In Ira Sachs’ new film “The Man I Love,” which premiered in competition at the Cannes Film Festival, Rami Malek stars as Jimmy George, a fictional New York performance artist in the downtown experimental theater scene of the late 1980s. Ahead of their premiere, Sachs and his longtime writing partner Mauricio Zacharias came by the American Pavilion, presented by IndieWire, and talked about what it was like to be young and gay in New York City in the ’80s and ’90s.
“I was hanging out with people who were making plays and writing The Village Voice articles, and going out at night, and then there was this darkness around us because it was the high point of the AIDS epidemic,” said Sachs. “There was fear, certainly, but there was also rage, which I think is wonderful, and then there was the pursuit of joy. So there was a lot of intention upon living, and living hard, and living emotionally and intimately with groups of people.”
Added Zacharias, “There was a lot of dancing, a lot of great music, there was a lot of great energy, even though there was something really terrible going on that was directly affecting my life.”
“The Man I Love” is the sixth feature film collaboration between Sachs and Zacharias, who talked about making a film that captured this formative time in their lives ever since they met two decades ago. To tell it, they needed time to separate them from the trauma of losing a large portion of the generation of gay men.
They set their film in the experimental theater scene, which was at the center of downtown nightlife culture in 1989. Jimmy’s fictional experimental theater group, The Mechanicals, is based on downtown performance center PS 122 — which Sachs attended regularly when his first NYC job was as the assistant to then-performance artist Eric Bogosian — and the Wooster Group. The character of Jimmy was inspired by Wooster performer Ron Vawter.
“Ron died in 1994 of AIDS, but really the week before his death, he was performing on stage in Belgium,” said Sachs. “He actually cut that performance short because he wasn’t well, and he got on a plane to go home, and he died on the plane. So literally, until the moments before, he was making art, and I think that was such a moving story and image for us.”
When we first meet Jimmy, he has just returned home from a two-week hospital stint in which he almost died from AIDS complications. While still recuperating, he throws himself into what will likely be his last role in a race against the clock.
Zacharias and Sachs said one of the final pieces of the script was deciding what Jimmy’s final production and role would be. Sachs had the out-of-the-box idea for The Mechicals to adapt an obscure 1974 Québécois film “Il Etait Un Fois Dans L’Est” (“It Was a Time in the East”), which he’d seen at a Toronto LGBTQ film festival in 1990. The long-forgotten film, adapted from several plays by playwright Michel Tremblay, follows a day in the life of marginalized characters who gather at a neighborhood club to perform.
“It’s a beautiful movie that, for me, felt like if [director Rainer Werner] Fassbinder made ‘Nashville,’” said Sachs. “In ’89, because I was a theater director also, I would’ve been intrigued about making a play based on this movie. My friends made plays based on Fassbinder films all the time; that was a regular thing people did in the late ’80s. And then it was this funny thing where you had a crew of 100 people all trying to recreate this 1974 film that no one had ever heard of.”
Another appeal in having The Mechicals adapt the obscure film was the character of musical performerCarmen, which Sachs saw as an interesting role-within-the-role for Malek. Music is a huge part of Jimmy’s life, from the impromptu dinner-party jam sessions to his showstopping performances of “The Man I Love” at a nightclub, to “Look What They’ve Done to My Song, Ma” at his parents’ wedding anniversary.
It’s also easy to imagine how this could be an inevitable selling point for the film, which is seeking distribution out of Cannes. It gives audiences the opportunity to see Malek perform again after his Oscar-winning role as Queen frontman Freddie Mercury in “Bohemian Rhapsody,” but Sachs said he never even considered that.
“I’d not seen ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ before casting Rami,” said Sachs, who said he had no real interest or need to see it. “I actually tend to cast on a very limited palette. I only saw, like, 20 minutes of ‘Mr. Robot’ and I thought, ‘That guy I can work with.’ And it’s really about something very specific that I see in a performance.”
While Malek does do a beautiful rendition of George Gershwin’s “The Man I Love” in the film, one other surprising tidbit Sachs shared with the audience at the AmPav tent was that the name for his new film came from the 1941 movie “That Man I Love.” The plot of that semi-noir nightclub film directed by Raoul Walsh, in which the star Ida Lupino sings the Gershwin classic, shares little in common with Sachs and Zacharias’ script. However, it provides an emotional connection for Sachs.
“[The Walsh film] is about 74 minutes long, and it’s suffused with emotion,” he said. “The emotion is so rich, and there is this balance between drama and melodrama, which is our lives. Really, that’s what our lives are like, drama and melodrama.”
“The Man I Love” premiered at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.
You can watch the complete conversation in the video above. And for more information on American Pavilion’s Cannes programming, check out the rest of our lineup here.
