Ben Whishaw on Becoming Peter Hujar in Ira Sachs’ Vivid Snapshot of ’70s Manhattan
Ira Sachs has a sneaky way of building a rapport between his co-stars.
“He does this thing where he introduces the two actors, usually at a cafe or restaurant, and then he just leaves you so you’re forced to talk,” Ben Whishaw tells The Hollywood Reporter about the American filmmaker. The British star was plunged into this exact scenario with fellow Brit Rebecca Hall — the pair are starring in Sachs’ Peter Hujar’s Day, getting its international premiere in the Berlinale’s Panorama section.
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“We just talked for hours at this diner in New York, and it was so nice,” recalls Whishaw, star of Black Doves, Paddington and the James Bond franchise. “It sounds like it could be a horrible thing, but it was a lovely thing. You end up going beyond the politeness of what you might just do if you met each other on a film set. You’re forced to go beyond that level quite quickly.”
In Peter Hujar’s Day, Whishaw and Hall’s characters have a conversation about just that: a day in the life of the American photographer, best known for his black-and-white portraits. It is based on the 2021 book by Linda Rosenkrantz (Hall), who, in Whishaw’s words, thought much of what was written about her dear friend “was overstated”: “He was quite a complicated person. But it’s so easy to reduce a person to some anecdotes about them or some second-hand information. I didn’t want to judge Peter.”
A contemporary of Fran Lebowitz, Susan Sontag, and David Wojnarowicz (later his protégé), Hujar is now recognized as a major photographer of the ’80s and ’90s. But during his lifetime he was the recipient of minimal praise, and Hujar died following an AIDs diagnosis in 1987. “It’s incredibly sad,” Whishaw says. “We were just in Sundance with the film, and Linda came to Park City and was there with us at the premiere and we got to hang out with her a little bit. She was having a lovely time, but there was this really deep sadness that Peter isn’t here to see it. I think about that a lot,” he adds. “But I’m happy that it’s happening at all, because he really was such an uncompromising person and artist.”
The movie is the second team-up between Whishaw and Sachs after 2023’s Passages. It came about when Sachs recommended Rosenkrantz’s book to the actor. He had soon worked it into a screenplay, which Whishaw, a longtime fan of Hujar’s work, loved. “I picked up some postcards of his photographs, years and years ago,” the star begins. “I would send them to people and I loved them, but I didn’t take much notice of who they were by.”
It was only when Whishaw saw Hujar’s snap of Warhol superstar Candy Darling as the cover art for the band Antony and the Johnson’s I Am a Bird Now that he began to put the pieces together. His appreciation for Hujar solidified when Whishaw went to a London exhibition and saw a collection of his photographs all in one space. “It blew my mind,” he tells THR.
The 76-minute movie premiered at Sundance and now makes an appearance at the Berlin Film Festival. “It’s two friends in a room talking about the mundane events of a day and sometimes the not-so-mundane events of a day,” Whishaw teases about what to expect. “It’s a love story between two friends. It’s about everydayness. I think it’s about art and what is monumental or strange about mundane things. And I think,” he adds, “it’s about an artist’s struggle to capture something in their art and the sense of failing at that, which I find very touching.”
But Hujar is an enigmatic figure and a biographical portrayal wasn’t exactly on the cards. “I don’t think there’s a single piece of video of him talking,” Whishaw says about becoming the photographer. “We went through the archive at The Morgan Library [in New York] and all Ira and I could find was a tiny audio of him being hypnotized when he was trying to quit smoking.”
There was another conversation between the artist and Wojnarowicz, who was once his lover. Whishaw listened to it a lot, but aside from those two tapes and essays about him by people who knew him, the depiction of Hujar was largely Whishaw’s own interpretation. “I felt quite free, in a way,” he says. “I didn’t want it to feel like a performance of him or an imitation or mimicking. It had to be a bit of me as well, just as I think it had to be a bit of Rebecca. Then Ira made an atmosphere where we could just be very natural and very intimate with each other.”
Because Sachs and Whishaw have worked together before, it meant they could dive in at a “deeper level” without the stress of “discovering each other.” Whishaw says Sachs’ film has a homemade quality to it. The final product is something he says he’s proud of. “I think it’s an unusual thing,” he says. “And we kind of made it not knowing what the hell it would be like. We thought it might be a short film. There wasn’t a great deal of thought about the outcome — at least on my part. I think Ira probably had other thoughts, but I was just like, ‘I love this. Let’s do it.'”
Was there anything Whishaw found to have in common with the late creative? “We’re both Librans,” he says, adding with a laugh: “I believe in those!” Ultimately, however, he feels as though Hujar was a pretty different person to him. “[But] I really related to this feeling that he had, the disappointment of having not quite done your best.” What it was that made his photography so unique, however, Whishaw is more certain on. “Have you ever taken photos with a camera? I’m really bad at it. I see how uncomfortable people are. I’m bad at just grabbing photos on the street. So I think he must have had some kind of personality, which meant that people were able to open up to him.”
He continues: “I guess it was just something in his nature, because he really captured something so incredibly intimate about people, and really soulful about people. and also animals. They were so trusting of him.”
It’s not Ben Whishaw’s first Berlin Film Festival but he’s excited to touchdown in the German capital nonetheless. The actor will be linking up with Sachs and Hall ahead of the film’s premiere but hopes to catch a few films, too. As for his own movie, he really doesn’t mind what the audience comes away with. “I obviously didn’t live through this time, but I believe that it records an atmosphere of that period, New York in the ’70s, when you could be an artist in Manhattan and lie on your friend’s bed and chat all day, Whishaw says. “A sense of spaciousness, connectedness. I really enjoy it, personally, and I think people will take whatever they want. And that’s as it should be.”
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