| The Rescuer | Dialogue |
BRIEF ENCOUNTERS
ALL OF US STRANGERS Andrew Haigh’s festival favourite is a weapons-grade weepie.
I wasn’t interested in telling a traditional ghost story,’ says Andrew Haigh (Weekend, 45 Years). Unlike the 1987 Japanese novel that it adapts, Haigh’s latest film, All of Us Strangers, is anything but traditional.
Instead, it takes the novel’s central conceit – what if you could meet your deceased parents again? – as the inspiration for a tender tale about love, acceptance and the lingering effects of grief.
‘I’d been looking to tell a story that balanced familial love and romantic love, and showed how intertwined they were,’ Haigh tells Teasers. ‘This offered that chance because there could be conversations between characters that, in a regular drama, you would not be able to have.’
Andrew Scott stars as Adam, a lonely screenwriter living in an almost empty London tower block with only one neighbour – Paul Mescal’s Harry. The pair start a romantic relationship by night, while during the day Adam visits his childhood home where his longgone parents (Claire Foy and Jamie Bell) have inexplicably returned.
Exactly how this is happening is unimportant. ‘I love the idea that it is just an expression of something,’ says Haigh, who instead saw an opportunity to tell a deeply personal story. Not only is Adam a filmmaker and 40-something gay man, like Haigh, but the writer-director shot the film in his own childhood home. ‘I found that both terrifying and exciting,’ says Haigh, who wanted to push himself into the same vulnerable place he required of his cast.
‘I’m really pleased that it’s working for lots of different people’
ANDREW HAIGH
In casting Adam, for example, it was important to Haigh that the actor share a similar background to himself and, by extension, the character. ‘There is so much nuance to Adam’s sexuality having grown up in the 80s and 90s,’ Haigh notes. ‘I felt to understand that experience, I needed someone that had gone through it. Andrew was perfect.’
Haigh cast Mescal as the younger, more sexually fluid Harry in the midst of his meteoric rise, the trio hitting it off after seeing The Rolling Stones together at Hyde Park. But even trickier to cast were mum and dad, who had to be believable parents to an older actor. ‘I knew how I wanted the mother to feel: loving; a bit spiky,’ Haigh says. ‘And for the dad to be a bit of a doofus, but soft and quite sensitive. Claire and Jamie just fully embodied that.’
With its multifaceted exploration of loving relationships, Haigh is satisfied that early audiences are taking different, equally meaningful things away from the film. ‘For people that have lost parents – they seem to find it speaks to their own sense of loss,’ says Haigh. ‘And then people who are gay take something else from the story. So I’m really pleased that it’s working for lots of different people.’
ALL OF US STRANGERS OPENS IN CINEMAS ON 26 JANUARY 2024.