Ira Sachs has been making gay films for over 30 years but “Passages,” a gay, bi and hetero drama, marks the first time he’s been slapped with an NC-17 rating.

His film, which premiered at Sundance last January, is now going out unrated, uncut.

“Passages,” set in cosmopolitan Paris, stars three of Europe’s most notable new stars – Germany’s Franz Rogowski, England’s out gay actor Ben Whishaw and France’s Adèle Exarchopoulos, best known for the sexually provocative “Blue is the Warmest Color.”

When Rogowski’s director impulsively begins an affair with Exarchopoulos’s grade school teacher that changes everything for each of them. It leads to recriminations, lies and an explosive coupling between the two men that led to the rating.

It all began, Sachs, 57, said in a Zoom interview, “During the pandemic. I craved a kind of cinema, as well as a kind of experience, that I really missed. And that was one of intimacy and passion.

“I wanted to have experiences and I wanted to use cinema to create experiences for others in a really personal and raw and hopefully beautiful way.

“I wanted beauty, to be honest, and I wanted pleasure,” he confessed. He thought about “raw” films, “That made me feel connected to the characters in a unique way. So I set out to try to make a film like that.

“I also was living under Donald Trump, and I felt to some extent, oppressed by the presence of a man with such power. So the film in a way is a kind of conversation with a man like that. An effort in a certain way to puncture his position and to show his vulnerability.”

If one is bisexual, can they really be a gay couple?

“I think it’s a generational shift,” Sachs said. “It’s like the film I wrote was a film of identity. The film I made was a film of fluidity. That’s the difference between me at 57 and these actors in their 30s. The boundaries are less rigid for a younger generation. In that way the film could almost be called ‘post queer.’ There’s a level on which it’s primarily human.”

No intimacy coordinator was required.  “I asked each actor before we began, ‘What are the boundaries?’ Once I know those boundaries they were never discussed again.

“There is a process of setting up an environment in which the actors feel safe, and also feel free enough to discover certain unexpected moments that are part of intimacy.

“The actors knew the script and they signed on because they want to be exploring the same questions and stories that I do, which are stories of relationships and intimacy, sexuality and desire.”