Peter Hujar’s Day traces its origins, quite unexpectedly, to something as modern and seemingly trivial as a direct message on social media. Yet, like many enduring works of art, it began with a moment of spontaneous human curiosity. The film’s director, Ira Sachs—celebrated for his delicate explorations of intimacy and personal connection in films such as Passages and The Delta—had recently discovered a long-lost interview between the late photographer Peter Hujar and the writer Linda Rosenkrantz. Their conversation, recorded in 1974 but only published as a book in 2022, unfolds as a sensitive dialogue between two artists reflecting on their own creative anxieties and the fragile rhythms of ordinary life. Captivated by the text’s honesty, Sachs felt compelled to reach out to Rosenkrantz directly through Instagram, initiating a digital correspondence that would grow into a profound collaboration. That simple exchange ultimately became the starting point for what is now Peter Hujar’s Day—a cinematic reimagining of that 1970s conversation, starring Ben Whishaw as Hujar and Rebecca Hall as Rosenkrantz. The film, deceptively minimal yet astonishingly tender, unfolds entirely within a single, elegantly appointed West Village apartment, spanning the course of an ordinary day and transforming the mundane into something emotionally vast.
In a conversation with The Verge, Sachs described the curious serendipity of how the project emerged. When asked about messaging Rosenkrantz, he recounted his surprise upon later realizing that she was eighty-nine years old at the time of their correspondence. Despite the generational gap, their dialogue felt strikingly organic—an effortless, back-and-forth exchange marked by humor, openness, and mutual respect. Over time, this virtual exchange evolved into a sincere friendship, one that Sachs compares to the special kind of emotional understanding that can exist between heterosexual women and gay men. He describes it as a particular kind of companionship—not romantic, but profoundly intimate—that mirrors the very dynamic captured in the 1974 conversation between Linda and Peter. In this sense, their creative partnership became both a continuation and a reflection of the friendship immortalized in Hujar’s words.
When asked whether this was his usual way of beginning projects, Sachs explained that his artistic process frequently begins with a germ of an idea that he instinctively feels compelled to follow. The form it takes—whether an impromptu message, a casual observation, or a reading that stirs something deep within—matters less than the emotional certainty that the idea is worth pursuing. His creative intuition, he suggests, is an act of trust.
Sachs recalls that the moment he realized the interview could become a film came only upon finishing the final page. It was in that last passage that Hujar’s description of standing on the corner of Second Avenue and Twelfth Street at three o’clock in the morning, listening to the faint sounds of the city drifting upward, took hold of Sachs’s imagination. He understood instantly that such an image—the solitude, the pulse of nocturnal New York, the poetic tension between isolation and connection—possessed inherently cinematic qualities. The challenge, from that point onward, was to ensure that the film built toward this final, luminous moment in a way that made it resonate. Sachs observes that many films find their defining emotional truth in their concluding moments, and for him, this one had to embody both the presentness of 1974 and the subtle sorrow of what history would later bring: beauty intertwined with loss.
When pressed to clarify that sense of loss, Sachs responds that it represents, most simply, the loss of an era—a bygone cultural and emotional landscape. More personally, it evokes the awareness of Hujar’s death seventeen years later, a life extinguished prematurely by AIDS. Though Sachs deliberately tried not to dwell on that tragedy during the creative process, it inevitably casts a shadow over the film, infusing every gesture and every silence with quiet poignancy.
Unlike many contemporary films that attempt to encapsulate the entirety of an artist’s life in sweeping biographical terms, Peter Hujar’s Day approaches its subject through profound restraint. Sachs never intended to create a conventional biopic. His goal was instead to honor the specificity and intimacy of a single exchange, to reveal the texture of creativity through conversation. What drew him most to Rosenkrantz’s transcript was its raw authenticity—the unfiltered quality of two artists speaking not as representatives of greatness but as flawed, searching individuals. In capturing that tone, Sachs hoped to achieve moments of truthfulness that rival those in his own wider body of work. The dialogue, he emphasizes, is reproduced verbatim, allowing the film to feel like the viewer is spending a languid afternoon in the company of two old friends, listening to them grapple with art, ego, and vulnerability in real time. It possesses, he notes, the layered richness of literature—something akin to Proust’s minute attention to memory and sensation—and embodies a rare degree of honesty.
Sachs also highlights an often-overlooked aspect of Hujar’s artistry: his exceptional storytelling. Though best known for his photography, Hujar’s ability to articulate visual experiences through language was remarkable. The imagery he conjured through speech had a distinct cinematic rhythm, which in turn offered Sachs a natural bridge between written dialogue and visual interpretation.
Despite the film’s confined setting—a single apartment and the span of one day—Peter Hujar’s Day never feels suffocating or stage-bound. Its visual language transforms a domestic space into a psychological landscape, shifting fluidly with the passage of time. Sachs admits, however, that he initially feared the project’s smallness might become a limitation. Approaching production, he wondered whether such intimacy could be sustained cinematically or whether it might collapse under its own minimalism. Yet it was precisely in abandoning the pressure to recreate the original interview literally that Sachs found freedom. Rather than depict two people sitting face to face for an hour and a half, he reconceived the material as a series of twenty-three separate scenes unfolding over twelve hours, capturing changing moods, light, and emotional tones. The result is a film that feels alive—expansive within its confinement.
To shape the cinematic structure, Sachs spent two weeks in a donated Westbeth apartment in the West Village, working with his cinematographer, Alex Ashe, and two stand-in performers. Together they explored the apartment’s rooms, photographing the space at different times of day to capture its shifting atmosphere. These images then became the foundation for the film’s visual sequencing. The placement of each scene was governed less by what was said in the dialogue than by rhythm—by a sense of when the film needed to move, to breathe, or to cut, ensuring the emotional tempo stayed dynamic even amid stillness.
When discussing the film’s relevance to the present day, Sachs reflects on how Peter Hujar’s Day functions as a quiet meditation on the eternal struggles of creative life. Watching it invites viewers to confront the inseparable companionship of confidence and doubt that every artist endures. For Sachs, the dialogue between fear and assurance, uncertainty and belief, is one that defines his own artistic existence. He relates deeply to Hujar’s self-questioning—his insecurity over whether a photograph of Allen Ginsberg was extraordinary or inadequate. That sense of perpetual doubt, Sachs suggests, reveals something profoundly human: even those whose work we later revere once wrestled daily with self-doubt. This recognition, he finds, is deeply comforting.
Ultimately, Peter Hujar’s Day is not a nostalgic look backward but a film that speaks to the present moment—a work that acknowledges both the losses of the past and the enduring resilience of artistic creation. It recognizes that to make art is to exist in continual tension between fragility and perseverance, between uncertainty and hope. Sachs concludes that this existential balancing act extends beyond art itself; it is the very question of sustainability—emotional, creative, and financial—that every person must face in life. The film, opening in theaters on November 7th, stands as a quiet but powerful testament to how connection, conversation, and creativity continue to illuminate the human experience.
Sourse: https://www.theverge.com/entertainment/816399/peter-hujars-day-ira-sachs-interview
