Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. We had a great week of conversations here on All Of It. I think we truly lived up to our name. We spoke to the stars of the new musical The Seat of Our Pants, which is now at The Public Theater, and they performed live in studio. We also heard a live performance from singer-songwriter Hannah Frances. Yesterday, Oscar-winning actor Ariana DeBose was here to talk about her role in the revival of The Baker's Wife. We also spoke to war photographer Lynsey Addario. We heard from you about your favorite public benches in New York City. If you missed any of our segments this week, go back and listen to them wherever you get your podcasts and check them out on our show page at wnyc.org. Still on today's show, Laurie Metcalf, Micah Stock, and Samuel Hunter will join us to talk about their new Broadway play. First, we head to the movies, and a unique movie at that. How often do you reflect on everything you did in a single day? In December of 1974, photographer Peter Hujar attempted to do so when he sat down for a conversation with the writer Linda Rosenkrantz at her Manhattan apartment. The point was for Hujar to recount what he did for an entire 24-hour period.

These stories of sleeping through his alarm, photo shoots with Allen Ginsberg, dinner at Chinese restaurants, name drops from this and that influential New Yorker. There were a lot of cigarettes. The recordings of those conversations, well, they were lost. A few years ago, a transcript of the conversation was discovered at The Morgan Library, turned into a book, and now has been adapted into a movie. The film is called Peter Hujar's Day, featuring actor Ben Whishaw as Hujar and Rebecca Hall as Rosenkrantz. It's directed by Iris Sachs and is a faithful word for adaptation of the conversation from that day in '74. Vulture has called it a masterpiece and one of the best films of the year. The New York Times named it a critic's pick. Peter Hujar's Day is in theaters beginning today, and Ira Sachs is in our studio right now. It's nice to meet you.

Ira Sachs: Nice to meet you, Alison.

Alison Stewart: You found this book transcript at a bookstore in Paris?

Ira Sachs: Yes.

Alison Stewart: You read the words?

Ira Sachs: Yes.

Alison Stewart: What made you think it could be a piece of cinema?

Ira Sachs: I was working at the time with Ben Whishaw on a film called Passages, and I was really enjoying the collaboration. I have to say that I was thinking and hoping that I could find something for the two of us to continue making art together. When I read this work, which was this transcript of a conversation that took place 50 years before, I found it had all the things that I love and look for when I make a movie, which is intimacy and detail, and also a story of friendship and love.

I found it very emotional and very exact in its precision and its understanding of the city at the certain time. Also, I was very interested in Peter Hujar, the photographer whose work I'd been following since the early '90s, and his place within a canon of queer artists in New York City, in the East Village, specifically, many of whom we lost to AIDS. I was interested in trying to know him through this work.

Alison Stewart: Were you aware the recordings were lost?

Ira Sachs: Not until I got in touch with Linda Rosenkrantz, who is alive and well, lives in Santa Monica, and who I approached. I messaged her on Instagram, and we started a conversation. I learned that there were no tapes, but the transcript existed. It was from the transcript that I created the screenplay for the film.

Alison Stewart: Is the screenplay a word-for-word adaptation of these transcripts?

Ira Sachs: No words were added.

Alison Stewart: No words were added.

Ira Sachs: No words were added. I ended up, once I started working on the film, going back to The Morgan Library and pulling the transcript out of the archive and adding a few things that had been edited out in the process of publishing the book.

Alison Stewart: Oh, interesting.

Ira Sachs: There's certain things that I feel certain a few more moments that were saved from the dustbin of history.

Alison Stewart: Oh, give me an example.

Ira Sachs: There's the whole section where they talk about Bette Davis and Joan Crawford in the film. It's a very intimate scene where they talk about whether or not they would walk across the street to see Joan Crawford. Linda says, "I don't like stars at all." "I have no interest in stars," she says. There's a great back and forth between these two friends about who they like better, Joan Crawford or Bette Davis. They both seem to like Bette Davis more.

Alison Stewart: There were little pieces of the conversation that were edited out, and you just put it back in there.

Ira Sachs: Yes, I put a few things back in. In general, it is a verbatim use of this text. That's part of what was really interesting, I think, for Ben Whishaw, who has an enormous amount of text, he's really the storyteller in the film in a certain way, because for him, it was almost like memorizing a jazz piece, because it's really the improvisation of how people speak that he had to get into his head and to internalize in a way that's very intimate.

Alison Stewart: I wondered if you saw the plays, Dana H., Is This the Room?

Ira Sachs: I didn't see either of those plays, but I certainly know of them and of this idea of documentary theater. I think I thought that that was what I was going to do, to be honest. I thought I would direct the film as a real-time version of these two friends talking. Once I started working on the production, I realized that wasn't going to work and that I needed to do something that turned something that was very realistic into something that was more cinematic.

I broke down what was probably two people across a table talking for an hour and a half into 25 scenes that took place from the morning till the middle of the night. I transformed one day that Peter describes into a day between these two friends. It became really a film about the intimacy of friendship.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Ira Sachs. We're discussing the film Peter Hujar's Day, which recreates conversations from a 1974 conversation with him and Linda Rosenkrantz, and Peter Hujar. It's what he did over a 24 hour period. It's in theaters now. It took place in her apartment, the original conversation. First of all, the apartment is very '70s. [chukles] How much research did you do into what her apartment actually looked like? Did you recreate it?

Ira Sachs: We were luckily and wonderfully donated a space in Westbeth, which is the artist housing building for--

Alison Stewart: Bethune, right? Yes?

Ira Sachs: On Bethune, exactly. They felt that we were mission aligned because we are a film that's bringing back certain interest in New York City artists. They're a nonprofit that is made to preserve space for New York City artists. They gave us this location, which was empty. Everything you see, we brought in. Linda shared with me photographs of her apartment, which was on East 94th Street. Those photographs I shared with my production designer, Stephen Phelps. There's certain elements like spider plants and a little bit of Macramé and-

Alison Stewart: The '70s, after all.

Ira Sachs: -a table. Yes, exactly. Tablecloth on the table with a candelabra, which is directly from Linda's photographs that we use in the film. There was also a lot of freedom. We were not making a documentary. We were making a new film film in 2025.

Alison Stewart: What piece did you see that you thought, "I need to have that for this film"?

Ira Sachs: The rug is mine, I have to say, and some of the art is also mine or mine and my husband's. There's a wonderful couch, which is our cinematographer Alex Ashe's couch, which is mid-century, and it's quite elegant. It's quite lovely.

Alison Stewart: The New York Times wrote about Linda Rosenkrantz. They called her a writer who "Turned gossip into art." What has Linda told you about her recollections of that day that proved to be useful for you as a director?

Ira Sachs: I think the thing that I felt talking to Linda, and also Rebecca Hall, who plays Linda in the film, and she spent a lot of time with Linda and the three of us are constantly emailing and texting and talking. I'll see Linda on Sunday in LA with this film.

Alison Stewart: Oh, I'd like to be on that text chain.

Ira Sachs: Oh, yeah, it's fun. Linda's wonderful. I think Rebecca and I both understood that she's a really warm-- I think that the depth of her warmth and love for Peter was something we both understood. Also, she's like you. She's really curious. Her curiosity is authentic and you feel it. I think that openness is something that's very important. The film also does convey a sense of loss that I think Linda still feels, and I certainly do. Peter died in '87, in his early 50s, of AIDS. I think there is a sense of something is with us, but it will not be permanent. I think that was an element that really Rebecca conveys so beautifully in the film.

Alison Stewart: Did she express to you why she was interested in why people do in a day-- why they would write down what they would do in 24 hours?

Ira Sachs: She had published a book called Talk, which has been recently republished by the New York Review of Books and is a great novel based on transcripts of conversations that she had with friends on Fire Island in the late '60s. In a way, she developed a kind of art form of these overheard and recorded voices that are also bringing in the language of the time. The amount of specificity that she gets by sharing this particular story of Peter's. I have to say, one thing about Peter is it seems like, "Oh, he's been asked, and so he's giving us this detail."

He's an extraordinary storyteller. He is not an ordinary storyteller. His ability to convey image and feeling and a vivid sense of exactly what it was like, the details down to how many pennies he gave to someone when he was getting change for buying Chinese food, or how much cigarettes cost. He was like a photographer of the moment in his mind. His language is wonderful to listen to.

Alison Stewart: What was interesting to you about how Peter Hujar spent the day that he recounted to Linda?

Ira Sachs: For me, the part as an artist that has been most meaningful, and I actually didn't notice this until the film was done, is that it's a story and an insight into what it is to create art and how hard it is. He vacillates between confidence and doubt with regularity in a way that I find really familiar as someone who has made a life also trying to make art that I believe in. I think to think of Peter Hujar, who I think of as this master photographer, and to realize, "Ah, Peter Hujar questioned himself.

Peter Hujar wasn't sure if he'd done the right thing. Peter Hujar doubted whether his work was good or bad." All of that seems really embracing to me as an artist of what it is to make things.

Alison Stewart: You go through the hero-zero, as they call it. "I'm the best. I can do this. I can't do this."

Ira Sachs: Yes. I think that, like the Wizard of Oz, to pull the curtain back and say, "Even Peter Hujar doubted himself." Of course, every artist. It's part of the creative process. I think that this is a unique window into what that feels like. I don't know that many works of art or stories or films that give us that insight.

Alison Stewart: You mentioned earlier that you admired his work. What did you admire about his work?

Ira Sachs: He has a kind of rigor with his eye that also maintains a kind of love and interest. He's unsentimental, but he's very human. He also has an incredible sense of black, white, and everything in between in terms of the scale. His photographs are square images, black and white, and that he took interest in a demimonde world that other people were not paying attention to. [coughs] He says-- sorry about that cough. There's a cough button here. You might not know that, but there is a button you can push, and I missed it.

Alison Stewart: [laughs]

Ira Sachs: Peter, he's a photographer of a world that nobody was paying attention to. He does it with such honor and beauty and psychological precision. There's nothing sentimental about his work. For me, the artists of the East Village in the 1970s, '80s, pre AIDS, and then those who survived were risk takers in a way that I go back to all the time just to remind myself that risk is a good thing to take.

Alison Stewart: I'm talking to Ira Sachs. We're discussing his new film, Peter Hujar's Day. I can understand Linda listening to Peter Hujar in all of his detail, what she was getting out of it. What do you think he got out of it that day?

Ira Sachs: Hmm. I think he did what he was asked to do. He was asked to do it, and he was going to do it well. I think ultimately both of them realized that if you pay attention to what you do, then in a way, you honor the variety of things and the seriousness of things and the challenges of just living through a day. There's a certain kind of quality that's like Ulysses in this work. Meaning, which is the story of a day. I'm not trying to compare Peter Hujar to James Joyce, but there is a way in which you make the everyday into something that's monumental.

I think that probably is a way of understanding that your days have meaning and also that they are things that you have to live through. Sometimes recognizing that can be very embracing of oneself, and yes, I don't know. Days are hard.

Alison Stewart: As a film director, you had to make something that people would want to watch. How did you do that out of a transcript, literally? Did you take it apart line by line? You said there's 25 locations. Did you parse them out? I'm curious how you had to figure out how to make something that would be somewhat entertaining, the good side of entertaining?

Ira Sachs: Oh, yes, of course. I'm curious how your day has been, Alison.

Alison Stewart: My day's been-- It's been hard. It's been okay. I woke up at 5:30 in a little bit of a panic, but I had 10 guests today.

Ira Sachs: Oh, wow.

Alison Stewart: All with difficult names. I had to figure, "How am I going to do this with a brain injury? Like, how do I do this?"

Ira Sachs: I think one of the things that's interesting is you look at someone across a room and you actually notice. With this film, you're thinking, like, "What?" It encourages empathy in a certain way because you're like, "We're all-- My father used to quote Philo of Alexandria, who said, "Be kind for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle." Somehow this film encourages me to remember that battle instead of that I'm the one who's always battling, which sometimes is what one feels.

Because of Westbeth giving us this space for an extended period of time, I was able to take two stand-ins, two actors who were standing in for Ben and Rebecca, into the space with Alex Ashe, the wonderful cinematographer of the film, and photograph them at different times of day in different parts of the location. Ultimately, I realized that that was the movie was like Linda and Peter on a couch at 4:00 in the afternoon. Linda and Peter in a bedroom at 6:00 PM as the sun goes down. Linda and Peter on a terrace-

Alison Stewart: I noticed that.

Ira Sachs: -in the middle of the day. That sequence was how I broke the film up and turned what could have been a stagnant story into something that is, for me, an action and an active piece of cinema. It was really important for me for the film to be a moving picture. That was how I approached it.

Alison Stewart: You shot on 16 millimeter?

Ira Sachs: Yes.

Alison Stewart: Tell me why.

Ira Sachs: Whenever I can shoot on film, I would prefer to. Thank you, Kodak, for helping that happen. Because, like you see in Hujar's photographs, I love how the negative is reflected and how the human quality of film is something that can't be replicated in digital work. It's porous and it's vulnerable somehow. It also seemed to mirror the kinds of movies that I was looking at, which were films like Warhol's Poor Little Rich Girl, a film he made with Edie Sedgwick, or Shirley Clarke's Portrait of Jason, which is a wonderful film that was shot in the Chelsea Hotel in the late '60s.

Alison Stewart: Portrait of Jason?

Ira Sachs: Portrait of Jason. Are you--

Alison Stewart: Write it down.

Ira Sachs: That's a canonical and incredible work. [coughs] Boy. Another film that was really important to me was Jim McBride made a film called My Girlfriend's Wedding. All of these films were very intimate portrait films made with a person with a camera and a subject in front of them. I felt like I was making that kind of experimental work, and those films gave me the license to do so in whatever way I wanted. The film is not a realistic film.

It has an essential base, which is exact in terms of this transcript that seems very authentic and real, but the film itself is much more playful than that. There are certain asides and certain uses of music, and much of it is invented, even though hopefully all of it is from something that is very authentic.

Alison Stewart: What's something about '70s New York that we pick up from their conversation or we see around them, that you think 2025 is just lost? We won't see it again.

Ira Sachs: I hope not lost, because that would imply a kind of nostalgia that I'm resisting. I will say that in one day, Peter had three or four friends drop over. He saw three or four people in person, and he was on the phone with maybe five or six other friends. I think that that nature of community and accessibility, and regularity is something that we need. I won't say we lost.

Alison Stewart: We're texting people that now-

Ira Sachs: We're texting people-

Alison Stewart: -instead of calling.

Ira Sachs: -and I think of places like the Cedar Tavern, which was a famous bar on University Place in 9th Street that was a hangout for the abstract expressionists and poets of that period in the '50s. I miss the idea of the Cedar Tavern, a place where, at the end of the day, when you doubt yourself, you could go and share that doubt and also a drink. I'm sure it wasn't utopia, but I do think the regularity of conversations that people had with each other is really essential to sustaining one's life as an artist. How do we keep talking, and how do we share things that are hard or good or bad or? That part is something we need.

Alison Stewart: What was the rehearsal process like for Rebecca Hall and Ben Whishaw?

Ira Sachs: I don't rehearse in a traditional way, so for 30 years that I've been making films, I find rehearsing for film is a theatrical process that I'm trying to resist. I'm interested in what happens in the moment in which the camera is turned on. I don't want the actors to come up with their own sense of what they're going to do before we start shooting. That being said, I certainly block the film and construct it visually, and I try to give the actors everything they need. Which part of it is for Ben to have Rebecca and Rebecca to have Ben? That kind of quality was certainly central.

I did give Ben a glossary of all the names and people in his text. I tried to help him think about who all these people were. His ability to actually make that alive is something that's about his talent. He took Wikipedia-level descriptions of a certain number of people, and he makes them seem like they're next door and around the block. That is something that I didn't know would be so powerful in the film is that you actually believe the world he's building for you through his words.

Alison Stewart: Have you changed how you think about Peter Hujar now the film is out and you've seen people respond to it?

Ira Sachs: I think I know more than a lot of people about Peter, but I never knew Peter. I think part of the film is a recognition for myself and also for the audience that there is loss that someone was so vibrant and so passionate, and then at a certain point, 12 years after this conversation was taped, was gone. I think that is really a quality that was important to me in the making of the film. It was something I both tried to think about and not think about. I think it's really in the DNA of the film, which is this sense of the fragility and the ephemeral nature of our relationships and our own lives.

Alison Stewart: The name of the film is Peter Hujar's Day. I've been speaking with its director, Ira Sachs. Ira, thanks for being with us.

Ira Sachs: Thank you, Alison.