Deadline’s Read the Screenplay series spotlighting the scripts behind the awards season’s most talked-about movies continues with the Sundance-premiering Peter Hujar’s Day from Janus Films. Written and directed by Ira Sachs, the film is a mesmerizing time warp into the heart of New York’s queer cultural history.
Starring Ben Whishaw as the pioneering photographer Peter Hujar and Rebecca Hall as the writer Linda Rosenkrantz, the movie is based on a rediscovered 1974 interview transcript. In this unique narrative experiment, Rosenkrantz asks Hujar to narrate the events of the previous day in minute, exhaustive detail, resulting in a film that illustrates the life of the creative mind through both the quotidian and the imaginative.
Janus and Sideshow acquired the film after its Sundance premiere and released it in early November. It has since scored five Independent Spirit Awards nominations including Best Feature and Best Director for Sachs. The screenplay was also nominated for a USC Scripter Award.
The narrative follows Hujar as he chronicles his waking hours from December 18, 1974, recounting everything from the moment he woke up until he went to sleep. This account is far from a dry recitation; it is filled with Hujar’s observations, honest self-assessments, and amusing dollops of gossip involving a wide circle of 1970s cultural luminaries. The film captures Hujar’s interactions and thoughts on figures such as Allen Ginsberg, Susan Sontag and Lauren Hutton, bringing the creative ferment and dodgy conditions of the era’s Lower East Side scene to life.
Sachs envisioned the project as an art project first and foremost, focusing on an intimate relationship between the camera and its subjects. Shot on 16mm film with a 4:3 aspect ratio, the production intentionally avoids a glossy, commercial look in favor of naturalistic, sometimes underexposed lighting that emphasizes simple elegance. This stylistic choice underscores a central theme of the film: the radical honesty of artists who produced work because they had to, rather than for commercial gain or bourgeois expectations.
Ultimately, Peter Hujar’s Day explores the preciousness of life’s fleeting, everyday moments and the perpetual struggle of art to capture them. The dialogue-driven film treats the small details of Hujar’s day — what he ate, where he traveled, and what his friends wore — as monumental events.
Read the screenplay below.