Inside Ben Whishaw’s Transformation Into Iconic Photographer Peter Hujar

In 1974, about a week before Christmas, the photographer Peter Hujar met up with his close friend, author Linda Rosenkrantz. Rosenkrantz wanted him to tell her everything he’d done the day before, from when he woke up to when he went to bed, from what he did for work to what he ate for dinner. Their conversation was recorded, and published in full more than 40 years later in Peter Hujar’s Day, a slim but evocative 37-page book that highlights the warmth between two close friends—and the off-the-cuff sensibility of a particular and major artist.

director of such great New York films as Keep the Lights On and Love Is Strange, saw a movie in that book. He’s taken its parameters—the single location, the winding and unfiltered conversation—to create a textured, rambly, richly cinematic historical portrait. “Nostalgia doesn’t interest me, but you can go deeper than that and try to get something about the energy, which is timeless,” he tells Vanity Fair. “The recording was in 1974, and we shot in 2024, so it’s a 50-year gap—and yet that gap disappears in the process.”

Part of this has to do with Hujar, played in the film by Ben Whishaw (who also starred in Sachs’s last movie, Passages). Whether describing a long afternoon spent with Allen Ginsberg, laying out his precise strategy when ordering Chinese takeout, or musing on his contemporaries Susan Sontag and William Burroughs, he’s one of a kind—a figure of an era now associated with profound artistic community and enormous loss. (Hujar died at 53 years old, 10 months after being diagnosed with AIDS.) “Read it and weep if you didn’t know him,” the artist Nan Goldin once said of the Peter Hujar’s Day book. “Or read it and weep if you did that we lost him.”

Sachs’s adaptation, premiering Monday at the Sundance Film Festival and co-starring Rebecca Hall as Rosenkrantz, may inspire a similar, melancholy directive. It’ll mark an introduction for many to Hujar. His intimate black-and-white portraits have gone on to great renown after being relatively unheralded during his actual life. The iconic photo Orgasmic Man, from Hujar’s series in the late ‘60s that captured men at moments of sexual release, became the cover for the best-selling novel A Little Life; the Morgan Library acquired 100 of his prints as well as his writings back in 2013. But this 16mm movie—and Whishaw’s cellular portrayal—bring Hujar back to prickly, witty life as only cinema can.

Vanity Fair: When did you first start to learn about Peter, and how would you describe your relationship to his work?

Ira Sachs: I remember I went to Matthew Marks Gallery in Chelsea probably 20 years ago. That’s when I first started seeing shows of Peter’s. There was a very significant exhibit of his work at the Morgan Library about a decade ago. I came to New York in 1988. My life was in the East Village—my social life and my artistic life and my sexual life. Artists from that time and place were kind of my mentors, even though I didn’t know them. The way in which they lived their lives and their commitment to work—which was honest and radical and fearless, uninhibited—documented a time and a place which had so much loss and so much feeling.

I’ve been engaged with those artists. I made a film called Last Address about a group of New York artists who had died of AIDS, which included Peter, and I’m working on another film with Ben set in the East Village in the late 80s. This has been a period that’s given me direction and also that I have a lot of melancholy feelings about. It was also a time in which people would talk to four or five different friends in the course of one day. They would call on the phone; three or four people would drop by unexpectedly. It was a different kind of community as an artist. Recognizing that loss allows me to think about what might work as substitutes for that.

When and how did you see a movie about him, in what’s essentially a monologue of a book?

I was very interested in Peter and his work, and reading the book, I just felt very close to him in a very unexpected way. It’s a short book, but over the 40 pages, I felt like I also had an unexpected intimacy with this very particular friendship—it felt very familiar to me as a gay man, as an artist, as a human. Because it’s a recording of a conversation, there’s no mediation, so in a way it’s like an access point that is unfiltered.

I wanted to start with how you approached Linda, who speaks far less in the film, as she’s technically interviewing Peter. She’s also still alive in real life.

I approached Linda on Instagram, and I started talking to her about the book and the idea for this project. Only after several months of communicating did I realize she was 90 years old, but was still extremely with it and also really a dear and joyous and kind person. Rebecca and Linda talked a lot before they shot the film, and I think that quality is something that Rebecca internalized—it really became more part of her performance than an accent, for example, or anything impressionistic on Linda. It was Rebecca herself—and I saw this once we were in the editing room—who put so much love into Linda’s feelings towards Peter, which I think mirrored feelings Rebecca was having toward Ben in the production. She saw that there was that story even in a deeper way than I could have imagined.

What did you and Linda talk about?

Occasionally it would be things like, Did he smoke cigarettes? What might he have been wearing at the time? We could ask technical questions and then not follow them, to be honest. We felt very free. The film begins and is interrupted in certain times with conscious theatrical gestures in order in a way to accelerate and embrace that freedom. And what I think is so impressive to me about Ben’s performance particularly is how much he’s inside the text, how much he allows us to imagine each moment fully, each person that he describes. You don’t need to know who the people are, but you believe they know who the people are.

You and Ben made this after Passages. This is a very different kind of film, obviously, and it’s quite demanding for him. How did he work through it?

Ben had 55 pages of text to perform, never having done so before the shooting began. On day one, I worried because fluidity was so crucial. But by day two we found a process that allowed it to be very internal for him, the text to be completely owned and yet not repeated. It’s not a theatrical performance, ultimately. It’s not something he’s doing time and again. The things he discovers are discovered once. That’s what cinema does so differently than theater, and it’s something that Ben’s performance allowed me to hold onto. There’s an immediacy.

Ben said to me it was the hardest thing he’s ever done. It’s a monumental task. It’s actually tremendous what he’s pulling off. It’s not the amount of words, it’s the amount of singular moments within the words that he has to describe and convey.

How did you figure out the parameters of the film? Is the script just a transcript?

The script is the text from the transcript, reimagined over the course of a day. Still in one location, but kind of expanded upon to become a series of vignettes within different parts of his apartment at different times of day and in different moods. That was hard to come by. I didn’t see the shape of the film until I saw pre-production barreling towards me. On a production level, it came together very quickly and very actually, easily—and then suddenly I was like, what do I do with this material, two people talking? What was important to me was to find a cinematic solution to what could have been a very stagnant experience.

So how did you find that solution? Because you do achieve something genuinely, surprisingly cinematic.

Well, a couple of things really helped. One was seeing a number of films that were made in New York City in the 60s and 70s that were very personal filmmaking; subject, camera, room, people, artists. So films like Shirley Clark’s Portrait of Jason, and a film by Jim McBride called My Girlfriend’s Wedding, and Chantal Akerman’s early work. Andy Warhol’s Poor Little Rich Girl, which has Edie Sedgwick in the Chelsea Hotel. These films of which a lot could be said in very minimal ways. I saw in them the use of ellipses that happened because the film rolled out, or they cut between something indoors and outdoors. Those films gave me the permission to create ellipses in something that didn’t necessarily have them. That was really freeing.

Ultimately we worked for a couple of weeks with stand-ins. And Alex Ashe, my cinematographer, and I shot these two figures in various spaces at various times in the location. Suddenly I ran into a sense that I was making a movie much more about portraiture than I had imagined…. I realized that there was a story in photography inside the film. Which was pleasurable obviously because of the subject, but also was pleasurable to me because that’s what I am interested in, in part, when it comes to cinema: What emotion does an image convey separate from the language or from the text?

Where did you shoot this?

I was lucky enough that a friend of mine had recently become the executive director of Westbeth Artists Housing, and he saw the project as aligned to the mission of Westbeth, which is an artists’ housing space that’s been around since 1971. Its mission is to support and encourage artists—their domestic life and their creation of their work. We were doing all of that, so he gave us this space for a couple of months, gratis. That allowed us to really explore the images we were going to make with a kind of freedom that would not be usual in film production. Merce Cunningham had his office in that building. Many, many artists have been there and are there. The ghosts of other artists were in the building while we made the film. That was resonant to me.

There’s a real energy to these last two films of yours, between Passages and this one, amid a difficult climate for independent filmmaking. I’m curious, taking a step back: How are you feeling as an artist these days?

I feel like I am making hay while the sun shines. I feel fortunate that I met and started to work with [producer] Saïd Ben Saïd, and we’re now working on a third feature together to shoot this summer in New York. Careers seem like they’re made by caveat or by faith, but they’re often made by a certain few people. Truly, if Saïd hadn’t taken interest in my work about six or seven years ago, I don’t know if I would’ve been able to sustain.

Since the pandemic—and this is also where I look back at the artists of the East Village in the 70s and 80s—I feel that risks must be taken. We’re going to die, so you might as well try. My husband, Boris, says this to me occasionally, when I get kind of nervous that I can’t make something: “If you don’t make it, it won’t exist.” That alternative creates something that encourages me to go forward. I feel like I’m in a forward-moving phase. I really do continue to get inspiration from people who were savvy about the business or the industry or the art form, but they weren’t craven to it, and they found ways of making work that was deeply personal. That’s kind of the needle that I continue to try to thread. There’s some advantage of getting older: I feel like that’s the only needle I’m interested in.

This interview has been edited and condensed. This feature is part of Awards Insider’s exclusive Sundance 2025 coverage.

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