Interview: Ira Sachs on "Frankie"
Thursday, October 24, 2019 at 9:30PM by Chris Feil
Frankie is the latest film from director Ira Sachs, one that transplants his trademark humane examination of family dynamics to a beautiful town in Portugal. Isabelle Huppert plays the titular actress, who has insisted on a vacation with family and friends after receiving a fatal diagnosis. The film - also starring Marisa Tomei, Brendan Gleeson, Jérémire Renier, and Greg Kinnear - is Sachs’ most sprawling ensemble yet. In the span of the day, there are reconciliations and aired heartbreaks shared between lovers, step-siblings, and most importantly parents and children - all set against the revealing truth of nature and the landscape. When I sat down to talk with Sachs about the film and his point of view as a storyteller, he was every bit as warm and thoughtful and introspective as his films...
Chris Feil: Your films have an incredibly formed sense of place that also informs the drama. In your first films it started in Memphis, and most recently you’re known for your work in New York. What brought you to Portugal for Frankie?
Ira Sachs: There are a couple of things. I had seen a film about ten years ago by Satyajit Ray called Kanchenjungha (1962) which is about a family on vacation in the Himalayan mountains - it takes place in one day from the morning to the afternoon and there’s a central crisis with nine stories. It’s a beautiful film and it always sort of stuck in my head as a great structure for a movie that I might make. When Isabelle Huppert and I started talking about making a film together, this seemed like the right project because I would never make a film - or I would be very unlikely to make a film - with Isabelle Huppert in France. Because I just wouldn’t be the guy to do it!
But the idea of everyone being in a dislocated experience, which though often I’ve made films set in specific places, often the central characters are people not from there. In Memphis I made a film about a Vietnamese immigrant (The Delta) and a Russian woman (Forty Shades of Blue). In New York, I made a film about a Danish filmmaker (Keep the Lights On). So I’ve often worked with people working and speaking outside their native tongue. So it felt best to do that with Isabelle in a place that she wasn’t everyday.
My co-writer, Mauricio Zacharias, is Brazilian but his family is Portuguese, so he suggested Sintra which is this little town outside of Lisbon. And when he did, I remembered that I had been their when I was fourteen on a vacation with my mother and two sisters, and I had actually written a diary there. So we went back to Sintra, and I realized that I had a very strong and very intimate emotional response to the landscape.
Did that come from any of those diary entries that you found?
No. The diary wasn’t very good, actually. [laughs] It was just really being in these particular locations and completely knowing, as much as I know about any location in New York, that I would be able to convey that emotion through moviemaking.
Was it moreso that emotional truth you responded to or was there anything specific about the place that informed the drama for all these characters?
You know, we used the kind of trope or mythology of the area to build a kind of theatricality to the story. There’s the idea of spirituality - all this stuff where the film plays with the real and the unreal but in a very theatrical fashion. And ultimately the most real is nature.
It’s also a space where the characters get lost in. Meanwhile they’re all navigating through their feelings about Frankie’s mortality. You mention the real and the unreal - on an emotional level, do you think that death is one or the other, or are the characters trying to discover that?
I think they, like most of us, are human because they don’t look at death. You’re human because you look at life, right? And I think the film is about life, really.
So it sounds like this was a more organic process of coming to making a film in Portugal. Do you think you’ll be telling any more stories in Europe?
You know, for right now I feel like only if I made another film about a family on vacation. [laughs] I would be very hesitant to - except maybe England where it’s my native tongue - I would be hesitant to go and make a film within a culture I don’t experience. But I don’t think Frankie is within the Portuguese culture, it takes place on the land. Though my collaborators were all Portuguese filmmakers and artisans, and that I think is very much a part of the film.
On the collaboration side, you mentioned your writing partner Mauricio Zaccharias. This is your fourth film together - with that type of longevity with someone, what does that process look like when you’re approaching something new?
We have a strategy that usually begins with a couple of months of talking about our lives and stories, and usually we watch a lot of films and find an inspiration in all of that together. Both of us are middle aged men who are encountering the brevity of our lives and those of our parents in a compelling personal way. So we do this period of talking and we shape a story together and he writes the first draft and puts himself in to it with a lot of freedom. And then it’s a process of back and forth.
Did you have any other direct influences? I kind of thought of Chekhov a lot during the movie, and maybe that’s just because you’re dealing with performers and creative types.
I feel like there’s certain people I’m always in conversation with, Chekhov being one. But in a way, when I say Chekhov, I’d say Rules of the Game because there you can see Renois’ influence on Chekhov. To me Rules of the Game was important to us because we were trying to ride the line between the tragic and the comic, and also taking characters a little bit farther from themselves. So bringing the situations to kind of caricature spots and playing with the idea of the cartoon, the extreme.
And then Eric Rohmer was a big influence on the film. We were making a movie about people walking and talking through nature, so I started really looking closely at his work and was guided in terms of the mise-en-scène.
I wanted to ask you about how you create family units through extended families. Frankie has a family of friends, step-siblings, ex-lovers - what compels you in your films to depict something outside the typical cinematic representation of just the biological line?
Well, I was thinking today about how I’m often writing about artists, and I was sort of wishing that I could write about business and finance because I think it’s really fascinating and there’s a lot of tension there. I was on an elevator with three business men and thought “I know nothing about you.” Unfortunately.
I would have to do a lot of research and I prefer to do films where I can share what I know, in an easy, intimate way. So I think my films really directly reflect how I experience life and family. Including my own family, which includes my husband and we have two kids and we raise them with their mom. But also when I was a kid, my parents were divorced - my father had nine children with six different women. So I have a wide range of what is considered family.
That being said, I think there’s something there about the parent-child relationship that is very compelling to me. My next film is about a recently widowed man with two grown daughters who reveals that he has a second family, but the relationship between father and daughters is the heart of the film.
I definitely relate to the extended family experience, so it’s always compelling to see because you don’t always see it onscreen. Why do you think that is?
Well, I think casting a black woman, Vinette Robinson, as Brendan Gleeson’s daughter, and not giving extended context about what the history was, is pushing the audience in a way that they should be pushed. The expectations for the art film tend to be very blanche, and I feel like that’s also not a reflection of my life and community. It’s a push and pull with being authentic to your own experience and also inclusive. That comes up around class also, you know? How does the idea that you can only depict what you know limit you? That’s the inverse.
Seeing past ourselves is definitely important. Even though you are depicting what your experience is, how do you find ways to still push yourself?
I think there’s a really interesting question anyone can ask a queer person who makes film: what are the influences that affect the stories you choose to tell? And I think anyone who doesn’t admit that the dominant economic culture of heterosexuality isn’t part of what you’re in conversation with, would be lying. For me, I started with The Delta which is a super queer film and then it was twelve years before I put a gay character in another film. And now I’m again telling stories that are less queer on the surface - and why? What are my responsibilities? So it’s just a conversation you’re still in with yourself.
Frankie opens today in select theatres!!
Reader Comments (2)
Oops, Nat! You'b better update them Oscar charts and find room for Huppert and Tomei!
I thought the film was underrated, probably under-appreciated by those who expect something kindred to what Ira Sachs has done in past films. Frankie has an inert-ness that is not necessarily a bad thing even if that word has been hijacked as a relative to dull, boring, possibly uninteresting. But I like the 'inert' glow of Frankie -- it has some staginess especially when certain characters are involved, and yet in another scene with a different set of interactions, it becomes freer, more naturally conversational. Huppert is like a spirit, a mater dolorosa who hovers and touches all the characters who reveal little facets about themselves through their interaction with Huppert's Frankie. I hope the film gets a reassessment someday, not just as a Rohmer-lite but as a meditation on the intimacies and strangeness of landscapes to people who are grieving in their own personal ways. And I wish Huppert's quiet turn here will be in award conversation but it is highly unlikely. Gleeson and Tomei were also effective