‘Peter Hujar’s Day’ Director Ira Sachs on Turning a Conversation Transcript Into Cinema: ‘What the Hell Do I Do with This?’
Ira Sachs’ latest film “Peter Hujar’s Day” is a fascinating experiment and historical document, and in speaking at the IndieWire Studio, presented by Dropbox, he said it “kept me up at night” trying to figure out how to make it cinematically interesting.
The film, a tight 75 minutes, is a filmed recreation of a conversation between famed New York photographer Peter Hujar and his friend and journalist Linda Rosenkrantz from 1974 in which he describes a day in his life in NYC’s downtown art scene. He discusses chats with Susan Sontag and photographing Allen Ginsberg, and all of it was recorded as part of a transcript that was unearthed just in 2024, 50 years after the conversation first happened.
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With only two people talking, Sachs had to find a way to make the dialogue “suspenseful, emotional, not boring,” which he called an “interesting challenge.”
“I connected to the time but also to the texture of intimacy between these two friends, which seemed to me dramatic unexpectedly and very intimate,” Sachs said. “A connection that feels authentic between two people is what I look for in every scene that I shoot. This is a step forward because the language is so authentic, you feel like you’re already there. So then the enactment was actually very hard.”
Sachs didn’t write a word himself, the entire screenplay is drawn from the real-life transcript, but he built 33 scenes out of the material and had to find the intimacy between Hujar and Rosenkrantz.
“Once we had everything in place, two actors, money, we’re shooting in a couple of weeks, then it’s like, ‘What the hell do I do with this,'” he said.
The film stars Ben Whishaw and Rebecca Hall as Hujar and Rosenkrantz, two Brits each playing ’70s New Yorkers with distinct accents. But because this film wasn’t a “biopic” in the traditional sense, it freed up each of their performances.
“I didn’t try to do the whole of this man,” Whishaw said. “It was just this day, this particular moment with this friend. I let go of feeling like I had to do any mimicry of him. It had to be more personal. It had to be him but it had to be us.”
“It evoked mostly her warmth and love for Peter, which I think is very present in the text even though they’re not talking about any aspects of their relationship,” Hall added. “This is the brilliance of the film, you get more of the nuances of human relationships and life and emotions when characters are not talking. So there was a lot of room to play that.”
Watch the full interview with the group from “Peter Hujar’s Day” above.
“Peter Hujar’s Day” premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. The film is seeking distribution.
Dropbox is proud to partner with IndieWire and the Sundance Film Festival. In 2025, 68% of feature films premiering at the Sundance Film Festival used Dropbox in their film production. Dropbox helps filmmakers and creative teams find, organize, and secure all the files that are important to any project.
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