Last Words: Considering Contemporary Cinema

With Forty Shades of Blue (2005) Sachs participated in the Screenwriter’s Lab at the Sundance Institute. Set in the world of Memphis music, it confronts many of the issues that have been central to Sachs’ work, most specifically characters who exist both inside and outside of their own environment.

The film is the story of Laura (Dina Korzun), a young Russian woman living in Memphis with a much older music legend (played by Rip Torn), and the personal awakening she experiences in the wake of her unfortunate affair with his estranged son. In the bars and bedrooms of this very contemporary city, a love triangle forms, illuminating the hearts and souls of these three tangled lives.

Sachs has since completed Married Life (2005) and the harrowing Keep the Lights On (2012), an exemplary tale of a contemporary gay relationship fuelled by addiction. Featuring the music of Arthur Russell, it is like Forty Shades of Blue (around which this interview is centred): a powerful, coruscating look at love in bad faith.

JASON WOOD: I understand that genesis for Forty Shades of Blue was your relationship with your father.

IRA SACHS: The film began with the idea to tell a story about a character that I knew growing up in my birthplace of Memphis. My parents divorced when I was eight and consequently my father, who was a larger-than-life business figure and man about town, had lots of girlfriends. As soon as I met one of these girlfriends I would have an antagonistic relationship with them as they were different from me and were frequently from different classes, backgrounds and experiences.

Strangely, I have since gotten to know some of these women who have stayed in my life over twenty or thirty years. The actual characters in the film are very different from the ones that I knew but the plot and the trajectory is pretty much the same. I think the film is about that process of going underneath and getting to know someone that you might dismiss in your first meeting. It is about looking a little harder and listening a little bit more. You do this in film too; you look at characters that initially seem peripheral. I’ve always done this when watching films and also in my own work, such as my previous feature The Delta. It’s a fascination with characters on the outside. I remember watching Straight Time [1978] and thinking rather than a film about the Dustin Hoffman character wouldn’t it be interesting to have a film about the character played by Theresa Russell?

JW: Laura, played by Dina Korzun, certainly starts on the periphery, moving to the centre through a process of self-discovery.

IS: I’ve always been compelled by female characters and love novels by writers such as Edith Wharton and Henry James – Portrait of a Lady and House of Mirth especially. I also love the films of Fassbinder and Buñuel’s Belle de Jour [1967] and Godard’s Contempt [1963], pictures where women take on a central role that is somehow larger than the director. You must have the right actress in this position because quite often these roles are not particularly verbal, but come from the character’s interior strength. We were very conscious of how we developed Laura and if you look closely you’ll notice that she has seventeen different looks throughout the film to define her visually, psychologically and in narrative terms. I had pictures of Catherine Deneuve and Monica Vitti on my wall as guides, pictures of women who moved through films with an iconic presence. Even though the film is quite naturalistic in its approach I also knew that this was going to be a film that would be very much crafted. It’s the craft that makes the audience relax a little. They will know that they are watching something that has been crafted for them and they can relax and experience it in a different way.

My grandmother, an outsider who came to Memphis from New York, also influenced me. Nobody ever really understood her. Laura’s habit of saying ‘pretty good’ whenever Alan asks her how she is doing is actually something my grandmother would say. She was somehow out of step with her society. This is something I could personally relate to. Growing up gay in Memphis takes a little bit of time to figure out. I am certainly compelled by characters that are on the outside for this reason and it is no coincidence that in this film and in The Delta the central characters are immigrants. It’s a translation of that experience of being out of step with where we are.

JW: What made you cast Dina Korzun?

IS: I knew that casting was essential and the most important job I had as the film is defined by the shades and the details in every beat. I saw Dina in Last Resort [2000] and after meeting her was struck by her combination of naturalism and classical training. Dina brings a density to the performance that really carries the film. I had to really track her down actually and came here to London to meet her. She has a very intelligent approach to constructing her character and steered the film away from being a purely observational drama. I was really impressed by just how conscious she is of being able to create effect and emotion for the audience.

JW: Did you write Alan James with Rip Torn in mind?

IS: I wrote the part for Rip because as an actor and as a man of the world he is similar to the type of character we were writing, a powerful man with an earthy combination of expressiveness and poetry. Alan James is also based on producers including Sam Phillips of Sun Records, Willie Mitchell, Al Green’s producer, and Jim Dickinson who produced Big Star and who also played piano on the Stones’ ‘Wild Horses’. These people were kings of their domain, and they were brilliant. Rip has this too. He’s complicated and volatile, but also extremely sensitive and human. Even though his character is being heralded for bringing glory to Memphis, there is a sense that in domestic terms he is vulnerable. I think that by the end of the film you have a very clear sense that this man is mortal. Rip approached the part as if it was King Lear and to do Lear well you have to have a sense of comedy and tragedy. Rip knows how to make light what could otherwise be very heavy. He is the oldest person in the film at 74 but he brings an energy to it that drives everyone else.

JW: Memphis becomes its own character.

IS: It’s a city that I know really well and in a way that is instinctual and impressionistic. It’s an active city where things happen but where the inhabitants are not particularly verbal. I wanted to tell a domestic melodrama within that environment and to do so I was able to use all these great locations because of my relationship with the place. We shot in locations including the Peabody Hotel and Ardent Studios, which is where all the Big Star albums were recorded.

A lot of the background faces are also Memphis characters, such as Charles ‘Skip’ Pitts who played the original guitar lick on Shaft. I think the fact that I paid this attention gives authenticity to the depiction of the city. It’s about getting information into the frame so that people feel that they are experiencing something with depth. On the other hand I had some financiers who had just seen Lost in Translation (2003) and I think they wanted me to shoot Lost In Memphis. They wanted me to shoot the river and have every element of the city in the film. I had to argue to maintain a less fetishistic approach to the city of Memphis.

JW: And what was your visual approach to the city?

IS: I wanted a vivid approach that was not entirely defined by colour. I looked at lots of show reels of DP’s who had worked on credible indie movies and although their work was very decent nothing stood out and convinced me that they would be right for this film. I found Julian Watley who ended up shooting the film by poring over endless show reels and coming across a video that he shot for Green Day’s ‘Time of Your Life’. There was a sense that here was someone who could use natural light to a transformative effect. Within a short sequence I was able to see someone who could capture the elements of the everyday and turn them into something else. Julian and I met and I discovered that he had worked as a camera operator for David Fincher but had never shot a feature before so there was an element of risk for both of us. It was a process of trying to translate what were my impressions of a certain shooting style that I was coming to and then for Julian to find a way to achieve that on a technical and impressionistic level. We used three Ken Loach films as templates: Kes [1969], Family Life [1999] and Looks and Smiles [1981]. It was photojournalism filtered though Nan Goldin. If you froze any frame you would see a clear aesthetic choice.