Some Movies Hit Close to Home. His Was Filmed There.
“I got called a gay elder the other day,” Andrew Haigh said. This title, bestowed by a group of younger gay men, initially rankled him.
It’s true that Haigh — the director of acclaimed films like “45 Years” and “Weekend” — had recently turned 50, but he still found that landmark age hard to believe. “I’m looking older,” he told me, “but it’s a strange thing to think that I’m not young anymore.” That uncanny feeling is a key theme in Haigh’s latest film, “All of Us Strangers,” which he adapted from the 1987 novel “Strangers” by Taichi Yamada.
Andrew Scott stars in the film as Adam, a screenwriter in his late 40s with a whole lot on his mind: As he entertains a tentative romance with his neighbor Harry (Paul Mescal), he returns to his childhood home and finds it somehow inhabited by the parents (Claire Foy and Jamie Bell) who died when he was young.
Though this reunion summons Adam’s inner child to the fore — a transformation Scott sells with heartbreaking subtlety, even when dressed in Christmas pajamas — there are still tricky adult conversations to be had with his parents about his sexuality and lonely middle age. “I knew that for this film to work, I had to throw myself into it on a very personal level,” Haigh said. “So much of the things they’re talking about and the memories that Adam has of being a kid are my memories.” That commitment even extended to filming much of the movie in the house where Haigh grew up, a notion that astounded many of his actors. “I always have this image of him losing one of his baby teeth in that house where the crew were stamping on the floor,” Scott said. “Isn’t it extraordinary that as you shoot a scene downstairs in the kitchen about a man coming out to his mother, he could have gone upstairs after he had actually done that and been upset in a small bathroom?” In November, I met Haigh at an old-fashioned cafe in Hollywood where, as a young film student, he used to plop down in the corner booth and order the blackened chicken.
