EXCLUSIVE
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.
In casting Adam,
