Andrew Haigh talks to Simon Brew about his extraordinary new movie, All Of Us Strangers…
A few days before our conversation, Andrew Haigh and his team had been in Old Billingsgate, London collecting seven gongs from the British Independent Film Awards (the BIFAs). Those prizes included Best Independent Film and Best Director, and at the time of writing, that awards success looks likely to carry on into the BAFTAs.
“It was a really good night,” he admits.
How does he reflect on winning awards, though?
“It’s nice to win things,” he says. “It helps people know about the film, and I kind of feel that’s what this is all about when you win these things. Maybe a few more people have heard about it now, and maybe a few more people will get to see it.”
The movie in question is the remarkable All Of Us Strangers, Haigh’s fifth feature film (although he effectively classifies it as his fourth in this chat), and his first since 2017’s Lean On Pete. Previous to that, he’d written and directed features such as Weekend and 45 Years too – but it’s this new movie that is widely being talked about as his best. No mean feat, that.
The movie stars Andrew Scott and Paul Mescal, alongside Claire Foy and Jamie Bell. It takes loose inspiration from Taichi Yamada’s 1987 novel Strangers, and on the surface, is about the relationship between Scott and Mescal. Not too far underneath, it’s – heck, here’s a sentence that doesn’t necessarily sell a movie – an exploration of grief. It’s remarkable how well it works: not that Andrew Haigh – who, as always, writes and directs – is entirely sure why it sometimes does.
“Even when you’re writing, when you write a scene and something clicks in it, you don’t know why it’s clicked. How suddenly you’ve found the right way to express an idea, or that you found the right words in a line of dialogue. You don’t know why it worked. It just happened to work.”
Still, I put it to Andrew Haigh that he’s more experienced now. Doesn’t that fine-tune instincts a little more? His first rodeo, after all, this is not.
“It’s really strange. I think when you start out making films, all you have is essentially your instincts, so in a strange sense, I actually asked less questions than I do now! Back then, I was like, I don’t really know what I’m doing, so I’ll just see what happens.”
Then, as a career evolves, the number of conversations increases, and the number of things you have to justify rises too. “When I made Weekend, there was one page of notes from the producers, and that’s it. The more money you have, it actually becomes a bigger conversation, and you go oh, I should doubt myself more!”
Still, Haigh does feel that he’s getting firmer with himself to close off elements of self-doubt.
“I have to trust that I know what I’m doing. Or even if I don’t know what I’m doing, I have to trust that it’s right for this film.”
The Quartet
The core cast of four in All Of Us Strangers put in superb work and the chemistry between them is really quite something Inevitably this didn’t happen overnight, but still it was only a few weeks before shooting that Andrew Haigh could get them all together
Paul Mescal and Andrew Scott only got together once or twice before filming got underway whilst Claire Foy and Jamie Bell didn’t get to properly meet Paul until they were on set. Jamie, Claire and Andrew were brought together in a London Ibis hotel to talk about the film though. Thing was, they were all a little nervous and Haigh decided to call a stop to it.
“I believed in my heart it would work as a concept and I didn’t want to have to try and play it out in a hotel room on the South Bank!”
Perfection
“I’m better at realising now that the film is an expression of where you are at the time of making that project. It doesn’t have to be perfect, it doesn’t have to be the best thing you’ve done in the world, but it’s where you are. It’s all you can possibly do. And that has to be enough, otherwise you drive yourself insane,” Haigh advises.
This is a consistent message, just in different clothes, to the one that Andrew Haigh puts across. He goes out of his way in our conversation to recognise the “amazing” British debut films we’ve seen over the last year or two: Aftersun, How To Have Sex, Scrapper, Rye Lane.
“But I imagine for an independent filmmaker starting out, I wonder if they’re thinking ‘does my first film have to be like that? Does my first film have to win lots of critics awards, or be at the BAFTAs?’ And you’re like, no! It takes time for some people. There’s so much insecurity that your film has to be a certain thing, and you’ve got to take that pressure off you.”
It does seem to be a boom time for incredible debuts from British filmmakers. But still, Haigh feels there has to be room for the movies that don’t get such acclaim.
“Sometimes the film can seem small and strange and maybe only ten people will see it. But maybe that’s all you need.”
He knows what he’s talking about here, too. When he premiered Weekend, he flew to Austin for the South By South West Festival (SXSW to its friends). He duly went along to his screening to discover, five minutes before it started, just one person there.
The attendance didn’t reach double figures by the time the credits started either, and Haigh feared his career was pretty much done.
But still: sometimes, it’s not the size of the audience, but who’s in it.
“The right people were in the room, someone bought the film, my career started,” he recalls. Even then, though, he’s open that there’s no straight line of progression. “There are moments when you’re struggling to get people to care about what you’re doing, and not everything people are going to love, and not everything is going to break through the bubble of conversation. It’s hard, but you have to find a way to battle through that.
“I’m nervous for all those filmmakers who make those first films that are so lauded. They’ve got to follow them up! They’ve got to keep making films! That’s a scary proposition”.
How did he feel himself when he made his own second film?
“I was very aware that if my second film didn’t do well, that could be the end of my career,” he admits. Thankfully, that next film – 45 Years – was very well received, and Haigh’s career continued. But he very much felt the pressure of the moment.
Booked
Haigh’s success across film and television has brought his career to a point where, sometimes, the material initially comes to him. That’s certainly the case with All Of Us Strangers. In this instance, producers Graham Broadbent and Sarah Harvey had optioned Taichi Yamada’s aforementioned novel – a tale with a ghost story at its heart – and thought Haigh might be the right person for it.
His response to the approach? To read the book, then do nothing for a couple of weeks until it had soaked in. The novel had been adapted for film before, in Japan, as the more traditional ghost story that it actually is. Haigh, though, wanted to take things in a different direction.
“I love a horror film, don’t get me wrong”, he tells me. “But I suppose just the idea of meeting your parents again, which is very much part of the novel. I just kept thinking about that. It wasn’t even so much about here’s a study of how you deal with grief, more the idea of a reunion with your own past.”
He warms to his topic.
“Like any reunion, you get to recalibrate, to look into your life again, to understand what your life has been. I found that really intriguing and interesting”.
That wasn’t the only ingredient in the script he’d fashion, though.
“I wanted to tell a queer story again, it’s been a while since I have in a film. To be able to tell a queer story again, and in relation to family, how queerness relates to family. I just kept unpicking that idea and trying to work out, okay, can I turn this into a queer story, which isn’t in the novel?”
It took some work, but he found his path forward. Even when he’d cracked that, though, it still took some time before he felt he should direct the feature.
I found that a little puzzling, for a man who’s written and directed each of his pictures, and who’s not written one for anyone else either (although he did direct for the TV show The OA, his sole directorial credit with someone else’s script). Still, Haigh insists that’s just his process.
“I shouldn’t say that to the producers,” he chuckles.
Clicking
He actually wrote the film during the 2020 lockdowns, but tells me that he’s written a lot of scripts that he’s decided in the past not to pursue. In the case of All Of Us Strangers: “I couldn’t quite get the script to be what I wanted it to be until pretty late in the day, and then just a few things sort of clicked within it.”
What things?
“I can’t even remember,” he laughs.
Still, once he committed to direct as well, All Of Us Strangers was going to become a very, very personal picture for Andrew Haigh. It’s fairly well known, for instance, that Haigh returned to his childhood home as a location for the film, shooting in the very house in which he was raised.
While he was in production on the film, it was full of the usual chaos that comes with making a movie. But how did he reflect afterwards?
Read more: All Of Us Strangers | A sort-of review with a star rating at the end
“It was such a strange experience being in that place,” he considers, and by the sounds of it, not for the first time. “When I was in [the house], it was about trying to work and make the film; I kept forgetting I was in my parents’ old bedroom or my old bedroom. It was afterwards, watching the assembly of that first cut… I essentially watched that first cut and pretty much had a breakdown.
“Usually when I watch a film, I’m like ‘oh my God this isn’t going to work’, because it’s terrifying when you watch the first cut. I still sort of felt that, but more than that, just everything from the shoot and how I felt being in that space again.”
Still, as the edit progressed, it proved to be a positive experience for him.
“I delved into my own past a lot,” he admitted. “I thought about where I used to live, and how I grew up, and stuff about my family, and my relationship with my parents and all kinds of things. [The edit] sort of helped me work through all of that.”
In touch
The response to the film has been an emotional one for early audiences, and that’s a heavy understatement. Haigh has spoken in the past about how he hates his first assemblies of films, and he’s not unique in the director’s union for that. But I do put to him that with a film as emotionally and tonally potentially fragile as All Of Us Strangers, there must be a moment where he gets a sense it’s working?
“I think I knew that something was happening, something was coming up in this film that was having an effect. Even during the shoot, I would come in and my editor had been working in the edit room, and he’d been crying for half an hour after working on a scene.”
Quite a moment? Haigh nods. “I was like, okay, there’s something in here.”
When Haigh too had such an emotional response to the assembly cut of his film, that amplified the feeling. And then showing that rough cut to the producers, he could see the film was landing.
“It was having an unusual effect on people,” he explained. “They weren’t quite sure about what they were feeling. It was a complicated emotional effect: that they were feeling sadness, but some kind of hopefulness. I knew that something there was working.”
It didn’t stop him from going through the usual terror ahead of the movie debuting at the Telluride Film Festival last August, before trundling its way through an assortment of other festivals in the back end of 2023. Acclaim followed minutes after each screening, too, and it’s fascinating to see what the movie’s wide release will open up. We’ve not got long to wait, with Fox Searchlight opening the film on over 100 screens in the UK just as this issue goes on sale. But the journey of the movie is far from done, with further awards attention pretty much a given.
“I’ve made things before that I can’t really get people to talk about,” Haigh reflects, as we chat about that. “And then sometimes you make something that people do.”
I can’t help but feel that the conversation about All Of Us Strangers will go on for a very long time…
