Can the film 'Peter Hujar's Day' capture the essence of the elusive artist?

Ira Sachs’ latest feature makes its artifice clear from the start. A clapperboard shuts as Ben Whishaw steps into the persona of Peter Hujar, the queer, black-and-white photographer who frequented, and captured, an exuberant 1970s New York cultural set. Peter Hujar’s Day – adapted from author Linda Rosenkrantz’s book of the same name – reenacts verbatim a conversation from morning to sunset between the two friends, at once a precious window into their world and a self-aware spinning of fiction.

Besides the transcript, the resources Sachs and Whishaw had to draw on to summon Hujar were scant, with only a single interview with David Wojnarowicz (then his friend and mentee) to listen to. ‘I think that was probably a good thing,’ reflects the Passages director, when we meet in The Londoner Hotel. He took some liberties with biographical details; ‘the good idea of having a Scotch in the middle of the afternoon’ despite Hujar not drinking, for example. What the duo could glean about his life suffused the atmosphere onset, including, says Whishaw, ‘a kind of spaciousness, a sort of time, actually, in the way [Hujar and Wojnarowicz] talked.’

Though he only published one book during his lifetime and all but vanished from the cultural consciousness after his death in 1984, Hujar’s work has been enjoying a resurgence of popularity thanks to recent major retrospectives in London and Venice. The film, in which Hujar name-drops Susan Sontag, Allen Ginsberg, Fran Lebowitz but also dozens of forgotten creatives, raises the question of ‘when someone appears, why does everyone else disappear?’, says Sachs. Hujar helped to document a transient artistic scene, but that doesn’t alter the fact that it was fading.

‘I didn't know him, and I don't feel like I know him any better now,’ insists Sachs. ‘I know parts of him, but I don't feel close to him in any way – and so maybe I still want to. I drive by his apartment almost every other day, driving my kids to school, I see the windows that he lived in, and that's a very nice, funny, weird connection.’

Alex Ashe’s sunlight-permeated cinematography brings another artistic dimension to the film, though Sachs and Ashe were ‘consciously not looking at [Hujar’s] work’ for inspiration, but directors like Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Jean-Luc Godard and Chantal Ackerman ‘who create their own forms of portraiture’. It was important to Sachs that Whishaw and Rebecca Hall, who plays Rosenkrantz (and is also a painter), were primarily interested in leading creative lives, so they would commit to the filmmaking ‘process’ over the product with ‘complete abandon’.

If there’s a theme running through Hujar’s day, it’s self-doubt. ‘We don't often see that in artists, except in very melodramatic ways,’ says Sachs. ‘He is continually coming back to the question of whether or not on that day he made a good photograph.’ Whishaw adds that, though essential, insecurity is ‘torture’, precipitating a ‘change of perspective’: ‘You have to have this kind of questioning, reflection and striving to reach something that feels unrealisable.’

The film has a note of nostalgia for Hujar’s heyday, pre-global art market. ‘I had a sense that the parameters of value were more local,’ explains Sachs. ‘There is a depth that comes from that where there is a community of people who are actually going through a lot of similar things, politically and socially. That's where movements come out: a group of people in one location coming into conversation with each other. That's very hard to do now.’

Death was a constant theme in the photographer’s oeuvre – his book, interspersed with catacombs, titled Portraits in Life and Death. Sontag observed that his subjects ‘appear to meditate on their own mortality’. This is something which rises to the surface during the film’s melancholy final sequence, amid ‘the waning light, the gathering darkness,’ says Whishaw. ‘It was lamplight and candles and the conversation turns to Peter's health. There was just a shift in atmosphere.’

Sachs looked to Elizabeth Taylor’s final scene in the Tennessee Williams adaptation Suddenly, Last Summer, her tone ‘purely theatrical’, with a touch of melodrama – creating a heightened interiority. ‘I knew that the whole film spoke to the impact of Aids and the loss without saying anything [directly], and that somehow Peter's soon-disappearance was an element in what we were making.’

Peter Hujar's Day is released on 2 January 2026