Ira Sachs quotes:

I grew up in the 1960s in Memphis, and my father was a member of the American Civil Liberties Union. I was born three years before Martin Luther King was killed, and I think that history of civil action was something that I had in my blood.

All history is defined by shifting modes of reality and time and how things change. That's what I love about cinema. It changes in the moment.

Secrets make for good drama, and revealing the hidden truths and contradictions of life is, for me, one of the most exciting aspects of making movies.

Seeing the road show of 'A Chorus Line' in 1977 at the Orpheum Theater in downtown Memphis was a life-changing event for me: there were gay people, on the stage, and they all lived in New York.

My father moved out to Park City in in the mid-'70s and lived in a Winnebago behind a hippie joint called Utah Coal & Lumber that was one of only two or three restaurants at that time. Park City was a sleepy little mining town, with not a condo in sight.

I don't rehearse with my actors... the first rehearsal is the first time we turn the camera on... Sydney Pollack never rehearsed his actors, and I found out that's allowed... so you film reactions; you don't create them.

Suspense films are often based on communication problems, and that affects all of the plot points. It almost gives it kind of a fable feeling.

There's a lot of things lost in the Digital Age.

What I loved about 'Goodfellas' is that it's a film about bad behavior - but told with great energy and without judgment - but it doesn't actually shy away from the consequences of that behavior in the characters' lives, which I think is similar in 'Keep the Lights On.'

How to Survive a Plague' is history-telling at its best. It's a film I'll show my two children, now toddlers, when they are old enough to understand. It's a movie that I cannot forget.

As independent filmmakers, we are actually deeply dependent on each other. The Spirit Awards are a public expression of those bonds, the intricate set of relationships and histories that we filmmakers depend on to make our most personal work.

I think it's interesting: What is the generational effect of the experience of being a gay person in America? For my generation, it was very difficult.

I conveniently was not accepted to film school, which I applied to in 1987, and so I decided I would become a filmmaker instead of a student.

As I've gotten less righteous, less pedagogic, I have become more loving of the artificiality, the art form, the imitation of life in film.

I think there's a fear of difference in American cinema.

I grew up thinking there was something called 'independent film,' which I wouldn't necessarily have had access to if there wasn't Sundance.

Music Box has proven itself in a few short years to be a cutting edge distributor with a sophisticated understanding of both the market and cinema.

What's interesting to me is the distinction between my old life and my present life.

I've been close to two or three couples, gay and straight, who have been together for 45 years.

Why do people stay in relationships that are tough from almost the very beginning?

Without community events like NewFest, I don't think we'd have a queer cinema in America.

I've been hiding crucial events in my life since I was 13.

You can only begin to share life well when you think well of yourself.

Being an artist is in part an act of rupture.

I've made four films about the destructive nature of relationships, of secrets and lies, and I think I'm no longer interested in that subject - which is a wonderful relief.

Working on the Obama campaign was a life-changer for me. I realized during that campaign that structure is the name of the game, and so, soon after the election, filmmaker Adam Baran and I started Queer/Art/Film, a monthly series at the IFC Film Center in downtown New York that invites queer artists to present the films they love to an audience.

Every time you make a film, you create a world. You make decisions about sets and costumes, and you create a universe connected to reality, but not reality itself.

I could not - and I still cannot - see a sustainable career as a filmmaker in which I focus fully on our gay stories.

I have been very influenced by the director Maurice Pialat, who I continue to be in conversation and conflict with and get inspiration from.

Movies are romantic fantasies.

Everything encourages you not to tell stories of gay lives. There is no economy yet for that kind of cinema.

I came to N.Y.C. in 1988 and got very involved with Act Up. I also started making movies, including two very gay shorts, 'Vaudeville' and 'Lady.' It was the height of the AIDS epidemic, and New York City was both dying and very alive at the same time.

You can understand why good publicists go on to run distribution companies: because the creativity involved is complex and nuanced.

Capturing intimacy is pretty much the only thing I'm interested in. That's what excites me and what I find beautiful in movies personally - that almost obscene sense that we shouldn't be this close to these people. I find that very inviting and meaningful as an audience member.

I remember being a teenager and seeing Seymour Cassel across a crowded room and being incredibly star struck, and not having the courage to say, 'Hello.'

As a gay person, my life has been marginalized.

I'm not interested in a film about deceit anymore. I think I was always invested in deceit on some level. But it no longer compels me the way it did for so many years.

I find the stuff that is exciting to me are the films coming out of Taiwan and Iran and France. So I have the feeling I'm not making the films that American distributors want to make.

Fighting bitterness can be a full-time job.

Everyone wants to belong, and everyone needs to belong in order to make a career on some level.

You can be aware of the passing of time without being nostalgic.

All of my films have been autobiographical - it's all I've got to go on.

By 1988, I was living in New York myself.

I tend not to think that anything I happen to be reporting on in my films is special. Meaning that people are always saying to me, 'you must love New York, you have it in all your films.' But mostly it's because I know New York, and I know Brooklyn at this time. I know the lives there, because I have lived in them.

When working on and writing a film, I'm often more of a sponge than other times, aware of what's going on around me.

To come to change, there had to be conflict and pain.

My early films were about self discovery, and films of internal conflict. At that level, they were very personal.

I do love the young adult novels as a form and genre, because it has a purity of intention and heart.

The praise helps on a deep level, which gives you the grounding that encourages you to trust yourself. On another level, each film is a risk, and the praise doesn't save you from that risk.

I try to keep feeling what's going on and try to use the camera, the actors and the design to enhance those feelings. There's something really emotionally direct and honest about how I put the material with the images. You hope that the strength of mise-en-scene comes from an honesty towards the material. You also hire really well.

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.