Director Ira Sachs and lead Franz Rogowski discussed their film Passages at an exclusive screening in London on Friday.
The screening was the first of a series of exclusive QA events curated by Variety in partnership with brand and culture consultancyBSBP targeted atBAFTAand AMPAS voters as well as key players in the showbiz community in the U.K., taking place at Londons The Cinema at Selfridges. Varietyand BSBP teamed with film distributor, global streaming service and production companyMUBIfor the first screening in the series, Passages, written and directed by Sachs.
The screening was accompanied by a QA conducted byVarietycritic Guy Lodge with Sachs and Rogowski. The sexually frank relationship drama, about a polysexual Parisian love triangle, also stars Ben Whishaw and Adele Exarchopoulos, and premiered to great acclaim at the Sundance Film Festival, also playing at the Berlinale. It made headlines Stateside when the MPAA gave it an NC-17 rating, prompting MUBI to release it unrated instead.
Somehow, the whole debate about sex being the most intimate space, I find it a bit hypocritical because it also touches so many things like ownership, like who owns my body? What does it mean to be intimate with someone?, Rogowski said. It touches so many fields that I feel like intimacy coordination is very interesting. But if we only talk about sex in terms of intimacy and then give an NC-17 rating to a movie like this, theres something off, I think.
Ive tried to make films about human beings and human lives and human relationships, Sachs added. I also wanted to make a sexy film, like I wanted to make a film that didnt shy away from skin and bodies and lights and forms and sex. But I couldnt have done it without the actors, like I can create those scenes, but theyre actually giving us those scenes. So theres a level of generosity.
The filmmaker revealed that he was drawn to Rogowskis performance in Michael Hanekes Happy End (2017) and he and writer Mauricio Zacharias wrote the film for the actor. Discussing the chemistry between the actors that is palpable in the film, Rogowski said: Its really important to get to a space where you dont have to prepare for the outcome of what might happen during a scene, a way where you can explore together, and maybe even get to a point where things are different than you might have expected in the beginning.
Sachs added: Whats significant is [that] in this film, and all my films, I dont rehearse before I start shooting. We spend time together, we spent a lot of time figuring out costumes and wardrobe in this film, which was really significant. We enjoy each other, but we arrived without any conversations about motivation, backstory, all these things that might become language that the actors might produce, I dont want them to know where theyre going.
Theyve never heard the lines before, they dont really know what the other actor is going to give them. And they dont know how the lines are gonna sound coming out of themselves. So thats a pretty dangerous place. But I think its also exciting, Sachs said.
BSBP, which was founded by Bethani Stainfield-Bruce in 2016, is a brand and culture consultancy specializing in creating, executing and nurturing partnerships between brands and the film, music and entertainment industries.