While the world of superhero fandom tries to cancel film icons Martin Scorsese and Frances Ford Coppola, “Frankie” filmmaker Ira Sachs remains constantly aware of the cinema that came before him and is always looking towards his idols for inspiration. One can probably assume that Disney won’t be hitting up the sensitive art house filmmaker to direct the next Lucasfilm spin-off anytime soon.
Sachs’ newest film “Frankie,” which premiered at Cannes earlier this year, does feature the fictional second unit DP of a “Star Wars” movie, however, played by Greg Kinnear, in a very amusing performance. The film follows an extended family on a sentimental retreat to Sintra, Portugal, a vacation that turns sour when old memories and hard truths resurface. Isabelle Huppert plays renowned actor Françoise “Frankie” Crémont reuniting with some of her closest confidants after her cancer returns.
Unfortunately, we didn’t ask Sachs to weigh in his thoughts on capes and cowls taking over the business, during our recent chat, but we did have an insightful discussion on his new movie, who his artistic influences are, watching “Claire’s Camera” with Huppert, and how LGBTQ representation in the industry both is and isn’t changing.
[Note: There are some minor spoilers for “Frankie” in the interview]
How much time did you spend in Portugal? It had to be a refreshing change of scenery after shooting inside New York apartments for so long?
5 months. It was great to live there and feel like I had a real familial relationship with my crew, who were all Portuguese. I felt very comfortable there.
It was a different kind of impressionistic discovery where you could feel the nature, but it’s a very similar process. When you’re location scouting it’s very instinctual. There’s something you respond to emotionally that gives you a sense for whether a place is right for a scene in the movie. It’s an emotional process; it’s not just aesthetic.
What was the casting process like for “Frankie?”
My co-writer, Mauricio Zacharias, and I wrote 4 of the roles for 4 of the actors in the film; Marisa Tomei, Isabelle Huppert, Greg Kinnear, and Jérémie Renier. I often write for actors who don’t end up being in the movie, so this was a rare situation where it all worked out. I’d worked with a couple of them before and Isabelle had written to me after “Love is Strange,” which she really liked, so we had been in conversation. I wrote this with her in mind. I was very lucky. It’s a particularly fine group of performances, and a lot of that has to do with how it’s shot. When there’s not a lot of cutting you can watch people get from one place to another through the work of the actor; it’s performative; it was a a joy watching what these actors could do with language.
It almost plays like a sequence of small plays. Did that make balancing the characters more difficult in the screenplay?
I’m always interested in giving the audience enough so that they can have clarity of the relationships they’re observing, but not too much so it feels like I’m directing or over-telling. I want them to feel that there’s a world outside the story that’s will continue when the movie’s over. You have to hold back. The challenge was trying to balance telling 9 stories, in 1 day, in 1 film, which was a challenge.
How did you settle on that approach? Your movies are very elliptical. How do you apply that to 9 stories and keep things coherent?
Mauricio and I don’t start writing until we know where the movie is going to end up. That doesn’t mean that it won’t change. “Little Men’s” ending in particular is very different than what we first wrote. Sometimes there’s a shift, but I don’t start writing a movie until I can reduce it to a logline. I’ve always felt that one should have a coat rack, and you can hang lots of things on it, but you need that coat rack; you need to know what the story is. I learn a lot from Altman, who has a digressive quality but there is also a clear sense of direction. Spike Lee is very good at that as well, at being diffuse but centered.
You take simple concepts and turn them into something deeper. You fill the story with periphery characters, yet even the most minor reveal themselves to be remarkably potent.
As a director, I’m more sensitive than I probably am everyday. My job is to be as attentive to whoever is in the space, including extras. I try to build worlds that are real because then everything becomes easier, the acting becomes easier and, also, the audience’s belief in the fiction. In “Frankie,” there’s the scene where Isabelle runs into a birthday party. That group of people was a family; they were a real family, which comes with an unspoken authenticity. That’s what I tried to do, strategically, with every moment of the film, so that the audience believes they’re entering worlds that have truth, or density.
In your movies, we often learn things at the same time characters do; like you’re showing via your characters telling. Is that something you’re conscious of?
I’m aware of those moments. Marisa Tomei’s character in this film serves as a stand in for the rest of us. When she achieves clarity, we achieve clarity. I’m aware where those things turn. I don’t want to be elliptical, annoyingly. I don’t want you to consciously be thinking about the fact that information is being held back. It’s a natural, instinctual way of telling the story. Cinema has a level of abstract poetry, but it’s a narrative poetry. But it is abstract, and that’s something that’s very true to my storytelling. I trust that I have a story to tell and I trust my way of doing it.
I always want the dialog to do multiple things. It shouldn’t be able to be reduced to any one intention. That’s sort of why I never talk with my actors about subtext and motivation because then they would reduce it. And why limit it to one thing? Why can’t it do more? I learned a lot from watching Elaine May work with John Cassavetes. “Mikey and Nicky” is a really great movie. You see these actors, just really in the moment, be contradictory. I always want that to be possible; it could be this, or it could be that; it could be any number of other things. I try to write dialog where you feel like information is being gathered but hopefully, you don’t notice too much.
“Frankie,” is about an extended film family. Did you mine many details from personal experiences
The films I make are extremely personal without being autobiographical. The fourth film I made, “Keep the Lights On,” is more autobiographical. I make films about creative people because I’m a filmmaker; my husband is a painter, my sister is a novelist, and my other sister is also a filmmaker. I live in a world of creative class. I sometimes wish I could make a film about big business, but I don’t know anything about it. I feel too limited in my resources to make films that are not connected to the things that I know.