The British director on the power of crying and how he crafted his heartbreaking new film, All of Us Strangers.
'The British director on the power of crying and how he crafted his heartbreaking new film, All of Us Strangers.
Andrew Haigh is a veteran of film and television, having directed projects including Weekend, 45 Years, Looking and The North Water. His work is defined by an expert eye for detail and profound sensitivity – in All of Us Strangers, he excavates familial and queer trauma to create a powerful, tender, ghostly romance, starring Andrew Scott, Paul Mescal, Claire Foy and Jamie Bell.
LWLies: Every person I’ve spoken to about All of Us Strangers has had quite an intense emotional reaction to it. How aware of that potential are you when you’re making a film?
Haigh: It’s funny, because I used to get emotional writing the script, and then making a film, there are moments when you feel the emotion that’s coming back at you. I’m a pretty emotional person, I’m constantly crying. But then when I watched the assembly that Jonathan [Alberts, editor] had done, I was a wreck. And I know that he’d been a wreck editing it.
The more you work on a film, for months and months, you aren’t sure. You wonder if you’ve got rid of the emotion within the piece, if you’ve ruined it. When the film was finished, I hoped that people would have a reaction to it, and that it would feel like a genuine emotional reaction rather than a manipulative one.
I wanted to unpick the pain that we all carry around, in the hope that at the end, there is some catharsis. I find crying so cathartic. Every time I cry my eyes I feel so much better. I remember when Jonathan was cutting the dailies, and it was just one of the scenes about halfway through, of Harry and Adam in bed talking. I came in and Jonathan was just in floods. I said, “What’s the matter?!” It wasn’t a big emotional scene but he was a wreck.
I think that’s representative of how grief works, too. Sometimes it’s the small things that set you off, and it’s not always the things that make sense.
It’s always the little things, and it’s the same whether it’s grief or anything in your past. I think grief is not always just about someone you’ve lost, it’s about things that you’ve lost. It’s time that you’ve lost, it’s relationships that you’ve lost, it’s love affairs that you’ve lost. Our whole lives are essentially dealing with time moving on and us losing things. I wanted the film to be about that – so the mother is just as upset that she has lost the time with her son because those things are so fragile. I’m a pretty melancholic person, and so I often think about all of those little moments in life that have been so important and are now just distant memories. They are essentially ghosts.
It’s strange, I’m currently going through a lot of video footage from when I was a kid, so I’m having a very similar experience. It brings up so many strange emotions, excavating the past. Thinking about the people that aren’t in your life now.
Yeah – and the emotion that you have for someone once they are gone, whether that’s because they’ve died or they’re just not in your life..that emotion is still there. It’s strange how that works. Fear doesn’t last the same way. No other emotion does. But love is always there. Somehow it’s both a little bit cheesy and kind of magical at the same time. Love is the thing that remains.
Were you familiar with Taichi Yamada’s novel Strangers before you were approached about the project?
No, I hadn’t heard of it – Graham [Broadbent] and Sarah [Harvey], the producers, sent it to me. They knew me, and they asked what I was interested in doing, so I said “I’m kind of interested in doing some kind of ghost story.’ Even though this isn’t that exactly. But they sent me this very traditional ghost story, and the thing that I loved was this idea in the novel of meeting your parents again. I thought that was a fascinating way to start looking into love, grief, parental responsibility, all of those things. I very quickly knew I wanted to make the love affair between two men, and I didn’t want the ghosts in the story to be malevolent, in the way they sort of are in the book.
I felt like, Oh God, I can finally talk about queerness and family in a way that I think is very complicated, and do it within a way that these two things can be interconnected and wound up together. I feel like that is a thing about being queer. It is complicated within a family dynamic. It’s getting better every day, although not for everyone. But it was certainly so complicated for me, growing up.
I’m interested to know how much you thought about the connection between All of Us Strangers and your previous work, particularly 45 Years and Weekend, because there are overlapping themes.
Yeah, and I don’t mind it being sort of repeating, because I think my interests are always my interests. So the things I’m trying to articulate, I’m often going back on myself to try and find new ways to express something I’ve looked at before. I quite like that idea. But my biggest concern, actually, in the beginning, was that people were going to think this film is just Weekend with Ghosts. But even though I don’t think the film is that, everything that you do is always in relationship to what you’ve done before. For me anyway. It’s like picking up a conversation, there’s something that you’ve already sort of talked about, but you realise you want to talk about a little bit more, and in a slightly different way.
You’ve talked a little bit about bringing your own personal experience into the film. How do you find that process of weaving your own personal experience into an adaptation?
Yes, I felt like I had to. For some reason, I felt like I didn’t want to make the film unless it was personal. There was stuff I wanted to talk about in terms of queerness and how I feel about family and its complications, what it can mean to be a child and a parent. I wrote a lot during the pandemic – I kind of threw myself into trying to make it feel as close to something I understood as possible while making sure it wasn’t autobiographical. So there’s lots of me in it, but there’s also lots of me that isn’t in it. When I gave the script to people, they’d said “I feel like you’ve written this about me. I feel like you’ve told my life story.” Whether it’s about the loss of parents or the separation from family, or whether it’s about queerness…they’re taking something from it. And that was always what I hoped that it would feel like. It’s personal to me, but I want it to feel personal to everyone.
You have such a wonderfully curated collection of 80s music in All of Us Strangers. Was this directly plucked from your own experience?
Oh yeah, those choices were definitely personal. I love The Pet Shop Boys, I’ve loved them from their first album onwards back in 1985, and Frankie Goes To Hollywood. If you open the vinyl now, it’s so gay! You pull out this bit of paper, and they’re wearing like leather underwear and you’re like “How did this exist in 1983?” Those songs were so important to me. But pop music in general is a way for especially repressed British people to express themselves – the old pop songs especially expressed the things that we can’t say in very blatant terms. I think weirdly my politics was forged by pop music. I listen to a Housemartins song now, and I can tell they’re a bunch of socialists, you can feel it. Everything was passionate in those days, especially in pop music.
The film begins with a sunrise and ends with a night sky which lingers, and I loved that parallel. How early did you have that ending in your head?
I think it was there from the beginning if I’m honest – but I’m also aware that the ending won’t work for everybody. For me, it’s like I needed the ending to transcend a sense of reality. When I was a kid growing up I genuinely thought that I would never be able to find love. I couldn’t even see spending my life with another man as a possibility. And I wanted in the end to make love have this almost cosmic importance. Like the idea that love is so fundamentally important and enormous. Someone said something to me that I hadn’t quite realised – stars die billions of years ago, and the light is still there millions of years later. It’s like we said before; love is this thing that can be long gone, but it’s still there. And you can find it again. And again. And again. It’s always there.'
Colin Farrell, Brendan Gleeson, Kerry Condon, Martin McDonagh and Graham Broadbent at the 79th Venice International Film Festival for "The Banshees of Inisherin"
Andrew Scott and Paul Mescal's new movie has a devastating conclusion.
'Note: The following article contains discussion of themes including suicide and drug addiction.
All of Us Strangers delivers one devastating plot twist, so get the tissues ready.
Andrew Scott and Paul Mescal's beautiful and heartbreaking movie, one of this year's strongest awards contenders and already one of the best movies of 2024, is out now in cinemas.
Based on Taichi Yamada’s novel Strangers, the story follows screenwriter Adam (Andrew Scott) as he revisits his childhood home and reunites with his parents (Claire Foy and Jamie Bell), who died 30 years ago in a car accident. Whether they are ghosts or just products of Adam's imagination is one of the film's biggest enigmas.
While dealing with his family trauma, Adam also starts a relationship with his neighbour Harry (Paul Mescal), who ends up delivering the most shocking surprise in the story.
We delve into the ending of All of Us Strangers, and its intentionally unresolved mysteries.
Major spoilers follow.
All of Us Strangers ending explained
After sharing some soul-healing moments together, Adam's parents realise it's time to say goodbye. Adam is getting too consumed by this ghostly reality, and he needs to make peace with their deaths and move on.
After sharing one last meal full of nostalgic memories, they disappear.
Adam might be sad, but he has also come out stronger from this experience. He even finds himself brave enough to go knock on Harry's door. Adam has never been in his apartment before, and we're about to find out why.
After opening the suspiciously unlocked door, Adam is hit by a strong smell coming from the place. When he looks in the bedroom, he finds Harry's dead body. He appears to have died a while ago, given the state of decomposition of the body.
The 'dead all along' trope has never been so devastating.
Harry's ghost shows up in the apartment as if nothing has happened, but he quickly catches up. "I’m in there, aren’t I?" he asks Adam, right before he melts completely at the realisation of his own passing.
Adam consoles him as he leads him back to his own flat.
They lie in bed, Adam folding his arm around Harry. 'The Power of Love' by Frankie Goes to Hollywood (the same song that was playing on TV the first time they met) starts playing in the background.
The camera pulls away from them. They become a glowing light getting smaller and smaller, and soon they are surrounded by a constellation of other star-like lights.
In an interview with Digital Spy, director Andrew Haigh explained what this ending means, and why it didn't need to be a happy ending.
"There is a way in which this film could have ended on a very optimistic, joyful note. To me, that would have been a little bit simplistic in terms of what the story is trying to unpick and understand, which is about the actual nature, the essence of love, and what is important within that."
In an interview with EW, producer Graham Broadbent argued it can be a "more optimistic" interpretation of the ending of the movie.
"There's something in Andrew's filmmaking. Although it's a sad story, there's something kinder and gentler and more beautiful, more generous. People might perceive the end of the film as being sad, but I think when you watch it again and again, you see it's actually more optimistic."
What happens to Harry in All of Us Strangers?
There are several questions surrounding Harry's death in All of Us Strangers.
One is in relation to the cause of death. Although it's not explicitly revealed, the drugs and alcohol that Adam finds in the living area in the reveal scene would suggest an overdose.
Another question, perhaps more critical, is when exactly Harry dies in the timeline of the story. Is it before or after starting a relationship with Adam? It's not 100% clear, so there are a couple of theories.
The most likely explanation is that Harry died by suicide the night he knocked on Adam's door, therefore before their relationship went from neighbours to lovers.
When Harry shows up at Adam's door with a bottle of whiskey, he is most probably alive. He is a lonely young man looking for company and human connection, but Adam is wary and rejects his proposition.
"I was so scared that night. I just needed to not be alone," Harry's ghost recalls later on, when his body is found.
There is also a theory that points at the elevator scene (when Adam tries to flirt with Harry, regretting his earlier rejection) being the last time we see him alive. This doesn't really feed into Adam's ghostly fantasy, given Harry's lack of interest, so this could still be the real Harry. He could have died after that cold encounter.
The decomposition of the body makes it clear it's been some time since he passed. So, when did Harry die then?
Harry wearing his pink sweatshirt both on the night they met and in the big reveal scene might make us lean more towards the first theory — that Harry died on that same night
However, there is another theory — what if Harry never really existed?
Maybe he was a product of Adam's imagination from the very beginning. And that leads us to another possible interpretation of All of Us Strangers.
Is Adam dead in All of Us Strangers?
It's unclear what is real and what is not in All of Us Strangers, so it's all theories at this point.
The movie can be interpreted as a paranormal story where ghosts are real and Adam happens to be able to see them. We can also think Adam is dead too by the end of the movie, and that last scene means he is joining Harry in an otherworldly realm.
And the movie can also be interpreted as a fever dream full of regrets, trauma and loneliness.
In one scene, Adam asks his mother: "Is this real?" She responds: "Does it feel real?"
After all, it's not important if Adam's journey is real or not, as long as it touches deep in his soul, as long as it helps him find a way back from the grief that has been eating him alive.
In a similar way for viewers, it doesn't matter if the events we see in the movie are real or not, but how they make us feel.
In an episode of EW's Awardist podcast, actor Andrew Scott revealed he sees the movie as a dream. "You wake up from a very, very potent dream and you can feel so sad; you can wake up with floods of tears; you can wake up screaming; you can wake up laughing. I don't think you go, 'What happened in the dream? Let's rewind it.'"
"We try desperately to understand it, but I think Andrew's achievement is that he directs us towards the feeling, rather than the logic of what the feeling might be. The most important thing, and the most difficult thing to do, is making the audience genuinely moved."
In an interview with EW, Andrew Haigh shared his view on what the movie really means.
"In many ways, the whole film to me was a love letter saying, it's okay. It's quite hard. You've all been through some stuff, but you can move on from this and you can find love," he explained.
"You might lose it again, but you might find it again. That to me is an optimistic outcome in some strange sense, that you can just keep finding love even when it vanishes. And it doesn't vanish forever. That's important to me. That's where it is all about love at the end."'
The 39th Film Independent Spirit Awards are tomorrow and with one of the least amount of Oscar crossover in quite some time. In the last 10-
'...I expect Past Lives to triumph here and while American Fiction seems like a very possible runner-up I can’t help but think that the post-Oscar snub popularity of films like May December and All of Us Strangers could be strong pushes for FI voters...
Here are my predictions for the 39th Film Independent Spirit Awards for film and television, where I expect Beef, The Last of Us to do well.
BEST FEATURE (Award given to the producer)
Predicted winner: Past Lives
Producers: David Hinojosa, Pamela Koffler, Christine Vachon
Possible spoiler: All of Us Strangers
Producers: Graham Broadbent, Pete Czernin, Sarah Harvey...
BEST DIRECTOR
Predicted winner: Celine Song – Past Lives
Possible spoiler: Todd Haynes – May December
Other nominees:
Andrew Haigh – All of Us Strangers
William Oldroyd – Eileen
Ira Sachs – Passages
BEST LEAD PERFORMANCE
Predicted winner: Greta Lee – Past Lives
Possible spoiler: Andrew Scott – All of Us Strangers...'
"What I loved about it was this central concept or this central conceit about someone - an adult - meeting their parents again when they are essentially the same age as him. So I loved that idea of basically meeting your parents reparenting again. So from that, I kind of expanded the story and turned it into something closer to my life, I guess, and my understanding of the world and my relationships with my parents and my own romantic relationships. And so it was about taking my own experience and kind of bringing it into that story."
"I had read the script and I was immediately blown away about it, really. It’s incredibly personal to him, but like great writers, he makes you sort of feel like it’s personal to everybody."
"I think that's true of all of Andrew Haigh's films is that there's a deep sense of care and love that goes into the characters that he constructs."
"When you adapt a book to become a screenplay and then a film, I instinctively always leave it to the filmmaker, it's like: 'Let's go where the filmmaker wants to go.' I think what's interesting at the heart of this story, and in Andrew Haigh's interpretation of this story, is personalising it to a gay man in his 40's or 50's and the experience they might have had earlier in their life. So I think there's an overlap of what were the 80s, what were the 90s like as a gay man in London, how did your parents respond to that, what emotional journeys did you not complete?"
