“It was not the easiest day.” This is how the British filmmaker Andrew Haigh sums up the experience of deciding whether to come out to his father, again. “My dad went through a decline into dementia as I was writing and making the film,” he says of 2023’s emotional gut punch All of Us Strangers. “He has a memory of me, but he asked me if I had a wife. I suddenly felt like I was young again, about to have to come out to my dad.”
To raise the emotional stakes, this conversation happened the night before he was shooting a scene in which the film’s not-exactly-autobiographical protagonist, Adam, comes out to his own not-exactly- autobiographical father. “The feelings were absolutely the same: What happens if he’s going to be upset about it now? What am I going to feel like if he is upset about it?” You should also know that this suddenly just-about- exactly-autobiographical father-and-son scene, like much of the film, would be shot in Haigh’s actual childhood home just outside Croydon, England. “I didn’t even know how to comprehend it,” he says. “I’ve got some version of my dad sitting in the chair where my dad used to sit, in this house where I used to live that I haven’t been back to in 40 years, and I’ve just had this conversation with my dad.” He sighs. “It was unusual, let’s say.”
What’s equally unusual is that after his 2011 breakthrough, the beloved romantic drama Weekend, the polarizing HBO series Looking, and 45 Years, the film that earned legend Charlotte Rampling her first Academy Award nomination, it’s an intensely personal, not-exactly-autobiographical film like All of Us Strangers that’s clicking with audiences of all kinds. “I’m very glad that it’s having an emotional, cathartic effect,” says Haigh, 50, salt and pepper just starting to creep in at the temples. “But it’s almost a slight burden that people are taking it to heart.”
CHRIS HARRIS/SEARCHLIGHT PICTURES (ALL OF US STRANGERS)Haigh’s not-exactly-autobiographical film is anchored by beautiful performances from Paul Mescal (left) and Andrew Scott.
The film is a loose adaptation of Taichi Yamada’s 1987 novel Strangers, centering on Adam, a blocked and lonely and Haigh-adjacent 40-something writer played by Andrew Scott, living in a nearly empty London high-rise. As he begins a relationship with the man who seems to be the building’s only other tenant, Paul Mescal’s enigmatic and sexy Harry, Adam finds himself returning to his childhood home, where he encounters his parents, who were killed in a car accident when he was 11 years old. Alive. In their 30s, just as he’d last seen them. And ready to reconnect. “My parents split up when I was about the same age as Adam lost his parents in the story,” Haigh says. “So obviously from an autobiographical standpoint, there was something going on there.”
All of Us Strangers is anchored by four beautiful performances, particularly Andrew Scott’s heartbreaking turn as Adam. When Scott read the script, Haigh got what is by now a familiar reaction: “He was like, Oh my God, you’ve written a script about me.”
So the main character is not exactly Haigh, and the parents are not exactly his, and a major location only used to be his own home. But the soundtrack? “Adam’s music is the exact music of my youth,” he admits. “Pop music, when we’re young, allows us to express something that we’re not capable of expressing. We’re still children at that point, or we’re teenagers, and pop music allows us to express and understand deep emotions, painful emotions, emotions about love or grief or even emotions about politics. That’s the magic that good pop music can do.”
PHOTOGRAPHS BY AMELIA TROUBRIDGE“It’s not easy to say things to people that you love, to tell people how you feel, but secretly we all wish we could,” Andrew Haigh says. “The film delves into that idea: If we could in some metaphysical realm connect like this, wouldn’t that be an amazing thing?”
Haigh spared no effort getting the songs just right. “They are so integral to the story, to Adam’s emotional state. It’s set in the present, but Adam is being drawn back into some version of the past.” Specifically, Adam—and Haigh, and you—is drawn back to the mid-1980s, a period that might be the gayest era of pop music ever. “From 1981 to around 1986, British pop music was the queerest thing in the world: You had Culture Club and Wham! and Bronski Beat and the Communards, Erasure, Pet Shop Boys, Frankie Goes to Hollywood. Like: Was anyone not gay?”
Crucial to the film is “The Power of Love,” a very operatic 1984 ballad by the very gay Liverpool band Frankie Goes to Hollywood. “This is a song that was made when people were starting to die of AIDS,” Haigh says. “A time when people were losing their partners very, very young in horrendous circumstances. And here is a band who are saying love is gigantic, the possibility of it is gigantic.” Though it didn’t catch on in the States—it’s never too late to give it the “Running up That Hill” treatment—in the UK it was a number-one single.
But nothing gay could stay. “As you got deeper into the ’80s, as the AIDS epidemic really hit, homophobia came back with an absolute vengeance, and a lot of those bands couldn’t be as gay anymore.” Neither could people. Like Adam, Haigh had a hard time in primary school. “It’s fascinating, because I was bullied before I even knew that I was different,” he says. “The kids knew I was different before I did.” He continues, carefully, more genially than the weight of the subject matter suggests, not unlike an Adam would. “So many of us have gone through our teenage years, sometimes into our 20s and even longer, tense. You think the way to survive is to pretend that you’re not that person, and every fiber of your being is about that. We are braced against the world, braced against people knowing too much about us. And that’s a terrible way to go through the world.”
It’s also a condition we tend to face alone. As our understanding of ourselves grows, we develop a self we can’t disclose to our families, to the parents who had up until this point been at our side. It’s a schism, a breaking apart. A death of sorts. “For lots of people, especially queer people, it is a death within the family,” he says. “They existed as a certain thing for a certain amount of time, and then within themselves they had to shut down and lock things away, and that family unit as the way they saw it was destroyed, and they disappeared. A lot of queer people end up spending a lot of time thinking about our childhood and being nostalgic for something we never had.”
All Of Us Strangers contains a couple of sex scenes that, while not particularly explicit, are intimate in a way men are rarely allowed to be on film. “They feel honest,” Haigh says. “I don’t want to do a sex scene just to titillate. I want to see a scene where two people are navigating how to connect with each other.” At an early screening, about a dozen people left the theater the minute the sex scene happened, according to Haigh. “So we’re not quite as far forward as we think we are.” Still, to Haigh, that’s why a sex scene is necessary. “Because they show an audience, This is what people do, this is a way that people are intimate. If you don’t have them in this form, what do we see? There’s only porn.”
To do as Adam does in All of Us Strangers, to reconnect as a peer with the parents who either literally or figuratively died as we came of age, represents a bit of wish fulfillment. “It’s not easy to say things to people that you love, to tell people how you feel, but secretly we all wish we could,” Haigh says. “The film delves into that idea: If we could in some metaphysical realm connect like this, wouldn’t that be an amazing thing?” What Haigh has seen watching screenings with audiences indicates they agree. “It’s affecting different people for different reasons, but it’s connecting with people in a way that they really don’t want to talk afterwards. They want to go away and be by themselves. That was always my intention, that you would leave the cinema and be like, You know what? I’ve just got to think a little bit about some things—about myself, about my relationships, about my family, whatever that might be. I’m going to have a little look inside and I’m going to try and deal with it. “I wanted it to be a compassionate sort of hug, to say to people: ‘I know that things are really quite tough. They can be tough if you’ve grown up gay; they can be tough if you are grieving. Things are really, really fucking difficult.’ ”
This article appeared in the Winter 2023 issue of Esquire
SUBSCRIBE
Ultimately the question of whether Adam’s parents are ghosts or projections of pure longing and grief is beside the point. “I don’t believe in ghosts in a real sense,” Haigh says. “But as I’ve got older, I realize that the presence of the people who are no longer in my life still feels very, very strong. My grandma looked after me a lot when I was young, and she’s been dead for 20 years, but the love I feel now for her is exactly the same as I used to feel, or stronger. Really it’s just memory, but you don’t remember anything else like that. It sounds so cheesy, but I feel like love really is the thing that remains.”
Which draws us back to the conversation with his father, before the scene with the different version of the conversation with the different version of his father, because we have to know: Did Haigh come out to him? “I didn’t tell him,” he admits. “In the moment, I couldn’t tell him. And I’m not sure if that’s because I didn’t want him to be upset—not because of the gayness, but just not being able to understand it because of the situation that he’s in. But I think, to be truthful, it was my own fear.”
He wanted to reassure his father, though. “I said, ‘Oh, don’t worry, Dad, I’m fine.’ ” And he is. Haigh keeps his private life private, but he’s partnered to a fellow writer. “My dad said to me, ‘Well, as long as you found some love.’ My dad is a very sweet man, very much like the dad in the story, really, and he said that, so I know that’s what my dad cares about, and I have that in my life, so it’s good.
Another Look at Looking
HBO Max
After the success of his film Weekend, Haigh produced and was the lead writer-director on the HBO series Looking, about a group of gay men in San Francisco. The reaction was an eye-opener. “We felt quite battered from all sides about people’s reactions to the show,” Haigh says. “Some people absolutely adored it, some people viciously hated it, and that was a very fascinating thing to be in the middle of. It was a period of time when lots of change was happening very quickly, and there was a lot of debate about ‘What type of queer person are we going to be in the world right now?’ All of the characters were imperfect. They were making bad choices.”
Ultimately, while queer audiences were ready for representation, they may not have been ready for flawed representation. They still might not be. “Progress has happened so quickly, and I feel like we didn’t trust it. Still, we’re so happy that people like us that we don’t want to rock the boat. We don’t want them to change their mind,” Haigh says. “I think that infiltrated a lot of the discussion about Looking when it came out. “And some people just didn’t like the show. That’s fine, too.”
—D. H.
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7pr%2FQrqCrnV6YvK57xKernqqklravucSnq2iln6u2pr%2BOmmtucGVqhXN9jpqlnaqVrHqprcign2acmaeypMDOq2SapJxivKd51KxkrKyilruosdGsZg%3D%3D