Quotes from Ira Sachs

Music Box has proven itself in a few short years to be a cutting edge distributor with a sophisticated understanding of both the market and cinema.

I think it's interesting: What is the generational effect of the experience of being a gay person in America? For my generation, it was very difficult.

'How to Survive a Plague' is history-telling at its best. It's a film I'll show my two children, now toddlers, when they are old enough to understand. It's a movie that I cannot forget.

I grew up in the 1960s in Memphis, and my father was a member of the American Civil Liberties Union. I was born three years before Martin Luther King was killed, and I think that history of civil action was something that I had in my blood.

I always think of my films within the context of where aesthetics meet economics. That's the nature of making art – not being naive about what is possible and getting what you need to tell the story you want to tell.

My father moved out to Park City in in the mid-'70s and lived in a Winnebago behind a hippie joint called Utah Coal & Lumber that was one of only two or three restaurants at that time. Park City was a sleepy little mining town, with not a condo in sight.

I came to N.Y.C. in 1988 and got very involved with Act Up. I also started making movies, including two very gay shorts, 'Vaudeville' and 'Lady.' It was the height of the AIDS epidemic, and New York City was both dying and very alive at the same time.

I conveniently was not accepted to film school, which I applied to in 1987, and so I decided I would become a filmmaker instead of a student.

New York grabbed me too hard, as did adulthood.

Being an artist is in part an act of rupture.

All of my films have been autobiographical - it's all I've got to go on.

I realize I have strength as an artist and professional by embracing my difference instead of what makes me the same.

As a gay person, my life has been marginalized.

You are always factoring in the economy within the process of creating something, and making decisions that seem both fearless and full of fear.