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denimbex1986 · 8 months

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'The British director on the power of crying and how he crafted his heartbreaking new film, All of Us Strangers.

Andrew Haigh is a veteran of film and television, having directed projects including Weekend, 45 Years, Looking and The North Water. His work is defined by an expert eye for detail and profound sensitivity – in All of Us Strangers, he excavates familial and queer trauma to create a powerful, tender, ghostly romance, starring Andrew Scott, Paul Mescal, Claire Foy and Jamie Bell.

LWLies: Every person I’ve spoken to about All of Us Strangers has had quite an intense emotional reaction to it. How aware of that potential are you when you’re making a film?

Haigh: It’s funny, because I used to get emotional writing the script, and then making a film, there are moments when you feel the emotion that’s coming back at you. I’m a pretty emotional person, I’m constantly crying. But then when I watched the assembly that Jonathan [Alberts, editor] had done, I was a wreck. And I know that he’d been a wreck editing it.

The more you work on a film, for months and months, you aren’t sure. You wonder if you’ve got rid of the emotion within the piece, if you’ve ruined it. When the film was finished, I hoped that people would have a reaction to it, and that it would feel like a genuine emotional reaction rather than a manipulative one.

I wanted to unpick the pain that we all carry around, in the hope that at the end, there is some catharsis. I find crying so cathartic. Every time I cry my eyes I feel so much better. I remember when Jonathan was cutting the dailies, and it was just one of the scenes about halfway through, of Harry and Adam in bed talking. I came in and Jonathan was just in floods. I said, “What’s the matter?!” It wasn’t a big emotional scene but he was a wreck.

I think that’s representative of how grief works, too. Sometimes it’s the small things that set you off, and it’s not always the things that make sense.

It’s always the little things, and it’s the same whether it’s grief or anything in your past. I think grief is not always just about someone you’ve lost, it’s about things that you’ve lost. It’s time that you’ve lost, it’s relationships that you’ve lost, it’s love affairs that you’ve lost. Our whole lives are essentially dealing with time moving on and us losing things. I wanted the film to be about that – so the mother is just as upset that she has lost the time with her son because those things are so fragile. I’m a pretty melancholic person, and so I often think about all of those little moments in life that have been so important and are now just distant memories. They are essentially ghosts.

It’s strange, I’m currently going through a lot of video footage from when I was a kid, so I’m having a very similar experience. It brings up so many strange emotions, excavating the past. Thinking about the people that aren’t in your life now.

Yeah – and the emotion that you have for someone once they are gone, whether that’s because they’ve died or they’re just not in your life..that emotion is still there. It’s strange how that works. Fear doesn’t last the same way. No other emotion does. But love is always there. Somehow it’s both a little bit cheesy and kind of magical at the same time. Love is the thing that remains.

Were you familiar with Taichi Yamada’s novel Strangers before you were approached about the project?

No, I hadn’t heard of it – Graham [Broadbent] and Sarah [Harvey], the producers, sent it to me. They knew me, and they asked what I was interested in doing, so I said “I’m kind of interested in doing some kind of ghost story.’ Even though this isn’t that exactly. But they sent me this very traditional ghost story, and the thing that I loved was this idea in the novel of meeting your parents again. I thought that was a fascinating way to start looking into love, grief, parental responsibility, all of those things. I very quickly knew I wanted to make the love affair between two men, and I didn’t want the ghosts in the story to be malevolent, in the way they sort of are in the book.

I felt like, Oh God, I can finally talk about queerness and family in a way that I think is very complicated, and do it within a way that these two things can be interconnected and wound up together. I feel like that is a thing about being queer. It is complicated within a family dynamic. It’s getting better every day, although not for everyone. But it was certainly so complicated for me, growing up.

I’m interested to know how much you thought about the connection between All of Us Strangers and your previous work, particularly 45 Years and Weekend, because there are overlapping themes.

Yeah, and I don’t mind it being sort of repeating, because I think my interests are always my interests. So the things I’m trying to articulate, I’m often going back on myself to try and find new ways to express something I’ve looked at before. I quite like that idea. But my biggest concern, actually, in the beginning, was that people were going to think this film is just Weekend with Ghosts. But even though I don’t think the film is that, everything that you do is always in relationship to what you’ve done before. For me anyway. It’s like picking up a conversation, there’s something that you’ve already sort of talked about, but you realise you want to talk about a little bit more, and in a slightly different way.

You’ve talked a little bit about bringing your own personal experience into the film. How do you find that process of weaving your own personal experience into an adaptation?

Yes, I felt like I had to. For some reason, I felt like I didn’t want to make the film unless it was personal. There was stuff I wanted to talk about in terms of queerness and how I feel about family and its complications, what it can mean to be a child and a parent. I wrote a lot during the pandemic – I kind of threw myself into trying to make it feel as close to something I understood as possible while making sure it wasn’t autobiographical. So there’s lots of me in it, but there’s also lots of me that isn’t in it. When I gave the script to people, they’d said “I feel like you’ve written this about me. I feel like you’ve told my life story.” Whether it’s about the loss of parents or the separation from family, or whether it’s about queerness…they’re taking something from it. And that was always what I hoped that it would feel like. It’s personal to me, but I want it to feel personal to everyone.

You have such a wonderfully curated collection of 80s music in All of Us Strangers. Was this directly plucked from your own experience?

Oh yeah, those choices were definitely personal. I love The Pet Shop Boys, I’ve loved them from their first album onwards back in 1985, and Frankie Goes To Hollywood. If you open the vinyl now, it’s so gay! You pull out this bit of paper, and they’re wearing like leather underwear and you’re like “How did this exist in 1983?” Those songs were so important to me. But pop music in general is a way for especially repressed British people to express themselves – the old pop songs especially expressed the things that we can’t say in very blatant terms. I think weirdly my politics was forged by pop music. I listen to a Housemartins song now, and I can tell they’re a bunch of socialists, you can feel it. Everything was passionate in those days, especially in pop music.

The film begins with a sunrise and ends with a night sky which lingers, and I loved that parallel. How early did you have that ending in your head?

I think it was there from the beginning if I’m honest – but I’m also aware that the ending won’t work for everybody. For me, it’s like I needed the ending to transcend a sense of reality. When I was a kid growing up I genuinely thought that I would never be able to find love. I couldn’t even see spending my life with another man as a possibility. And I wanted in the end to make love have this almost cosmic importance. Like the idea that love is so fundamentally important and enormous. Someone said something to me that I hadn’t quite realised – stars die billions of years ago, and the light is still there millions of years later. It’s like we said before; love is this thing that can be long gone, but it’s still there. And you can find it again. And again. And again. It’s always there.'

#Andrew Haigh #All of Us Strangers #Taichi Yamada #Strangers #Weekend #45 Years #The North Water #Looking #Andrew Scott #Paul Mescal #Claire Foy #Jamie Bell #Jonathan Alberts #Graham Broadbent #Sarah Harvey #The Housemartins #Pet Shop Boys #Frankie Goes to Hollywood

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denimbex1986 · 7 months

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"A generation of queer people mourns the childhood they never had." All of Us Strangers director Andrew Haigh spoke to The Guardian and Alex Needham about the year's saddest film .

Today, having left the cinema with red eyes, I know that what we didn't say will hurt. Because this film is not only about loneliness or loneliness, it is about parental love and the child's need for visibility, it is about tenderness, loss and the common end of all – stardust.

When Andrew Haigh was filming his new movie, All of Us Strangers, at his parents' old house in Croydon, something strange started happening. "I started having eczema again, which I haven't had since I was a kid," says the 50-year-old director. “I feel like there's a reason your body remembers the trauma. In a way things almost become embedded in our DNA and find ways to resurface," he adds.

In All of Us Strangers, the protagonist played with unflinching commitment and incredible empathy by Andrew Scott, Adam is a 46-year-old gay man who finds himself caught between what happened and what he never said.

Blocked and lonely, Adam is a screenwriter whose parents died in a car accident when he was 12 years old. Now an adult, he lives in a mysteriously empty block of flats in London. One night after a fire alarm, a younger man, Harry played by the reasonably up-and-coming Paul Mescal, comes drunk to his door and asks for his company. Adam rejects him. "Am I scaring you?" Harry asks him. "We don't have to do anything if you don't like me, but I have vampires at my door."

For Andrew Haigh this is also the most important scene in the film. Although I don't want to go into spoilers, after the screening, yes, this is the scene that defines the beginning, duration and end of a film that will leave a mark in time as a razor.

The film – which won best film and best director at the British Independent Film Awards in December – is a statue of the fragile, the kind that modern filmmaking tends to shy away from.

It's a love story, a ghost story, and a coming-of-age narrative that breaks space-time into small, sharp, pieces. In the process, her Adam suddenly finds himself in a universe where his parents are alive. This is also the missed opportunity to tell them who he is, what he is, to claim an acquaintance and reconciliation that had never happened.

Masterful exploration of loneliness and sadness, the relationship between children and their parents and a testament to the fact that time, in addition to healing, can magnify the wounds that grow stronger with us. The heart never forgets to hurt and this is reminded - the only condition of course is that you have a heart, which makes the work a risk in itself because empathy is ignored today.

A tender, aching portrayal of the insatiable human need for love and connection, Haigh's film is about people yearning to be understood for who they are, often in vain.

A knot in the stomach of a lost generation

Based on the Japanese novel Strangers by Taichi Yamada (who died a few months ago at the age of 89), Strangers Among Us, written by Haigh himself, was written during the pandemic, when we were all locked in cages, faced with what has happened and what could have been otherwise.

Haigh – whose previous films include The Weekend and 45 Years, and TV series Looking and The North Water are regarded as tender examples of good television that doesn't drown in clichés by pandering to the world – wanted to make the film as personal as possible. He made it. Adam's home is the director and screenwriter's home, the one he left when he was 'nine or 10' – following his own parents' painful divorce.

The reality he conveys on the screen is his own. The middle-aged gay man who was a young teenager in the late 80s when the AIDS crisis unleashed a wave of ferocious homophobia. "I wanted it to be very specific to a certain generation of gay people, my generation," says Haigh. "It was not an easy task. Growing up, I felt that if I was going to be gay I would have no future and the only other alternative was not to be gay – which of course couldn't happen. So I wanted to tell this story," he tells the Guardian.

All of Us Strangers is hard for many reasons. The hero constantly struggles with the lingering ghosts of a childhood that was never normal as he was torn apart not only by grief, but also by prejudice and hatred.

"There's a generation of queer people mourning the childhood they never had," says Haigh. “I think there's a sense of nostalgia for something we never had because we were tortured so much. It's something like grief. A feeling that dissipates, but is always there in many different ways. It's like a knot in your stomach," he adds.

Much of the emotional power of All Us Strangers comes from the brutally repressed Adam trying to dissolve his feelings of shame and isolation in order to be seen and loved for who he really is. To this end, he takes advantage of the opportunity, denied him by their deaths, to come out to his mom and dad, separately. His mum is shocked – "Isn't it a very lonely life?" – and worried about AIDS. His dad, not unkindly, says: "We always knew you were a bit of a tutti-frutti."

"It is very difficult to move forward in life if you feel that you are not understood. And if they don't understand you, you feel like you're alone," says the director.

"It doesn't matter, as long as you find love"

In one scene in the film Adam asks his father why he never came to his room to comfort him when he heard him crying after being bullied at school. Haigh had been a victim of bullying in his school days, common memories for many.

"I was about nine and the kids around me knew something was different about me - before I even realized it myself," he says. “If you're queer and a kid, you don't want to tell your parents that you're being bullied because they're going to worry, and that's the last thing you want. Being queer in a family is sometimes the hardest thing because you're not like the others, you have a secret," he says.

Haigh told his own parents when he was 20 years old. His father now suffers from dementia and entered a nursing home during the filming of All of Us Strangers. Visiting one weekend, the director discovered that his father no longer remembered that his son was gay.

"He asked me if I was married and if I had a wife. Before this happened my father knew everything about me, he had accepted it beautifully. I suddenly found myself having the same fear I had when I was in my 20s, of having to re-introduce myself up front, and I realized I couldn't because I didn't want to upset him. But in the end, after a little silence, he said to me: 'Well, it doesn't matter, as long as you find love.' I felt so good about my father and his words. He just understood what the important thing was, and in many ways it spoke to exactly what the film was about."

The film is also based on Haigh's relationship with his own children, who are 10 and 12 years old. "They don't live with me but when I'm with them and I'm their parent, I'm always worried. Am I doing the right thing? Am I saying the right thing? I help them; As I got older, I realized that you don't necessarily need a parent to give you advice. You don't need them to find solutions for things that you can sometimes solve on your own."

Beyond meeting a child's needs, there's something about being a queer parent that makes you wonder how you and your children will fit into the larger society, Haigh points out. “Do we have a new code? Do we have a different way of being a family because we don't have a certain pattern? I know a lot of queer people who have kids and they all have the same question. Are we trying to be what our parents were to us or are we trying to be something else?'

Pop gave hope and momentum

Powered by 80s music production, All of Us Strangers uses iconic hits from the decade such as Frankie Goes to Hollywood's The Power of Love, Fine Young Cannibals' Johnny Come Home and Housemartins' Build, tracks heard by Adam when he travels back to his childhood. The musical pieces also become an integral part of the supernatural world that the hero visits to make peace with the loss of his parents and all that he never got to share with them.

"Paul Heaton (Housemartins) and Roland Gift (Fine Young Cannibals) are not queer artists, but they spoke to me as such," says Haigh. "I'm sure my political views were shaped by the times I listened to the Housemartins" – who were self-confessed socialists during the Thatcher government. “Pop music was so important – it gave me hope as a kid. I used to sing The Power of Love to myself in my bedroom, not understanding anything about myself at the time, but knowing that I longed for something and believed that something could be done. When I put that song in the film, I was thinking that my childhood self would be really amazed at what I'm doing now."

For Haigh, being LGBT does not necessarily mean alienation. “I know many young gay people who do not feel alone and alienated. But I also know people close to me, younger than me, who have found it very difficult to integrate into a society that sees them as different," he says.

“So I don't want to pretend that everything is great. But it's important to me to make it clear that these two heroes aren't alone because they're gay – they're alone because the world has made them feel different. There are many reasons that can gently slide you into loneliness and if you can't find something to get you out of it, you might stop caring about yourself, like Harry," she adds.

What ghost is really haunting you?

"I saw the film as a spiral and I let myself into it," says Haigh.

In one scene Adam starts to have a fever, which you don't explain further in the film. But what you're explaining is that Adam is running a fever after his mother brings up AIDS and her fears about this disease which in the 80s was an LGBTQ-only affair - or at least that's the narrative they wanted to sell the systemic media and their neoliberal leaders see Thatse and Reagan.

"I think all of us gay men of that generation know that every time we sweated a little more after casual sex with other people, we were suddenly terrified that we might have HIV," says Haigh. “A swollen gland wasn't just a swollen gland. I wanted to talk about it. To show that AIDS is another fear that Adam has buried. I'm telling a ghost story – what is it that haunts him?'

The end of the film is painfully bittersweet. For some it is romantic and hopeful, for others it is a finale of crushing sadness. "More than anything else, I want you to walk out of the theater and carry this film with you," Haigh says of All Of Us Strangers, which the LA Times (and countless other media and institutions, but not the British BAFTAs they snubbed the movie shockingly much) named it the best movie of 2023.

“We are all children, many of us are parents, many of us are in relationships or not finding love. Look, I want 15-year-olds to see this movie, not just people our age. If I had seen this movie when I was a teenager, it probably would have changed me," says Haigh.

Strangers Among Us has one more piece of advice for everyone. When vampires are at the door, a hug and a caress exorcises them, remember that.'

#All of Us Strangers #Andrew Haigh #Andrew Scott #Paul Mescal #Strangers #Taichi Yamada #The Housemartins #Frankie Goes to Hollywood #BAFTAs #British Independent Film Awards #The North Water #Weekend #45 Years #Fine Young Cannibals #Johnny Come Home #The Power of Love #Looking #Build

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