Married Life at the Movies
Married Life Red Carpet Interview
Filmmaker Ira Sachs, along with Patricia Clarkson and Chris Cooper, recently made the Red Carpet rounds for their latest feature, “Married Life” (opening March 7 in selected cities) at the Miami International Film Festival. Sachs is no stranger to the festival circuit. In 2005, he won the Sundance Grand Jury Prize for the lovely and emotionally textured “Forty Shades of Blue,” about Laura, a Russian bride, played by the phenomenal Dina Kurzon, trapped in the gilded cage of a lousy marriage to a rich record producer.
Ira Sachs’ follow-up to “Forty Shades” is “Married Life,” an elegant comedy of American mores, morals, and manners, circa 1950. Oscar winner Chris Cooper plays Harry Allen, an adulterous husband whose disastrously naive and misguided attitude towards his wife, his mistress, and even himself, sends him on an emotional roller coaster that would be tragic if weren’t so funny. Allen decides to murder his wife, Pat (Patricia Clarkson), so she won’t have to bear the pain of a divorce. When Harry’s best friend Richard (the ever-suave Pierce Brosnan) meets Harry’s fresh-faced and crimson-lipped girlfriend, Kay (Rachel McAdams), he’s promptly smitten. What ensues is a bizarre, hard-to-categorize cross between a Bergman-esque marital drama and a wacky Billy Wilder-style marital (and extra-marital) satire.
Jaman recently caught up with writer/director Ira Sachs, and chatted about “Married Life,” working with his stellar cast, and the future of movies (his and everyone else’s) in the digital age.
JAMAN: A question about “Forty Shades of Blue.” That movie has such a ’70s feel to it, it plays like a time warp to the days of Altman and Hal Ashby. What inspired the look and feel of that movie?
IRA: “Forty Shades” was inspired visually by the films of Ken Loach and [cinematographer] Chris Menges. “Looks and Smiles,” “Family Life,” and “Kess,” in particular. I’m interested in all sorts of cinema and they all play in my head as I make a movie. I was a literature major who also studied film theory, so I approach filmmaking as a form of writing. “Forty Shades of Blue” has to succeed almost as a novel because the emotional arc is very subtle, and you need a precision towards achieving to make the film work.
JAMAN: Dina Korzun [who plays Laura] is fantastic in it.
IRA: She was in a movie called “Last Resort” that I saw, and I was struck by her, the density of what she can do. My collaboration with Dina was extremely creative in terms of moving the story through her face.
JAMAN: In both “Forty Shades” and “Married Life,” you’ve got central performances that are pivotal to the film. In “Married Life,” it’s Chris Cooper who’s the heart of the whole thing.
IRA: I really do feel that in directing a movie, there’s nothing more significant than casting. I think of actors as co-writers, because you write text and they write sub-text, all the lines between the words. In “Married Life,” Chris was the first person we cast. The ensemble was built around Chris Cooper. I think he’s a bit of a genius. Chris works on an extraordinary instinct, he’s also someone that people can identify with, yet his acting is so grand on some level that he brings a kind of movie star quality to the everyday. I think of someone like Edward G. Robinson and Fred McMurray, both are actors that Chris Cooper is in the mold of.
There’s a scene towards the end of the movie where there’s a number of emotional turns…in which Chris has to swing from one discovery to another to another…and his ability to do that with such emotional precision is insane. It’s all in the face. What he can convey in his eyes is fantastic.
JAMAN: It’s a terrific cast. Along with Chris Cooper, you’ve got Patricia Clarkson, Rachel McAdams, and Pierce Brosnan, who’s really the one bonafide movie star here. Brosnan is eminently watchable, but how was it different working with him? His background is so different from Cooper and Clarkson’s.
IRA: I think that every actor needs something different from a director. Part of your job is just to figure what would create an environment that would make them each comfortable to do their best work. What I was struck by in Pierce’s performance was his comic elegance. The wit and the comic timing, he has a real Cary Grant quality, there’s a fluidity to his performance which is physical, almost acrobatic…but he also pulls off a certain vulnerability which gives the film a lot of heart. It was also surprising that he could pull off such a fully rounded, vulnerable character, and yet still be in the mold of a comic bon vivant, he pulled off the movie star persona, and there’s a depth beneath that.
JAMAN: “Married Life” has such a immaculate, smart-set look to it. It goes from a Kate Hepburn-Spencer Tracy type comedy to something closer to Hitchcock. How did you accomplish that look and feel?
IRA: The film is set in 1949, but we tried to approach the period as if it wasn’t the past. I worked with a costume designer Michael Dennison, and we would only pick costumes that the characters would look good in if they were walking down the street today.
On the other hand, there’s a lot of glamor to that period I think that the film conveys. I’ve gone from being obsessed with realism as a form and, I think as as I get older, I’m as interested in romantic cinema, which is partially why within the film the character played by Pierce Brosnan goes to see a movie called “Pandora and the Flying Dutchman.” There’s something about those old films, where the richness of emotion is in the image. That’s something we wanted from this film.
And yet we really wanted the film to feel as contemporary as possible. Once we set up the world, we never talked about the emotions, we only talked about the emotion. Patricia Clarkson has said that in some of those scenes with Chris Cooper she felt like she was in a Bergman movie. And that tension is what makes the film interesting, and it also makes it for some people looking for a pure sense of genre so difficult.
JAMAN: “Forty Shades” and “Married Life” are both about intimate relationships, about characters trying to get unstuck from them, and move on. Is there a coincidence here?
IRA: My first film was called “The Delta,” which was also about relationships and deceit. For better or worse, I’ve made a trilogy of deceit. I think a part of it has to do with growing up as a gay man. There’s a comfort in hiding that leads to certain emotional consequences that are damning. The films have been an attempt to work out some of that stuff. I’ve often thought that every film I would make should be called “The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter.” [Laughs] I’m not trying to make films that are too self-reflective, yet movies that speak of how we make connections, deal with our alienation from the people that we’re close to.
JAMAN: Lastly, Ira, a more philosophical question. As a filmmaker trying to make smaller, more intimate films, how do you see online cinema as a venue for presenting your future work? How do you see filmmakers as yourself reacting to the digital arena?
IRA: It’s unavoidable. No reason to be a dinosaur. But there are positives and negatives. An increased audience for this type of film is wonderful. I recently taught a class in the MFA program at Columbia, and what concerned me was that students were shooting on digital, projecting on television, and that was the only environment in which movies were made for creator and audience. And that transforms the image. I’m making movies for the big screen which get smaller when they get on television.
JAMAN: At the same time, I’m thinking of the statistic that only 1% of movies worldwide get any kind of distribution…
IRA: True, but sometimes, I think too many films are being made. Good films are getting lost, and there’s a glut. I’m not trying to be anti-populist, I think it’s great that anyone can make a movie, but it also means anyone can make a movie.
Then again, I think the studios have reneged on any responsibility to make a certain kind of adult film. The big problem with me is that there’s an intimate connection in America cinema between the film and the marketing, they’ve almost become one. That’s apparent when you see a film like “Juno” where literally the marketing is on the screen. That is very difficult when you start a project where you have to figure out already how will this be like other things. This is an age-old, the last thing I want to do is complain about the time I live in because it’s a waste of time. As a director, you’re functioning as a producer which means to understand these systems as best as possible.
