I interviewed Ira Sachs, director and co-writer of Married Life, for the Seattle P-I in the “A Moment With” format. I only had the opportunity to use highlights from the 20-minute phone interview in that piece, so here is the complete interview.

What was it about the book, “Five Roundabouts to Heaven,” that made you say: “This is my next project.”?

I’ve always been interested in psychological stories and character-driven stories. Right before I started working on this, I’d seen a lot of Joan Crawford movies and Bette Davis movies and Barbara Stanwyck movies and Fred MacMurray movies, a kind of old-fashioned storytelling that was usually over-the-top and larger-than-life in terms of the plot, but something about them really resonated for me personally. So I decided that’s what I wanted to do, I wanted to make one of those kinds of films without being a retro film. I just liked the way those stories were told. I spent a summer reading old pulp mysteries. People often say that you can make a movie out of a pulp fiction better than a movie out of a classic and I think there is some reason for that because there’s something more you can play with. And what I liked about this book particularly was that in the course of the story, when you learn more about each of the characters, you realize that, at its heart, it’s a really humanist story about relationships. Even though it’s a genre film, it’s also a humanist film. What I thought was quite true about the emotional stakes of these people within their marriages, even again if it’s over the top in its structure, it resonated for me personally within my own relationships.

I’d like to talk about that balance. In between the beats of the genre elements is an ongoing conversation about love and desire and marriage and relationships and what makes people happy in relationships.

That was certainly my intention and I think that what we tried to do, once we had a really good story, then the texture within that. Partially, I was lucky with my cast, a cast that gave a nuanced, emotional, really rich version of these lives that adds a better dimension. And I think in a way that’s the tension in the film, because it is a genre film on some level and yet it’s told in a naturalistic fashion.

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“This is my friend Harry Allen. He’s married. He likes his wife. It can happen.”

Harry (Chris Cooper) appears to be the very model of success in 1949 America: a corporate office, a long, healthy marriage to a practical (and well preserved) woman (Patricia Clarkson), a nice home, and a gorgeous mistress (Rachel McAdams as a platinum blond).

But Harry wants to be “truly happy,” he explains to his best friend Richard (Pierce Brosnan, our sardonic narrator). In the course of pursuing his happiness, it becomes clear to him that he must murder his wife. Not for money or spite, mind you. Harry loves Pat too much to put her through the pain of a divorce. How thoughtful.

The plot of Married Life, based on the British fifties-era pulp thriller “Five Roundabouts to Heaven” and set in 1949 Seattle (though the city is never actually identified, to the best of my recall), sounds like a seedy Hollywood B&W crime melodrama of cheating husbands and seductive sirens and the comforts of suburban life corrupted by lust and greed. Director Ira Sachs, who shoots the film in cool sepia tones that evoke the period and suggest lives lived in restraint and self-suppression, as if bold colors would shock them out of their comfort zone, plays it as a gentle comedy of manners. Or perhaps comedy is a misleading label. Call it an irony.

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I talked to director Ira Sachs Married Life, his third and most recent feature film, for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. The piece is now live online. Here are few clips:

On adapting a pulp novel:

People often say that you can make a movie out of a pulp fiction better than a movie out of a classic and I think there is some reason for that because there’s something more you can play with. I think in a way that’s the tension in the film, because it is a genre film on some level and yet it’s told in a naturalistic fashion.

On setting the tone:

The credits sequence is a playful animated sequence. I wanted to signal to the audience very early on that what takes place following might be very serious to the characters, but that the audience didn’t need to take it too seriously.

On creating the period:

We wanted to use the ’40s as if they were today because we wanted the characters to seem as familiar as possible within their dilemmas. There’s that old Faulkner line, “The past isn’t past, it isn’t even over yet.” I think that that’s true. I connected to these characters as if they were myself, my parents, my grandparents. They’re people I know.

Read the complete feature here.

My review of the film will run in the Friday edition of the Seattle P-I. I’ll feature it in my blog when it goes online Thursday night.

I’ll be publishing my complete interview with Ira Sachs later this weekend.