When Ira Sachs started his career by making films about tortured souls struggling to find romance, he admits it was a reflection of his own volatile relationships at the time.
Now he’s happily married to his artist husband, Boris, and the proud father of twin boys. And he’s mellowed out as a filmmaker, too.
Little Men finds Sachs exploring a friendship between two adolescent boys whose parents are engaged in a real-estate dispute within the melting pot that is New York City. It’s tender and heartfelt, and like his previous film, Love Is Strange (2014), lacks some of the cynicism that Sachs used to carry with him behind the camera.
“They’re about challenges, but they’re not about the failure of romance. I’m finding conflict in other questions,” Sachs said during a recent stop in Dallas. “My characters have always been versions of me, and when I was younger, there was a lot of struggle in the individual figuring out who he or she was. That was a very painful process.”
In the character-driven film, Jake (Theo Taplitz) is timid and socially awkward while Tony (Michael Barbieri) is outgoing with street smarts. However, they find common ground once Jake moves with his family to Tony’s neighborhood, into a Brooklyn house they inherited from Jake’s late grandfather.
While their friendship blossoms, friction develops between Jake’s father (Greg Kinnear) and Tony’s mother (Paulina Garcia), who leases space from Jake’s family for a fledgling dress shop and runs out of money to pay the rent. In the resulting stalemate between compassion and commerce, the kids are forced to find a middle ground.
“I’m both a parent and a child, so these questions of how children find their own space in adult life are really interesting to me,” Sachs said. “I wanted to make an intelligent film about childhood.”
Sachs, 50, said that while there aren’t many direct autobiographical elements in the screenplay, he’s intimately familiar with the character dynamics and the setting.
He grew up in Memphis as part of an urban children’s theater community that drew participants from a diverse collection of cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds. Then he moved to New York in 1988 as an eager college student, settling into Brooklyn neighborhood with a mix of Italian and Dominican cultures.
“These moments in which you cross class and background are very few, but they happen more regularly when you’re a kid,” Sachs said. “In adulthood, one of the things that comes into play is these ideas of very distinct, ghettoized communities. Children don’t make those distinctions.”
Little Men marks the fourth collaboration between Sachs and Brazilian screenwriter Mauricio Zacharias, who sparked the idea for the real-estate conflict in the story.
“As we started working on this project, his family in Rio was in the process of evicting a tenant. As I heard details of that story, I realized there was probably another side,” Sachs said. “They’re not that far apart from each other. The immigrant is a well-educated, middle-class woman who’s already established a base here. The homeowners are not huge landlords. It’s just their neighborhood house. I didn’t want to demonize one or the other too much. Part of the intention was that it wouldn’t be easy to pick sides.”
Finding newcomers to play Jake and Tony was a challenge during the casting process, in part because Sachs knew that their camaraderie would be as critical as their individual talents — and because the filmmaker doesn’t like to rehearse.
“They’re both natural. It was important to find two kids who would be memorable,” Sachs said. “They became easy with each other very quickly. They were comfortable with their dynamic. The chemistry was there.”
