CHICAGO _ A screenwriter, says writer-director Ira Sachs, has really only one job when writing a movie: "to keep people wondering." Narrative suspense, what's coming next ... however it's phrased, the Nashville native and longtime New Yorker says, a writer must make sure the audience is asking the right questions and wondering, rather than predicting various possible outcomes and shrugging.
Over a plain bagel (he wanted poppy, but they didn't have it), Sachs had breakfast with me in a downtown Chicago hotel back in March when he came through town in support of "Little Men." Sachs' previous picture, "Love is Strange," concerned a longtime gay Manhattan couple played by John Lithgow and Alfred Molina forced to live apart, at the mercy of friends or relatives, when one of them is fired from his job.
His new film, similarly economical and moving, depicts the friendship between two bright but very different teenagers, played by Theo Taplitz and Michael Barbieri. The Taplitz character has just moved from Manhattan to Brooklyn with his parents (Greg Kinnear and Jennifer Ehle); the Barbieri character's mother (Paulina Garcia) is threatened with eviction from a storefront dress shop now owned by the grown children of the landlord she knew well.
The movie's about gentrification, or rather, it would be if it weren't as effective. Sachs' knack for low-keyed, human-sounding dialogue is put to the service of tackling some larger themes, gentrification and fragile adolescence included. "Little Men" keeps its audience wondering about the outcomes of all these opposing forces.
"It was important to me for no one person to hold too many cards," he says. "I guess I'm really dealing with the battle of the middle class. Leonor (the Garcia character) is a well-educated middle-class woman who emigrated, and she's been pushed down a notch. And Kinnear's character owns the store, but he's also struggling financially." The balance of sympathies and interests, he says, "took a lot of refinement in the editing. It's not melodrama, this film, so to find the emotion means you have to be careful and rigorous about it."
Sachs may not be rich, but he has found a network of backers who believe in his work and keep the lights on, to borrow the title of an earlier Sachs film. "Twenty-four, maybe 25 people financed 'Little Men,'" he says, "friends of producers, mostly." Without rancor, Sachs states that independent film "does not work economically. The indie film business is no longer in sync with capitalism. So there have to be other reasons for people to invest in these films. I've been able to find a group of individuals who are willing to take the economic risk but also see the value in other ways, culturally." Sachs has made three films in five years. "It's a new chapter for me, of sustained productivity and also sustained possibility to make more of them."
It helps, he says, to have put an increasingly dangerous and addiction-clouded relationship behind him, a relationship that became the inspiration for "Keep the Lights On."
"That movie speaks to a time when there was a lot of turmoil in my life. We both got out of that (relationship) alive, which was lucky." Then Sachs entered a new relationship, this one with Ecuadorean-born painter Boris Torres. They married in 2012 and have two children, Viva and Felix. They live next door in a sixth-floor Greenwich Village apartment to the twins' mother and co-parent, cinematographer and documentary filmmaker Kirsten Johnson. "We co-parent, with a wall between us," Sachs says.
The central characters of "Little Men" prove their resilience in the face of changing circumstances. It's not unlike "the nature of urban evolution," Sachs says. "Cities are always in flux. Land is always being fought over. And there's drama in that struggle. Jane Austen, Henry James, so many others, they all wrote about money and land and property and who gets to stay."
With his writing partner Mauricio Zacharias, Sachs is developing what he hopes will become an HBO biopic on the life of Montgomery Clift, with Matt Bomer in the Clift role. "Love is Strange," meantime, is being developed as a stage musical at the New York Theatre Workshop, with Michael Greif ("Rent," "War Paint") directing.
Regarding his own films, Sachs says, he's lucky. "I still have to hustle. But I can get them made."
