Andrew Haigh: ​‘I’m a pret­ty melan­cholic person’

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.