From KCRW, Santa Monica and KCRW.com, this is The Treatment.

Welcome to The Treatment. I'm Elvis Mitchell.

Ira Sax has made movies that are about about, as a writer-director,

kind of the difficulty of leading a life of domesticity and how things intrude on that.

We go from the Delta to 40 Shades to Blue to Married Life, to keep the lights on.

They all in one way or another deal with that. His newest film, Love is Strange, is an entirely different look at that.

I'm talking to the writer-director, Ira Sachs, and one of the stars was film, Alfred Molyne,

first of all, good to have you back. Thank you. Ira, that idea of people trying to maintain

domesticity and this elusive force in your work, where does that come from?

From life.

You know, I think my films have always been about intimacy.

And for me, getting to the point that I could actually personally have an intimate relationship that had the potential to not destroy everyone involved took a lot of time.

And I think Love is Strange really reflects an optimism that I feel about love that I feel didn't come to me until I was in my 40s

and in middle age, really. And I think that has a lot to do with the fact that I grew up as a gay man in a certain generation, where we learned about intimacy tied directly to shame and self-hatred.

I keep talking about nothing but a man, which I think is a beautiful film by Michael Romer, and I think it really speaks better than anything about how culture can affect personal lives and how politics actually inflict their pain on relationships and people.

In that film, this young couple in love, African-American couple, their relationship is so beautiful

at the start and the end, it's so corrosive, and it's really culture, which creates that

corrosion.

But also, too, I mean, even in this, I mean, the idea of that joining ends up destroying

this couple, that legal sanctified joining ends up trying them apart.

I don't agree with that, because the couple is never torn up.

They're torn about physically.

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