Ira Sachs found his leading man in “The Man I Love” by simply turning on the television. The leading man happened to be Rami Malek.
“I had seen him in ‘Mr. Robot’ and was impressed by many things, including his charisma and his fluidity as an actor, like a very natural style,” Sachs told Casey Loving at TheWrap’s studio at the Toronto International Film Festival.
Malek stars as Jimmy George, a larger-than-life though not widely known performer still wanting to create even after being brought face-to-face with death, only barely surviving AIDS-related pneumonia. Now recovering and being cared for by his loving boyfriend Dennis (Tom Sturridge), the film follows Jimmy as he tries to live his life to the fullest.
Sachs added that what he looks for in an actor is a natural style, plus a willingness to discover things on set that neither of them planned.
Sachs traced the film’s naturalistic tone back to his own background as a theater director. He said it’s a way to bridge fiction and nonfiction rather than lean into melodrama.
“I think that’s why I was a theater director as a young person. It was really discovering naturalistic cinema that I felt like I connected to in a very deep way, and it also gave me the opportunity to talk more intimately about my own experience,” Sachs said. “Naturalism was a way of almost bridging the gap between fiction and nonfiction. I think of the movies I make as an opportunity to record life, whether it’s been created or discovered.”
“The Man I Love” premiered at Cannes in May and is having its Canadian premiere at TIFF.
In his review of the film, The Wrap’s Chase Hutchinson wrote: “In Sachs’ spectacular, shattering vision, which he co-wrote with his longtime collaborator Mauricio Zacharias, we witness the stories and the memories that we can only hope our own loved ones will tell of us when we’re gone. It’s a film about the ways we continue to dance, to love and to live, even with death ever present.”