CaitrĂona Balfe and Ebon Moss-Bachrach in âA Long Winter.â
Andrew Haigh Calls His New Film His Version of âThe Revenantâ â Allow Him to Explain (First Look)
The director of queer favorites like âLookingâ and âAll of Us Strangersâ returns with âA Long Winter,â a rich character study shot deep in the wilderness. Here he speaks about the film, which he calls an âendpointâ in his career thus far, for the first time.
Following the release of his latest film, All of Us Strangers, Andrew Haigh found himself presented with options like never before. The British director, previously best known for gay cult faves like his breakout feature Weekend and HBOâs Looking, met widespread critical acclaim for the wrenching queer drama starring Andrew Scott, leading to his first BAFTA nominations for best screenplay and directing. It became his highest-grossing movie ever at the box office, pushing past $20 million globally. The opportunity to scale up, beyond the intimate character studies with which heâd made his name, couldnât be ignored.
âWhen you have a thing that breaks through a little bit, you have to take advantage of it. It does make you take a lot more meetings afterwards, with lots of people sending you things â which is both good and then slightly exhausting,â Haigh says. âPart of me was like, âShould I go bigger? I could now go and do this thing over here thatâs big and shiny and might get me more visibility.â But I donât necessarily need lots of visibility. The slightly more success you get, the harder it becomes to make those choices.â
And so Haigh looked inward. He did not go bigger. Instead, he turned toward the project heâd been trying to make for nearly 20 years â as tender, nuanced and subtle as anything in his oeuvre. A Long Winter feels, first and foremost, like an Andrew Haigh film.
Now 53, Haigh first read Colm TĂłibĂnâs short story âA Long Winterâ right around its 2006 publication, before heâd helmed a single movie. The tale follows 20-something Miquel, who lives with his father in a remote snowy village. His brother has just left on military service and his mother has suddenly walked out on the family. Miquel desperately searches for her in the freezing conditions, plumbing new depths of self-discovery in the process.
âWithin that story was everything I wanted to make films about â I remember reading it and thinking, âThis is the perfect manifestation of what I care about,ââ Haigh says. This was roughly two decades ago. Then an aspiring filmmaker, Haigh convinced the prize-winning Irish author to grant him the rights to âA Long Winter.â As he built his career, he tried to make the movie, over and over â initially working off of a script set in Spain, as the original text was. âNo one wanted to make it,â Haigh says. âI made it harder because I canât speak Spanish and yet I was saying, âI want to shoot it in Spain.â
Fred Hechinger in âA Long Winter.â
And so the moment finally arrived, in the wake of Strangersâ lauded run and with a revamped adaptation. Haighâs ultimate film of A Long Winter is slated to screen at the Toronto and New York film festivals before hitting theaters via MUBI later this year. Itâs set deep in the Rockies of â50s Colorado, with young Mike (Fred Hechinger) navigating a complex relationship with his lonely father, Lester (Ebon Moss-Bachrach), after his brother (Kit Connor) leaves for Korea and his mother (CaitrĂona Balfe) disappears, running away from a life sheâd found unbearably isolating.
âIf you look at all of the movies Iâve made, there are these themes bubbling under: longing and trying to deal with loss and trying to understand who you are in the world and how to fit into the world that doesnât make sense to you,â Haigh says. âThose themes are very inherent in the story, but told in a [similar] way to what Iâve always tried to do with my filmmaking: Excavate the complicated emotions beneath the surface and find a way to get them onto the screen.â
Itâs a visually ambitious film for Haigh, the haunting elements of Strangers extending to this rich family portrait. âItâs not a big movie, but we had big ambitions,â the director says. âItâs definitely moving away from the more naturalistic, realistic base that some of my earlier work lived in and finding this more metaphorical place.â As heâs committed to doing lately, Haigh shot on film â âThere was no debate about that,â he says â and worked with D.P. AndrĂ© Turpin to execute a more subjective cinematic style.
âThe camera follows the awakening of Mike. If you look at the film, itâs a lot more static at the beginning and it starts to breathe,â Haigh says. âThe camera starts to open up. It starts to move independently. It starts to move without a character leading it across the frame. To me, the film was about breathing differently. It was about opening your eyes differently.â
A Long Winter shot up in Canada, a little over an hour outside of Calgary â Colorado was âtoo expensive,â Haigh concedes â and you can feel the intensity of the elements. The family home was an original construction in the woods, overseen by production designer Emmanuel FrĂ©chette, following an extensive location scout. âI can stand in the kitchen window and I can look out and see the mountains â theyâre above me, theyâre below me,â Haigh says. âItâs still there now six months later, somewhere on the mountainside, surviving the extremes.
âWe built that house up on the mountain, inside and out, no studio work, all up in 100-mile-hour winds and the snow,â Haigh continues. âItâs where they shot The Revenant, actually. So this is my version of The Revenant â a slightly more delicate version.â
Fred Hechinger and Ebon Moss-Bachrach in âA Long Winter.â
Haigh has been working with his casting director Carmen Cuba for well over a decade, going back to Looking. For the past several years, Cuba has been telling him to cast Hechinger in something. âSince seeing him in The White Lotusâs first season â from that day onward itâs been, âYouâve got to work with Fred,ââ Haigh says. âShe adores him, and I understand why. She sees him as a young, Dustin Hoffman-type of actor.â
Several actors put themselves on tape for the part of Mike, and Hechinger won the lead role. His moving, intricate performance serves as a showcase of what he can do as a lead, following auspicious supporting turns in films like Thelma and Nickel Boys. âIf you watch him at the beginning of the film and see him at the end, he even looks like a different person,â Haigh says. âItâs not an easy performance.â
Itâs the consistent hallmark of Haighâs work â the landscape for his characters to grow and change feels immense, even as the script hews to the tighter conventions of real life. Mike begins the film feeling relatively comfortable in the familyâs isolated cabin bubble, if only because what lies beyond it feels so alien. His contentment is rocked by his motherâs absence â her yearning for something better. He must now look his devastated father in the eye each morning, seeing all of his pain and resentments and fears. He must consider what led his mother to risk her death to find something different for herself. And he must confront what he himself wants â particularly when a mysterious young man (Reservation Dogsâ DâPharaoh Woon-A-Tai) begins living with the family to help out around the house.
As in TĂłibĂnâs story, Mike is queer â but Haigh, known for his vividly realistic sex scenes from Weekend through to Strangers, communicates this onscreen with a surprising, impressionistic approach.
âWhat I love about Mike, and especially how Fred plays him, is heâs this sensitive soul within this world that isnât sensitive â his sexuality for me is wrapped up in a different way of feeling about the world and seeing the world,â Haigh says. âHe needs someone to understand how he sees the world. Iâve put sex in a lot of the films that Iâve done, and I wanted this to be different. Sometimes queerness is framed only within sexual desire and not within something else. But obviously when you are queer, you know that itâs not just about sexual desire itself. Itâs more than that.â
Hechinger in âA Long Winter.â
In these subtle but intent pushes, Haigh arrived at what felt like the ending of a chapter in his life and career. âI think of this film as a bookend to a lot of things Iâve been exploring over the last 15 years of making films,â he says. âAs Iâve grown up and my life has changed â all of these stories that have been me trying to understand my own background, my life, my childhood, absences in my own life and certain losses â Iâve come to terms with a lot. So I feel like this is an endpoint.â
As for what his next chapter might look like? Haigh politely demurs with a laugh: âWell, letâs see what happens.â
Just donât expect his next era to go the way of tentpoles and blockbusters. Haigh can claim the rare feat of making modestly budgeted, emotionally driven, critically hailed dramas at a steady clip for the entirety of his career â during which time the very future of independent film has been put under existential threat. It has never been easy for Haigh to get his movies made. But this moment, he concedes, feels different â scarier than ever.
âIt is a very, very challenging time, and everything is much more expensive. Making a film is so much more expensive than it used to be,â he says. âMy first movie, I made it for $65,000. 45 Years was only $1.5 million. You couldnât make that film now for $1.5 million â it would cost so much more. When I speak to younger filmmakers, itâs a terrible situation for them. Itâs even harder for them.â
And yet: âIâm quite happy existing within this budget range. I like to tell these stories. I like to have control of how I tell my stories,â Haigh says. âI canât be someone else. I canât make films like other people. I can only make films like I can make them. And so when I tell myself I never want to do this again because itâs too difficult, I remind myself of that. Itâs a pretty incredible thing that Iâve been able to do.â
Remember⊠(Mikeâs) contentment is rocked by his motherâs absence â her yearning for something better. He must now look his devastated father in the eye each morning, seeing all of his pain and resentments and fears. He must consider what led his mother to risk her death to find something different for herself. â THR
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