Photo by David LaSpina

After his remarkable and critically acclaimed debut, The Delta in 1997, director Ira Sachs spent 10 long years getting his second feature made. The resulting film, Forty Shades of Blue, won the 2005 Sundance Film Festival Grand Jury Prize, further cementing his rising star status in the world of independent film. For a second time, Sachs centers on the lives of Memphians living on the edge of their insular worlds.

RS: Some people might say it’s a woman’s picture.

IS: I have a picture of Contempt on my wall. All those iconographic female characters from Belle du Jour and The Marriage of Maria Braun, for example, were of course inspirations.

RS: But it’s more than just the story of Laura. The title itself evokes the depth of the characters. Forty Shades of Blue could easily be a reference to all three leads.

IS: Well, it’s a triangle, and every point of the triangle is important.

RS: Even the people on the periphery of the story seem memorable. The camera lingers on these people, creating a richer environment.

IS: Well, what I want to do, and what I think I do, more specifically in this film, is to create a sense of the frame. It’s not a rectangle, it’s a box, and I wanted to shoot it with that in mind.

RS: Your previous film, The Delta, was also shot in Memphis. Legendary Memphis producer Jim Dickinson has a cameo, and Red West who plays Duigan, is a musician and was a friend of Elvis. There are also references to the great Memphis studios, like Stax and Ardent. Are you specifically interested in the musical history of Memphis? How important was that history when you were writing the screenplay for Forty Shades of Blue?

IS: A lot of that history is about the history of the character Alan James, played by Rip Torn. It’s about loss and remembrance of the past and nostalgia. It’s about Memphis, but it’s also, specifically, about the character. To make James this great producer, and to give him that background, creates more of an impact. Because only with grandeur is there the potential for downfall. I grew up in Memphis so I know the stories. But I also worked with a co-screenwriter on the film who is also a musician (Michael Rohatyn), so, in a way he helped guide that in the film.

But I specifically chose a lot of music that was not Memphis, just to give it some distance from the real-life people. Specifically, we chose the music of legendary producer Bert Russell Berns, who wrote “Twist and Shout” because Memphis is so well known for a certain type of music. People are very protective of those reputations.

RS: You really feel in Torn’s performance that he is this legend, Alan James.

IS: What we hoped to create in the film is the sense that, even though he is flawed and that he can be a bastard, he was still mortal. We wanted to capture that mortality.

RS: What about Darren Burrows, who plays Michael, Alan’s son and one third of the triangle in the film?

IS: He communicates a lot with his eyes. He projects a lot of pain with his eyes. We talked a lot about Fifties-style acting, especially Montgomery Clift.

RS: I knew their relationship was impossible, but at the end I felt he was so cruel to Laura.

IS: But don’t you think that all really good love stories should feel like horror movies?

RS: That last scene is so crushing. Laura and Alan are making plans for the future and she just breaks down. She is drowning.

IS: Can you relate?

RS: (laughing) Yes, I can, unfortunately. Your films often focus on outsiders. What specifically draws you to those kinds of characters?

IS: As an artist I think by nature you already feel alienated. So going back to a city like Memphis, which I’m both part of and not part of, is interesting to me. Whenever I talk about my movie, or really any movie, I feel much more pretentious. But when I’m working, it all feels much more instinctual for me and I want to be honest as much as I can. At the end of the film I’m not thinking, “This is Laura walking down the street,” I’m thinking, “That’s me walking down the street.” And with the character of the gay, half-black, half-Vietnamese man in The Delta—I met him in a pool hall and rewrote the script for him. I think a lot of what I do is to try to stay curious as filmmaker.

RS: Your shooting style in both The Delta and in Forty Shades of Blue is very observational. It feels very intimate, yet there is this distance. How did you arrive at this style?

IS: It’s a very specific shooting style that we had to kind of argue our way through before shooting. Because the camera is often placed far away (from the actors), we used mostly long lenses and didn’t use a lot of close-ups at first, which I knew that we were building towards. The cinematographer, Julian Whatley, got really nervous when we started shooting because we would go into a location like the Lamplighter Bar in Memphis, and I wanted to put the camera back in the kitchen at a distance from the actors. That was inspired a lot by the films of Ken Loach, specifically Kes and Looks and Smiles. I’m not a technician so I could only describe what I wanted and ask Whatley how we could achieve that. He felt concerned that the film was going to be a very cold film. Ultimately it is a very unconventional shooting style, yet it doesn’t look unconventional because it still feels very intimate. What it does is create a sense of architecture within the frame, because the actors move through the frame instead of the camera following the actors. There’s a use of foreground and background in every shot.

RS: Tell me about your new film, Marriage.

IS: I’m in the preproduction stage right now. The story takes place in an unnamed Pacific Coast city in 1949. It’s about a married man who falls in love with another woman. He contemplates divorcing his wife but realizes that it will hurt her too much. Since he’s unable to tell her he wants a divorce, he decides to murder her. So it’s a film about whether or not he’ll kill his wife.