Quotes from Ira Sachs

For gay people, we learned about our lives in secrecy and a lot of fear.

You can be aware of the passing of time without being nostalgic.

Everyone wants to belong, and everyone needs to belong in order to make a career on some level.

One of the biggest things that happens to many people when they have kids is that you suddenly realize that you're not going to last forever. You know there is another generation who are the heroes of their own stories, and that is humbling.

I grew up thinking there was something called 'independent film,' which I wouldn't necessarily have had access to if there wasn't Sundance.

Everything encourages you not to tell stories of gay lives. There is no economy yet for that kind of cinema.

Movies are romantic fantasies.

I started making movies in the early '90s, a few years after I discovered 'the cinema' during a three month stay in Paris during which I watched 100s of films.

Suspense films are often based on communication problems, and that affects all of the plot points. It almost gives it kind of a fable feeling.

I could not - and I still cannot - see a sustainable career as a filmmaker in which I focus fully on our gay stories.

I don't rehearse with my actors... the first rehearsal is the first time we turn the camera on... Sydney Pollack never rehearsed his actors, and I found out that's allowed... so you film reactions; you don't create them.

Every time you make a film, you create a world. You make decisions about sets and costumes, and you create a universe connected to reality, but not reality itself.

I've been close to two or three couples, gay and straight, who have been together for 45 years.

I find the stuff that is exciting to me are the films coming out of Taiwan and Iran and France. So I have the feeling I'm not making the films that American distributors want to make.

I got into filmmaking in order to tell very personal stories, and in this day and age, the opportunity seems all the more precious.

There's a lot of things lost in the Digital Age.

A lot of what I think I do as a director is try to give everything over to the actor. So I disappear.

What's interesting to me is the distinction between my old life and my present life.

You can understand why good publicists go on to run distribution companies: because the creativity involved is complex and nuanced.

I remember being a teenager and seeing Seymour Cassel across a crowded room and being incredibly star struck, and not having the courage to say, 'Hello.'

Most simply but profoundly, I chose to live an honest life, which I think as a gay person is not a given.

It's easy to make a film, but it's hard to make a career of being a filmmaker.

As a filmmaker, you realize that places have character based on their history as much as a face does or an actor does.

For me, every film is actually a form of documentary.