"I Hustle... That’s Part Of The Job"

In many ways, Love Is Strange a very traditional love-story: there’s something classic about the story of a couple that needs to spend time apart to learn what they have together,” says Ira Sachs. The 49-year-old New Yorker’s fifth feature depicts an aging gay couple – played, beautifully, by John Lithgow and Alfred Molina – who, after years together, can finally be legally wed; but, as soon as they do, their life falls into shambles, their union a stable force amidst unstable times. “I’d made a lot of films about relationships that don’t last, and, finally, at this point in my life, wanted to depict love with a more optimistic perspective. In my 30s, I suffered; in my 40s, much less. My relationship with my now-husband is so much different than the relationships I’d ever experienced before.”

Sachs’ previous film, Keep The Lights On, was one of these “doomed relationship” dramas, a portrait of a pair of self-destructive queer men drawn together in New York, inspired by Sachs’ experiences of “carrying a lot of that negativity” of growing up as a gay man in the 1980s. It was, for the director, a watershed moment. “I came out at 16, but in many ways Keep The Lights On was another kind of coming out. It was a real depiction of my life, as it was, on screen.”

Casting Keep The Lights On wasn’t so easy – “asking American actors to take off their clothes is a real challenge, especially if homosexuality is involved” – but, in contrast, casting Love Is Strange came easily. “Almost as soon as we finished the script, I sent it off to Alfred Molina,” Sachs says. “His performance in Boogie Nights always stayed with me, and I loved him in Prick Up Your Ears, years ago. He’s such a chameleon. He was the first person we approached, and he signed on straight away. John Lithgow, in contrast, came towards the end of the process. He and Alfred have been friends for over 20 years, and that was very useful to lean on, in depicting this long history between [their] characters.”

Love Is Strange was “financed completely outside of the Hollywood system, and primarily outside of the independent film system”, Sachs raising the funds to make it by soliciting 25 private individual investors. “As an independent filmmaker, I hustle; that’s part of the job, part of the challenge,” he says. “I’m the Barnum of the operation. I try to raise money like the development office of a small museum: I court potential investors/patrons/producers.”

These investors ended up “in the black” thanks to Love Is Strange’s great critical acclaim, and the topicality of its gay marriage drama. “To me, this is a very personal film about family,” Sachs says. “It’s as much about my perspective, as a middle-aged man, watching my children grow up and my parents grow older, as it is about my position, in society, as a gay man, and a married gay man at that. Clearly this issue, these developments of gay life – emotionally, politically, and legally – is something that I spend a lot of time thinking about. But I didn’t make this film as a political vehicle. Part of being an artist is being attuned to the times in which you live.”