In filmmaker Ira Sachs’ Peter Hujar’s Day (2025), over the course of 76 minutes we hear acclaimed queer New York City photographer Peter Hujar (Ben Whishaw) recount the contents of his previous day on 18 December 1974 to writer and personal confidant Linda Rosenkrantz (Rebecca Hall), leaving no detail unturned, no cultural figure (ranging from Fran Lebowitz to Susan Sontag) unmentioned. Sachs’ film bucks biopic convention by showing us a single moment of Hujar’s life in real time, avoiding both a literal depiction of the artistic process and the melodramatic pressure points one may identify when narrativizing an individual’s life. What’s instead presented is the day-to-day minutiae of being an artist: juggling assignments, rent payments, and the social scene of eccentrics that populated the East Village. Hujar’s testimony is decidedly unglamorous, but it gives us direct insight into the life of an invaluable artistic voice.
The film was adapted from Linda Rosenkrantz’s own book of the same name, published in 2022, which presents a transcription of a recorded conversation she had with Hujar, working off an initial prompt she gave him of describing his day prior. Rosenkrantz’s larger project, including her 1968 novel Talk, which was transcribed from conversations between three friends in the Hamptons, is concerned with a unique form of historiography. By embalming gossip and extraneous personal detail, Rosenkrantz’s books transform conversations, for the contemporary reader, into first-hand accounts of living through an artistic period we now see as totemic and unprecedented. When engaging with her work, one is transported to a time of immense artistic innovation and personal precarity, giving us access to a generation of artists like Hujar who were sadly wiped out by the AIDS crisis. As Sachs stated to me: “Whenever I’m scared, I think about the East Village in the 1970s and I get some sort of radical inspiration from the risks they took.”
Throughout the film’s production Sachs himself saw Rosenkrantz as a confidant, though he chalks this up to both a pragmatic answer: “She knew how to connect with arty gay guys”, and a spiritual one: “We’re from the same shtetl in Eastern Europe.” Luckily I was able to talk to the now 91-year old Rosenkrantz from her home in Los Angeles and discuss everything from her experience on the film and, though she’d be the last to admit it, her lived wisdom as the “last of [her] generation”
This interview has been edited for clarity.
MATT CHAN: I’m curious as to how you felt watching the film and seeing this specific period of your life, not just the milieu, but an actual hour or so of it, recreated with such loving detail.
LINDA ROSENKRANTZ: Well, it really brought back to me the intimacy of my relationship with Peter. I thought Ira did a fantastic job, and Ben did too, and Rebecca. All of them. So I was very pleased. I’ve seen it now four or five times, and each time I like it even more. At the beginning I had to work at separating Ben’s performance from Peter but now it’s become a seamless connection.
How much input did you have on the film? Both in terms of, say, helping them figure out how the apartment looked, but also in interacting with Rebecca Hall. It must be so strange to have someone acting as you—
Someone so tall and someone so glamorous and so unlike me. But she has been very sweet and very friendly. She said she didn’t want to do an imitation of me, and I mean, she does get me a lot more in facial expressions than the voice. It’s probably the way I would have looked as I was listening to Peter.
Ira and I really became close friends. He came out to California to see me a couple of times, and we hit it off immediately. We have a shared sense of humor. He’s consulted me a lot. He asked me if I had photographs of my apartment, and I only actually had one. The apartment, you know, doesn’t look like that Westbeth apartment that’s in the film. I didn’t have a terrace, I didn’t have roof access or any of that stuff. So he took liberties.
When reading the transcript and watching the film, I latch onto this feeling of complete comfort and intimacy between you and Peter. And zooming out, I’m curious as to how you and Peter first met, and how that relationship progressed until the day of the recording.
Well, we met in the 50s when he moved in with a close friend of mine who became his partner, a guy named Joseph Raffael. And then we spent time together when Joe got a Fulbright to Florence, Italy. They invited me over to stay, and I spent a few weeks living with Peter and Joseph. So we came extremely close at that point and stayed very close friends until he died.
An aspect of the book and the film that I find intriguing is how it demystifies the day-to-day life of the artist. Because so much of what you and Peter talked about was logistical. Like: I have to meet up with this guy, I got caught up doing this.
I’m interested to know how this fixation with the minutiae of the past has continued to color your work.
Well, I’m very involved with my past in various ways. I’m still working on other tapes that I made at that period. There’s sort of a throughline in my interests: in names, words, conversation, gossip in all my work. I had intended to do a book of tapes of people’s day in their life and it didn’t work out. I just did a few of them, and Peter was really the only interesting one. It’s all the minutiae of my life, and that’s kind of always been an interest of mine.
I think the larger thread in a lot of your work, between Peter Hujar’s Day and Talk, is this methodology of recording your subjects and just letting the tape run. I want to know more about when you first decided that’s how you wanted to operate as a writer. I was reading Talk and in the way the people in the book riff and have all these inside jokes, it almost felt like a proto podcast, or something of that nature.
I remember clearly when I got the idea of doing Talk. I could just picture where I was standing in my apartment, and I was getting ready to leave for the East Hamptons for the summer. And I thought, you know, why not take a tape recorder and try taping our conversations. At the beginning it was going to be more than three people, but that didn’t work at all, you couldn’t hear if more than one person was trying to talk. It was a mess. So I zoomed in on myself and the other two, one of whom was Joseph Raffael, who introduced me to Peter. So that’s how that all began.
With Peter and your other subjects, you had this sort of very basic prompt, which was: recall the contents of your previous day. Was this a way to spark conversation? Or was there something you were interested in about the sort of minute-to-minute experience of an individual and how they expressed it?
Maybe, well, I didn’t know what to expect. What the history of it was is that I started off with Peter and Chuck Close and then I was talking to some big feminist woman, who said: “Oh, you have to just do women” That was the biggest mistake I made. Because I was interviewing a lot of artist’s wives and young mothers and their day to day was changing diapers, and, you know, dealing with their babies and it was not very interesting. So, the two really surviving ones are Peter and Chuck.
I mean, the genius of Peter was in his recall of the details. He was extraordinarily good at that, because he didn’t take notes. He had forgotten to take notes but he remembered all those details about, you know, the guy in the Chinese restaurant, Vinceletti and all those he remembered. Very few people, I think, could do that without taking notes.
Another aspect of Peter Hujar’s Day that fascinates me is how it captures the eternal gossip that fuels the art world. The centerpiece of the film is essentially when Peter talks about photographing Allen Ginsberg. You hear all about his disgusting apartment and his Bob Dylan poster.
I really love hearing stories about people I have very little personal relationship with, to the point where the gossip seems to almost eclipse the actual work of the artist. I want to hear more about your thoughts about how important gossip is for a flourishing art scene.
You do? Do you well? I mean, God, gossip has always been a part of every scene, every milieu, I think. And I don’t know if it’s more so in the art world, probably not. People talk about gossip in a pejorative way, and I don’t think that’s what it should be. I think it has value in its way of allowing people to define their relationships to others and their opinions of other people unfiltered.
The other interesting thing about the project is that it acts as both a written and visual archive of an artistic community from a period so thoroughly devastated by AIDS. As someone who’s borne witness to so much change in this country throughout the years, I’m curious to know what larger changes you’ve perceived in the artistic landscape of New York.
Well, I’ve been out of New York for quite a couple of decades now. So I’m not tuned into that. But I don’t have the feeling that there’s as much community now as there was then. I think Ira talks about that sometimes. That’s something that kind of died.
In my time, it really was a close community. Everybody knew everybody else in the art world. There was a lot of socializing. There were a lot of parties almost every Saturday night. I mean, the gallery openings were every Tuesday evening, and everybody was there. You would see the other artists and other people. So I can’t really talk about what’s happening now, but I very much doubt that it’s the same closed world that it was then.
I do think part of it is tied to the cost of living and cost of rent. A lot of young artists don’t seem to take as many risks, because they have to prioritize some sort of sustainability versus, you know, artistic fulfillment. You have talked about how in the 70s it was kind of similar, where people were always struggling and scraping to get by. Do you have any insight or advice about just generally living this lifestyle?
I have no advice, but it was always risky. I mean, I was around when people just started living in lofts in SoHo and later in Tribeca, and it was illegal. Artists weren’t allowed to live in lofts at the very beginning of the loft generation. I also taped a day in the life of Chuck Close, and he talks a lot about living in the loft. They would have all these debates with the trash collectors and it wasn’t easy. So economically, I mean, everything was really cheap, but nobody was making any money either. So it sort of balanced out.
And today everything’s really expensive, but people still aren’t making money.
Right.
Ira also talked about how, in making the film, he realized how little he actually knew about the East Village in the 70s and the larger artistic milieu.
What I find incredible is that you are an archivist in the way you’ve collected all these recordings but are also a physical archive of sorts, as someone who lived through a time period that can feel so foreign today. Do you feel, maybe not that you bear a responsibility, but have some sort of specialized authority talking about this artistic period?
Well, I am sort of the last of my generation, which is a little scary. But I do take a certain pleasure in unearthing and sharing a lot of the stuff that I have saved and remembered. I don’t know if I feel a responsibility, per se, but I mean, there are two biographies being written about Peter and I’ve been able to help both authors of those books, with tons of information, photographs, letters, all the things that I have. I’m happy to be here and share my memories.
How does it feel that your relationship with Peter has continued to persist so long after his passing?
I feel good about it, and I feel very sad that he’s not here. I mean, I still miss him. He’s been gone for quite a long time, but I really like how this has reconnected me with him in a deeper way. He was always present but now he’s really present. So it’s allowed me to continue my relationship with him in a very nice way, but one tinged with sadness.
Do you think the film and book have reintroduced him into the larger conversation within the art world?
Well, that was already beginning. The executor of his estate, Stephen Koch, was making great progress. I mean, the breakthrough was the big show at the Morgan Library in 2018. From that time on, Stephen was able to set up quite a few exhibitions, reintroducing Peter to people who didn’t know his work. The process started even before the book and the movie. But at this point Peter is considered one of the great 20th century photographers. He might not have been in that category before all this.
I mean, that’s always the problem. People don’t really appreciate what’s in front of them at the time.
Exactly, yeah, although Peter always felt that he was going to become famous. So I hope he’s enjoying it somewhere.
