‘All of Us Strangers’ Director Andrew Haigh Breaks Down His Deeply Personal Gay Drama
26.10.2023 - 19:35
/ variety.com
Brent Lang Executive Editor Andrew Haigh has described “All of Us Strangers,” a spectral meditation on love and loneliness, as a deeply personal film, one infused with his own feelings about parents and relationships. That’s not unique — write what you know is an adage for a reason. But “All of Us Strangers” may be one of the only major movies to have been shot in the childhood home of its creator.
Shortly before production commenced, Haigh knocked on the door of the house he lived in until he was 7 or 8 years old and discovered that little had changed in the ensuing decades. “The owner agreed to let us film there,” Haigh says. “He hadn’t really decorated it in 30 years, so all these memories came flooding back.
And then we used my old photos to make it look almost exactly as it had. It was so emotional for me, but it was also cathartic. It was a chance to re-approach my past.” That’s exactly what Adam (Andrew Scott), a gay man in his 40s living a life of quiet desperation in a starkly modern London apartment building, undergoes in “All of Us Strangers.” Although his catharsis has a supernatural element.
One night, he returns to his old neighborhood to find his parents (Claire Foy and Jamie Bell) alive and well — even though they died in their 30s when Adam was a child. He keeps coming back, hoping to better understand how their loss shaped the person he became. “I can relate to what he’s feeling,” Haigh says.
“The child in us is essentially always there and stuff that you carry around as a kid. You think you’ve grown out of it, but it can bubble over, affecting how we live.” There were important differences in Haigh’s story and that of his protagonist. Most notably, the writer and director’s father and mother are still
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