Why Ben Whishaw had 55 pages of dialogue to memorize in new movie while co-lead Rebecca Hall had only 3

Normally, if an actor has 55 pages of dialogue in a film while his female counterpart has only three, there's clearly a wonky gender dynamic at play.

But that is not the case with Peter Hujar's Day, the new film from Ira Sachs which premiered at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival on Monday. The film is a re-creation of a conversation between Hujar (Ben Whishaw) and his close friend, Linda Rosenkrantz (Rebecca Hall), using the word-for-word transcript of the real individuals' chat.

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The transcript comes from a 1974 conversation between the two, in which Rosenkrantz asked Hujar, a photographer, to recount everything he did the previous day. The idea was that each of these talks with her artist friends would eventually become a book, though that was unrealized. However, the transcript, previously believed to be lost, was found in New York's Morgan Library in 2019 and pieces of it were published in a 2021 book.

Sachs happened upon the book while he was making his previous film Passages and immediately wanted to bring it to the screen. "It felt like a great window into a time and a friendship," Sachs said in a post-screening Q&A. "Ben [Whishaw] and I share an interest in a lot of things, including this history and Peter's work and people who are trying things differently, so I thought we could take a risk together on this."

To get the rights to embark on this project, Sachs reached out to Rosenkrantz on Instagram. "I immediately felt that he was the right person to do it," Rosenkrantz told the Sundance audience. "We really hit it off."

With right secured, then came the revelation that Whishaw would have to memorize 55 pages of dialogue for the film, while Hall would have just three. The discrepancy is inherent to the circumstances of the conversation at the heart of the film: Hujar is recounting his day as best as he can while Rosenkrantz listens with minimal interjections. "Their tasks were very different," noted Sachs.

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"If the task is to listen, if you've got something interesting to look at and listen to, it does the work for you," Hall told the audience.

For Whishaw, however, the task was monumental and unlike any role he had ever prepared for previously. "It was really difficult to learn it," he said. "I showed it to a friend of mine who's a musician and she was like, 'F---, this is impossible, this is like trying to learn someone else's improvisation,' which is a bit what it was like because it's not a written thing."

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He clarified, "It is written down, but it's full of all of the strangenesses of speech and the way people speak. It became very fascinating to learn, although very difficult."

Initially, Sachs wasn't sure if he'd make a short or a traditional feature film, but he explained that Whishaw's alacrity and insight into the language made him realize it needed to be a feature. "The fact that Ben makes every word valuable was not something I could know beforehand," the director reflected. "Every word counts and he conveys that, so there is an interest that seemed complete to me, and I wanted to see it through."

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And while Hall speaks so little as Rosenkrantz, it doesn't mean she's absent from the story. Her active listening and observation make the film a true two-hander, as we learn just as much from her quiet performance as Whishaw's more verbose take. "There's this other story that developed between production and editing," Sachs noted. "Which is the emotional story between these two friends which seemed very, very specific."

Peter Hujar's Day does not yet have a distributor or release date.

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