“All of Us Strangers,” about a lonely screenwriter named Adam who begins a relationship with a mysterious neighbor while beginning to revisit his childhood home, draws intimately from the life and experiences of director Andrew Haigh himself despite having been a loose adaptation of the 1987 novel by Japanese novelist Taichi Yamada. book “Strangers”. Haigh was sent the book several years ago, but he began writing the script in the middle of the pandemic while he was living in Los Angeles and feeling estranged from his family in the United Kingdom.
“I brought a lot of my own life,” says Haigh, speaking in London during the London Film Festival. “I dealt with my own relationships with my parents within the story. So it took an emotional toll on me at the time I was writing. But in a good, cathartic way.”
Yamada’s novel is a ghost story about a man who meets a couple who appear to be his dead parents and begins visiting them until they begin to drain his life force. In Haigh’s version, Adam (Andrew Scott) visits his childhood home and reunites with his long-dead parents, played by Claire Foy and Jamie Bell. During these encounters, for which Haigh never offers an explanation, Adam comes to terms with trauma and loss. At the same time, he begins a relationship with Henry (Paul Mescal), a neighbor who appears to be the only resident of Adam’s high-rise apartment building.
“It was the whole idea of meeting your parents again after they’re gone,” says Haigh, whose parents are still alive. “I couldn’t get that idea out of my head. It’s such an unusual and strange idea and something I think we all wish we could do, whether our parents are dead or alive. It took me some time to figure out how I would turn this story into something that was for me. Because in the novel there is a female character and it is a love story between a man and a woman. So it was about incorporating elements of myself and my way of seeing the world.”
The film depended on perfect casting, something Haigh knew from the beginning. He and the casting director spent a lot of time looking at numerous possibilities, but finally landed on Scott (“Fleabag”), who had never before had a lead role in a film. Scott instinctively understood Adam, Haigh says, and the film’s theme, which addresses how gay men of a certain age have felt isolated since the AIDS epidemic.
“What that did to a generation of gay men and how it terrified them of intimacy were things I wanted to look at,” Haigh says. “And Andrew understood that. Any gay man of that generation understands this. They understand what it’s like to be afraid to tell your parents. They understand what it was like to not be able to feel that you can exist in the world. He just completely understood it. He had such a guttural and emotional effect on me. In certain scenes I could feel what was happening to him. Sometimes I think it was even a surprise to him how much it affected him. It was beautiful to see because he feels very real and honest.”
Paul Mescal and Andrew Scott star in “All of Us Strangers.”
(Reflector Images)
“All of Us Strangers” was shot in six weeks in 2022. Scenes were first completed in the family home, which was Haigh’s actual childhood home, and then production moved on to the apartment scenes, shot primarily in a sound stage. Everything was filmed sequentially as much as possible to help Haigh and the actors follow the narrative and emotional development. Haigh hadn’t returned to the house where he grew up in years, but he couldn’t get it out of his mind as he wrote. “I couldn’t remember exactly where he was,” Haigh says of the house. “And then I found him and we knocked on his door and asked them to film there. It was literally going to the past while still being in the present, which is what the film does. It’s about how you’re always drifting or pulled into the past even though you exist in the present.”
For Haigh, the film reflects on many personal ideas, but is ultimately about pain. It is a topic that she says fascinates her because it is not just about the loss of a person.
“It’s about how we lose so much as we go through life,” Haigh says. “There are relationships that we have lost. We can regret that our childhood was not how we wanted it to be. We can regret the things we were never able to say to each other. I believe that pain encompasses a large part of our daily existence. That’s what I wanted the movie to be about, not specifically someone who lost her parents at a young age. But at the same time, I also wanted it to be about that.”
There is a supernatural element to the story, particularly in the shock of the ending, but Haigh doesn’t see “All of Us Strangers” as a traditional ghost story. Instead, he uses the concept of narrative to explore these themes of pain and loss and what he calls “loneliness,” something that for many was magnified during the pandemic. He finds the film’s ending, which is open to emotional interpretation, uplifting. For Haigh, the literal ghosts of history represent something more significant.
“Our memories and our past remain, and they are the ghosts of our lives,” he says. “If I think about the people who are no longer with me, they exist and I can feel them and I can almost see them and I can feel the love I had for them. It’s obvious but also profound at the same time. That force of feeling is so intense that love can grow even if you have lost that person. That, for me, is the key that unlocked something in this story.”
