Biography

November 21, 1965 · Memphis, Tennessee, USA

Brother of director Lynne Sachs.

His father is Ira Sachs Sr. who fathered nine children by six women. He hid two of them from his mother who threatened to cut him out of her will if he had any more children.

[on 'Love is Strange'] I think that all of my previous films were about the nature of love and its destructive toll on an individual. But even more, they were films of self-discovery, about people who were trying to understand who they are and what they felt about that. This is a film that begins with two men who know who they are, and face a conflict together. How they face that conflict is the story of the film and also describes their love. I've always thought of it as an epic story told in a New York apartment because it's multi-generational. It's really about all these generations and how, at each stage of our life, we know such different things.

All history is defined by shifting modes of reality and time and how things change. That's what I love about cinema. It changes in the moment.

[press conference for Frankie (2019) at the 72nd Cannes Film Festival] I'm 53, and for whatever reasons, until I was in my late forties, I wasn't that close to death and in the last five years I have been in a way that was very surprising, very difficult, but also what I noticed - and I was with three different women at different ages in times at which they were facing the end of their life - I noticed all the things that were unexpected, the mundane things, the funny things, the fact that life seemed to be so much stronger than death; life kept going until the very last moment. And to me, that's the definition of family - it's this connection that people have together, that holds, even when they face so much of a crisis. I also built the film for Isabelle [Isabelle Huppert] who'd I'd met three or four years ago after Love is Strange (2014) and we wanted to do a film together and, for me, I would never do a film with Isabelle in France, because I feel that it was important to find a location and a story that was somehow separate from where she was from, and that we all as a group were on a trip together to make this film.

In some ways all of my films could be called 'Passages.' There's no beginning and there's no ending.