How do you shoot a whole movie in one apartment? Director Ira Sachs knows

Ira Sachs couldn’t sleep. He was busy thinking about how he would shoot his next movie, which was set in a single apartment.

The idea to make a “bottle movie” came to Sachs around four years ago when he was gearing up to shoot the romantic drama “Passages.” He ran across an interview transcript between Peter Hujar, a photographer Sachs had long admired, and writer Linda Rosenkrantz, in which the two gabbed in her Manhattan apartment in 1974.

For Sachs, who typically directs muted, human dramas, the unwieldy relationships and relatively large scale of 2023’s “Passages” had him looking for a smaller project to do next. He kicked around the idea of adapting the interview with Hujar but knew that filming in just one space was a high-stakes gambit.

“It felt like a great risk, but I think w