A Quote by Ira Sachs

I could not - and I still cannot - see a sustainable career as a filmmaker in which I focus fully on our gay stories. — © Ira Sachs
I could not - and I still cannot - see a sustainable career as a filmmaker in which I focus fully on our gay stories.
I'm a film director. Gay is an adjective that I certainly am, but I don't know that it's my first one. I think if you're just a gay filmmaker, you get pigeonholed just like if you say I'm a black filmmaker, I'm a Spanish filmmaker, I'm a whatever.
Reality is, after all, too big for our frail understanding to fully comprehend. Nevertheless, we have to build our life on the theory which contains the maximum truth.We cannot sit still because we cannot, or do not , know the Absolute Truth.
So there's a choice that I made to tell stories that are still psychological melodramas about domestic issues. The challenge is to figure out how to make 10 films a career as a filmmaker, and that's a really challenging thing.
I like the idea of doing a part which, as a straight guy, is really different to me. I'd just see doing a gay kiss, and a gay role, as something different. Plus I have plenty of gay mates, so I could probably practice with them.
To achieve accurate knowledge of others, if such a thing were possible, we could only ever arrive at it through the slow and unsure recognition of our own initial optical inaccuracies. However, such knowledge is not possible: for, while our vision of others is being adjusted, they, who are not made of mere brute matter, are also changing; we think we have managed to see them more clearly, but they shift; and when we believe we have them fully in focus, it is merely our older images of them that we have clarified, but which are themselves already out of date.
I feel like I've been observed as an individual more than a gay person, or as a filmmaker with a certain point of view rather than a lesbian filmmaker with a gay point of view.
We set up a certain aim, and put ourselves of our own will into the power of a certain current. Once having done that, we find ourselves committed to usages and customs which we had not before fully known, but from which we cannot depart without giving up the end which we have chosen. But we have no right, therefore, to claim that we are under the yoke of necessity. We might as well say that the man whom we see struggling vainly in the current of Niagara could not have helped jumping in.
We still like to make up stories, just as our ancestors did, which use personification to explain the great forces of our existence. Such stories, which explain how the world began or where the sun goes when it sets, we call myths. Mythology is a natural product of the symbolizing mind; poets, when not making up myths of their own, are still commanding ancient ones.
When we submit our lives to what we read in scripture, we find that we are not being led to see God in our stories but our stories in God's. God is the larger context and plot in which our stories find themselves.
I think what Lawrence did was provide an assurance that gay and lesbian couples could live openly in society as free people and start families and raise families and participate fully in their communities without fear. And two things flowed from that, I think. One is that has brought us to the point where we understand now in a way even that we did not fully understand in Lawrence, that gay and lesbian people and gay and lesbian couples are full and equal members of the community.
Sometimes people think I'm gay. A lot of people have asked me if I'm gay. I answer, 'Look, not to my knowledge. But I'm still young, it could be that in the future, I'll find out that I'm gay.'
You think you're in a place where you're all 'I'm thrilled to be gay, I have no issues about being gay anymore, I don't feel shame about being gay,' but you actually do. You're just not fully aware of it. I think I still felt scared about people knowing. I felt awkward around gay people; I felt guilty for not being myself.
Now you are changed people. Your personality is different. It's shining through your spirit. In that spirit, you have to see everything. All your conditionings will drop out as soon as you start identifying your Self fully, fully with the spirit. Fully - again I say because we do not. We are still Christians. We are still Hindus. We are still Muslims. We are still Indians, English, this, that. We are still narrow-minded, small, little puddles. We have to be the ocean. Once you are identified with the ocean, you have to throw away everything and become absolutely clean and detached.
The eye— it cannot choose but see; we cannot bid the ear be still; our bodies feel, where'er they be, against or with our will.
I think I'm still trying to find my voice as a filmmaker and finding stories to tell.
As a gay man, there are certain places that I avoid. When I go to China, I lie and pretend I'm not married, which is really sad - I leave my ring at home. But I'm not willing to risk my safety in a country that could cause me no end of problems or where it's illegal to be gay. I'm very aware of the places I can travel to safely and where I cannot.
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