Interview: Love is Strange Writer-director Ira Sachs

At first blush, Love is Strange, independent writer and director Ira Sachs’ sixth feature, feels Woody-Allen familiar:

Gentle piano music plays; a nattily dressed couple (Alfred Molina’s George and John Lithgow’s Ben) lovingly bicker; and diverse but attractive characters gather to sing songs in a perfectly appointed New York apartment.

But Love is Strange quickly reveals itself to be so much more than those initial, surface impressions, becoming a beautifully observed and nuanced character study that weaves its way honestly and often humorously around issues of love, marriage, and family.

Soon after George and Ben are finally legally married after 40 years of partnered “marriage,” their cozy life together is upended by the institutional narrow-mindedness of George’s employer (a Catholic prep school) and the vicious financial realities of NYC rent.

Unable to find new, affordable housing together, George is stuck on a neighbor’s couch while Ben moves in with his nephew’s family (Darren E. Burrows, Marisa Tomei, and Charlie Tahan). As George struggles to find quiet and sleep amid hard-partying younger couples, Ben’s presence further upsets his nephew’s already strained marriage and his grand-nephew’s adolescent angst over love and sex.

I spoke with Ira Sachs a few weeks ago about Love is Strange.

Love is Strange opens Friday, August 29 at select theaters.

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The film pleasantly surprised me by going in different thematic directions than I anticipated. Did you purposefully set out to defy the audience’s narrative expectations?

Ira Sachs: No. My job is to be a good storyteller. I’m always interested in good characters, good drama, and humor—stuff about the way we live intimately with each other.

My modus operandi is when you make a film you’re actually on some level a personal historian–you’re documenting something. You want to get the details right and you want to be sensitive and timely. More deeply, I hope it’s about things that are very personal to an audience.

It’s about both realistic and idealistic notions of love, but also about love and relationships between friends and family members.

Sachs: “Love” is a very big word. I started writing this in the spring of 2012 with my co-writer Mauricio Zacharias. At the time I was moving from living alone in an apartment to living with my husband, our two kids, the kids’ mother, and occasional visiting family members. So I was in a perfect spot to consider the ways in which love and family intertwine within a household.

To me, the film is very much a multi-generational story about love from a variety of perspectives. You have this older couple, Alfred and John, and you have Marisa Tomei, who is very much a woman in the middle of her life trying to figure out what she is allowed and what she should expect in terms of herself and her relationships, and then you have this kid, Joey played by Charlie Tahan, who is experiencing love for the very first time. So I think people find different points of identification in this film that touch them in different ways.

Given the change in your living situation while writing it, are the sections with Marisa Tomei’s character trying to write with Ben always around based on semi-autobiographical frustrations?

Sachs: Certainly, but Marisa talked to two friends of mine who are novelists but also mothers and wives, and who are trying to keep that creative balance. I think balance is something you struggle with. What was nice and lucky for me was to have these actors who are also sometimes comic actors, so they had skills other actors who might have played these roles may not have had. It’s to the advantage of the film that these people see the humor in life.

That’s the beauty of the film—there’s a buoyancy to the performances that keeps it from getting pulled down into melodrama.

Sachs: That’s a good word, buoyancy. It helps to create an atmosphere. I don’t actually rehearse my actors before we start shooting. I want to create theater, so it’s strategically helpful to have them know their lines and the script, but then at the same time allow a level of emotional improvisational happening on set that leads to unexpected reactions.

It’s such a character-driven film—I was impressed by how Ben and George are such very different people. Often in film, long-married couples get blandly written as “twins,” two mirror halves of the marriage, with few deep emotional differences.

Sachs: The last pass of the script really refined the differences between these two characters. George is more of the caretaker while Ben is less aware of stuff. There is a kind of airy quality to Ben—his head is in the clouds, but he’s also super connected to his work and creating art. We refined these elements in that process.

And then you add in Alfred and John who are very different people. The film tries to pay attention to their differences while looking at what they’ve created historically with each other over a 40-year marriage, which is really what the film is centered on–it’s the story of marriage; not the act, but the thing itself. As John says, it’s a film with one lead: the marriage.

George is more inward and comfortable in quiet, solitude, where Ben is social and chatty.

Sachs: But Ben’s also self-aware, which is a really nice quality. In certain ways he’s seemingly unaware, but what Lithgow reveals is that Ben’s actually paying really close attention.

A lot of us do that in terms of how we look at our families, particularly our parents. We sometimes see them as characters that are not actually the centers of their own marriages. As a parent and a child, it’s very hard for any of us to accept that other people are writing their own stories–we think they’re part of our stories.

At one point, George warns a music student of over-romanticizing an already Romantic piece. Did you deliberately try to avoid romantic and “Romantic” tropes in the film?

Sachs: I just try to be attentive to how the world is and what I observe in human relationships. At the same time, it’s cinema and you want to make something that’s exceptional in a creative way. My goal is that of the neo-realists: to make the ordinary extraordinary. There’s something very epic about all our lives, but you need to channel that in a very detailed way. It’s done by being accurate and precise with your tools–you can do both those things; create something that is very real but also has beauty.

Without giving anything away, I just love the film’s closing shot—that’s a place where you did seem to nicely tip over into a more epic, larger-than-life idealistic statement.

Sachs: I really love films that have an open quality. Music has that quality, which is why I chose Chopin for the score. It’s an art that tells you enough but not too much. You want the conclusion to be something the audience can take with them and reflect on. That last moment of the film is a point of reflection.

It’s funny, there’s a story about that final scene. I had hired a girl who said she could skateboard for that shot, but when she got to the set that day, it was clear she couldn’t. And we were standing on the street trying to work this out when I saw a pony-tail go by really fast on a skateboard.

I pointed her out to our producer Jay Van Hoy, and he ran after her, followed her for three blocks in the West Village, caught up with her as she was going down the stairs to the subway, and tapped her on the shoulder and said, “Hey, you wanna be in a movie?” That’s the girl in the film. That’s the kind of accident you hope for when making a movie, especially in New York, where you’re trying to capture the ineffable and magical.

It’s also a nifty metaphor for love and how it ignores any rational plans.

Sachs: You have to know yourself very well to take advantage of those shifts. That’s something I really admire about Ben and George. I think I understand that more personally in my life now then I did the past 30 years. By knowing who I am, I have a better sense of how to love

That’s let me create a movie that has a real optimism about it and about being open to other people, to each other, and to connecting in deep ways. That’s a really impressive way to live your life; to have both humility and confidence. That’s what makes people want to be around Ben and George.

There’s also that sense of the idea of love—and all its complexity—being passed to the next generation. There’s a sense of education, of George and Ben teaching through example.

Sachs: Yes, to me the film is about education. We all are teaching somebody something. What do we impart as institutions, as educators, as parents, as lovers, as part of a family? That collective education is partly what the film is about.