Ira Sachs

“I have to say this is the film that we remade with Little Men. This was in the '50s and in the '30s he made another film, I Was Born, But..., and they're both about kids who go on strike against their parents. So we took that plot and we wrote our own film, Little Men, and these are better.”

“Francesco Rosi, great, great, great filmmaker who should be in the list of Rossellini, Visconti, Fellini, but no one knows Rosi except thanks to the Walter Reade.”

“This film and The Soft Skin, which you also have somewhere, were both these love triangles that taught me everything I need to know about pain.”

“I have not seen Shoah since I took a class from Shoshana Felman who wrote a whole book on my class in college. We studied only Shoah for a year and she wrote a paper, Psychoanalysis and Shoah.”

“Do you know there used to be a time in New York when you could see a Samuel Fuller film any day of the week that you wanted? There was always showing a Samuel Fuller double feature. Now, who's seen Samuel Fuller anymore?”

“I'm working on a Montgomery Clift film and we keep going back and forth between Raging Bull and All That Jazz as both biopics. This film is obviously the manic version of an individual's life.”

“In this movie, The Magic Flute, Ingmar Bergman begins the film with a series of close-ups of the audience. I'd never seen the movie but I thought it was a really great idea. So on this set when we were in production, I stole from Ingmar Bergman never having seen the movie.”

“Great, I'm going to complete my Rosi, my Rosi collection right here. Thank you.”

“I do not have Sirk. This should be preserved. When I saw Imitation of Life for the first time, I was probably 12. Never having heard of melodrama, never heard of Sirk, but growing up in Memphis and knowing about racism, I wept. I should have known right then that my future was going to be told in a certain way.”

“I wrote about PlayTime when I was in college because I couldn't get a print of The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, which is what I wanted to write about because the only copy was in Gena Rowlands' bathroom and she wouldn't send it to me.”