EDGE Interview: Andrew Haigh Looks at the Past Through a Queer Lens in 'All of Us Strangers'

Haigh is no stranger to telling gay stories, both obvious and peripheral. In 2009 he made his first feature, "Greek Pete," which followed a London rent boy around for a year. His breakout hit, "Weekend," released in 2011, chronicled a 48-hour gay romance and is already considered an LGBTQ classic. The film starred Tom Cullen and Chris New.

"45 Years" followed in 2015, dissecting a marriage in crisis. Charlotte Rampling received her first Oscar nomination for her role opposite Tom Courtenay.

The quietly bold HBO series, "Looking" premiered in 2014. The cast included Jonathan Groff, Murray J. Bartlett, Frankie J. Alvarez and Russell Tovey. "Looking" presented an authentic peek at a gaggle of gay friends in modern-day San Francisco. The show only lasted 2 seasons but was given a movie-length wrap episode in 2016.

The highly underrated indie, "Lean on Pete," (2017) took a current but, also, prescient look at the ethical and moral divide in the U.S. Haigh also kept the enigmatic lead character's sexual orientation cryptic. And as played by the gifted Charlie Plummer, that ambiguity had a decidedly queer lean.

"The North Water," a 2021 miniseries based on the novel by Ian McGuire and created by Haigh, had its share of homoerotic scenes between leads Colin Farrell and Jack O'Connell.

"All of Us Strangers" is Haigh's most personal queer exploration. It's also his most haunting, mesmerizing and best film to date.

EDGE had the pleasure of a zoom chat with Haigh.

EDGE: Andrew, the relatability to so much of this film for me was so deep and almost profound. I've spoken to quite a few people queer and not queer, who feel the same. So, through specificity you've achieved universality.

Andrew Haigh: That's very nice. That's always kind of what your goal is. Nobody wants to see a story that is just about something very specific--that has nothing else to say. That doesn't work. You have to always ground it in something universal bubbling underneath. That's what I was trying to do. It's so nice that it does work for people and works for different types of people. That's important. I didn't want to make it just for one group of people, so I'm really pleased about that.

EDGE: Can you speak about taking the Yamada novel and making it your own?

Andrew Haigh: Yeah, so the central idea is the same. I love that central idea of meeting your parents again, it felt like it unlocked something in me, and it unlock this idea about being able to talk about your past and what the past has done to you and how it can be hard to leave it behind. I don't just mean in terms of grief. I mean, in terms of how we felt when we were young and childhood experience...

This idea that we are so formulated by the first 10, 15 years of our lives and we can never really escape that. I see that in everybody. I see in people who are 70... your childhood has defined you who you are as an adult. It's almost impossible to escape it. And so that felt like such an opportunity to be able to tell that story within this strange sort of ghost story, metaphysical love story, whatever you want to see this as.

EDGE: You're reminding me, Jane Fonda said when she was writing her autobiography that she needed to go back to examine in order to move forward. I feel like the older we get, the more we seem to look back.

Andrew Haigh: I'm 50 now and I feel like the last 10 years, I've really felt it. I think when you're young, you don't look back, obviously, there's nothing to look back on. But as you get older, you're like, Okay, I've got however many years I've got left, I need to go back, I need to recalibrate, I need to have a reunion with my own path, so I can understand why I am the way I am. So, it makes total sense to me. But you have to stare it in the face. And you have to throw yourself into it in order to find some kind of way to move forward. I think that's why the film does resonate because I feel like we all want that. And the idea that we could actually have a world in which you could physically meet your past, again, is quite powerful.

EDGE: This is like a 1980s question, but we keep boomeranging, don't we? Did you get any pushback wanting to tell a queer specific and Andrew Haigh-specific story?

Andrew Haigh: I'm Yeah, that's interesting because that's two different things, isn't it? I like that. When the producers came to me with the book, the minute I said I want to do this, but I have to make it queer, they were like, of course great, do it and make the story you want to make. And Searchlight and Film4 were the same--they were l excited by the idea that I had made it specifically queer. There was no pushback... And then specific for me, is again, something different. And I feel like luckily, I've been making films now for long enough that people understand what that film will be. And they wanted to support that. So, it felt good.

EDGE: How did you decide on the structure and tone of the film?

Andrew Haigh: That was probably the biggest struggle. I did a lot of versions of the script... to fill in the structure, which there is a sort of logic but then I throw myself away from the logic. There's lots of things that I'm trying to do at the same time. And in many ways, I wanted just to plot it emotionally. If all this is a manifestation of Adam's need, what does that mean for the plot?... What does that make the tone of the film feel? And especially when you're dealing with something that could be seen as ghosts, there's so much weird logic that gets put onto those stories. Can they eat? What happens to them when he's not there? Is he really in the house?... At one point during the writing, I was like, I've got to free myself from the eternal, endless questions that you can ask yourself about the plot, and just make it be a film about feeling and texture and emotion and let that drive it.

EDGE: Speaking to that, I was fascinated by the quiet moments, the details, the lingering close ups, I've seen a few films lately, where there was all that minutia, and I was just fucking bored. Here, I was never not mesmerized.

Andrew Haigh: That's nice, because it's so true, there's no point, putting the camera on someone's face if they're not giving you something that is interesting. It just doesn't work. It's pointless... like someone standing by the window, looking out to show that they're lonely only works if something's happening or you're feeling something. For me, it is about that fine tuning and calibrating in the edit, so you're not bored and you're giving the audience something new each time or something surprising or there's something underneath what you're giving... I feel like I've always been trying to find that in everything I do. It's finding that space for the character just to exist and for you to lean in and listen more and concentrate more. I feel like if you can do that you're enveloping the audience into the story and into the world. And if you do it right then it can work.

EDGE: And, of course, your cast assemblage helps because you get such authentic and deeply affecting performances from your actors, whether it's Tom and Chris, or Charlotte and Tom or Charlie Plummer. And Andrew, Paul, Claire and Jamie here. Can you tell me a little bit about your selection process?

Andrew Haigh: The selection process is always the thing that I spent so long thinking about it. If you get that wrong, it's not going to work. And it's all about trying to find people that make sense together. That's how I how I do it. And also trying to find the right kind of people, not just as actors, but as basic human beings. I spend a lot of time reading interviews that actors might have given, watching clips of them when they're being interviewed. And then I have to sit down with them and talk to them before I go forward. I want to know what it is that they care about in terms of the material. I want to know if they're going to be open enough as collaborators to share their own experience, and me share my experience, of life and relationships and family and all that kind of thing. Then if you can get that, I think you just develop a trust. And they know I'm not going to screw them over... I love that process. I love working with actors. I love letting them be what they want to be as much as what I want them to be. That's the trick, you've got to just let it come out of them and don't try and force it into some preconceived notion of what you need that performance to be.

EDGE: I've never heard another director say that he's watched interviews (as part of the casting process). You can get so much from somebody from that.

Andrew Haigh: So much. And, also, you can see what they're showing and what they're hiding. I think I'm relatively perceptive about people and it's what they're not showing that is the most interesting thing to me. You can see a certain vulnerability in people when they're doing interviews... I also think that what an actor chooses to do with their career says so much about the person they are. Like Charlotte in "45 Years" Her choices have been so fascinating in her career that I'm like, well, you're an interesting person. There were choices that you (made). It's so important. The work that someone does defines them in so many ways. So, you have to take that on board when you're trying to make a casting choice.

EDGE: And the chemistry between Andrew and Paul were off the charts, but Claire and Jamie, too. Did you make them all shag before? I'm joking.

Andrew Haigh: (laughs) Yes, it was a really awkward session. We were in a bad hotel, and we were like, come on, this is what we got to do. We've got to really force ourselves through this. (laughs)

EDGE: Have you ever been in a situation where the chemistry wasn't working? Not necessarily on this film? And what did you do?

Andrew Haigh: ...I've been really lucky. I do think the reason that chemistry sometimes doesn't work is that you just set it up wrong. And you don't nurture the right environment on set. That is so important. If you can nurture that environment so they don't spend time locked away in their own trailers not talking to each other, that you create an environment where people are getting to know each other. I think so much of my job on set is to understand what people need.... it can be quite exhausting. You're like a therapist, basically, for the whole of the shoot...But I think that's what you need to do as a director to make sure that everybody is comfortable enough to give the best performances.

EDGE: There's so much conversation about actors playing queer roles versus the best actor for the job. I'm curious where you land. And how did it relate to the casting of Andrew Scott?

Andrew Haigh: I did want someone that was that was queer to play Andrew's character, because there's so much nuance I'm trying to pick out genuine feeling that I needed that character to have. And I think any of us who are a certain age who grew up at a certain time, it's in our body. It's baked into our DNA. How we felt the fear, the terror, the worry--all that stuff. And I didn't want to have a straight actor playing that role. Because I'd have to then try to explain all that. You know what it's like, you sit down with a gay person, there's so much shared experience you don't even need to talk about...you go into a room full of queer people you're like, I can breathe a little bit easier. Most of the time, it depends if who you're in a room with, but most of the time...

But then outside of that, there's lots of choices that go into who you cast for the role. I understand the arguments about why it can only be a queer person playing a queer role, but I really do think it depends on the role. Look, I'm gay, I wrote it. The producer Graham was gay. You don't need everybody to be gay. You just need enough people who know what they're talking about to be part of that project.

EDGE: I wanted to talk about internalized homophobia because it's there in the film. It comes from the people who shape us, doesn't it? Parents, relatives, friends...

Andrew Haigh: ...So many of us have dealt with internalized homophobia for so long in our lives. We've grown up with it. Every day you were going to school and having to deal with it, having so much shame. Sometimes you can hear a younger generation sort of think, 'Oh, you guys are just full of self-loathing, you're fully shame, get over it! And you're like, hold on, we weren't born with self-loathing or shame, it was put upon us by the world we lived in. So, you can't condemn us for having those issues that were put upon us... It doesn't just go away when it's embedded in you growing up. And it is from our family. It's from everybody, the TV, the news... I think it's a life journey for a lot of queer people to shed that internalized homophobia. And for me, personally, it's been a journey. And the film is another step in that journey to shed that. It's a very complicated thing.

There's a line in the film when (Claire Foy) asks if Adam's lonely, and that it's a very lonely life. And he's like, If I am lonely, it's not because I'm gay. And he's right. But also, being gay in the world has made him lonely. So, it's not being gay that makes you lonely, it's being gay within the world that can make you lonely.

EDGE: "Lean on Pete." I adore that film. I really appreciated that you never felt the necessity to force a sexual orientation on Charlie. There was no obligatory girlfriend or hookup scene, I'm assuming that was deliberate.

Andrew Haigh: Absolutely. And it's so weird to me--in the original novel, there's no sense that that kid is queer--but there's something to me when I thought about Charlie that he felt like a queer kid. So, in some strange way, it felt like it was a story, as well, about a kid trying to find his way in the world and being torn between this freedom--this desire for freedom--but also a craving for stability. I feel like sometimes as queer people we're told we've got to just go and find our new family... well, no, sometimes we want the stability of our actual family. I felt like that spoke to America, as I see it, and even in a bigger way about this conflict between stability and freedom. America was born on this search for freedom, the individual, but that cannot be great for everybody... We don't all need to be let free in the world to fend for ourselves.

EDGE: There's a lot of anxiety and stress involved in filmmaking. You seem like a really well put together person, how do you deal with it and not go insane?

Andrew Haigh: It's a funny thing because I feel like I'm actually quite an anxious person. And I feel like during the process, there were so many times when the anxiety of making it is almost overwhelming. Why am I doing this? Why am I putting myself through this? And that's writing, shooting, is all different anxieties, editing, the fear that that project is now going to be in the world, and how is it going to be taken? Filmmakers. It's an exposing art form. Even if it's nothing to do with you, you're exposing something about yourself. I don't care what anyone says, you care about the reaction, you care how people take it. So, it can be a stressful thing. I mean, you can just ask my poor partner who has to deal with my stress and anxiety constantly at the end of each day. But there was something that still makes me want to do it. I can't imagine I would want to do it forever... I know some filmmakers keep working into their 70s and 80s. I can't imagine that will be me. I feel like there will be a time when it's like, you know what, that's enough now, I've done what I can do, and I need to have a quieter existence.

"All of Us Strangers" is in limited release at theaters. For more on the film,visit the film's website.

Watch the film's trailer: