Andrew Haigh says that when it came to casting for All of Us Strangers, his romantic fantasy inspired by Taichi Yamada’s 1987 novel Strangers, it was important that his lead — played in the film by actor Andrew Scott — be gay.
The writer-director opened up about his approach to casting and talked about shooting the movie in his childhood home and capturing its intimacy scenes alongside editor Jonathan Alberts during a post-screening discussion at the New York Film Festival on Sunday. The film follows a gay man in London who, after having a chance encounter with his neighbor, develops a relationship with the man at the same time he begins convening with the ghosts of his dead parents during brief visits to his childhood home.
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During the Q&A at Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall, Haigh explained how he thought about casting for Adam, the quiet gay screenwriter at the center of his ghostly drama. Haigh said he always casts his leading protagonists first before any other members of the ensemble. But particularly for All of Us Strangers, which was cast by Kahleen Crawford, getting someone who could identify with Adam’s sexuality was “an important part of it.”
“Andrew I’d liked for a long time, and I felt like this was kind of a perfect role for him,” Haigh told the packed audience. “And I’m not one of those people that say you have to be queer to play queer roles, but it was important to me in this case. Because there’s so much nuance that I was trying to get to, I didn’t want to have an endless conversation with somebody who’s trying to understand it.”
For Adam’s mysterious neighbor-turned-lover Harry, Paul Mescal came on board very late after Haigh didn’t initially go out to the actor, convinced Mescal wouldn’t be interested. But after learning he was, the writer-director says it was “brilliant” news and worked with the duo “a lot on getting their chemistry to feel real, authentic.”
As for Claire Foy and Jamie Bell, who portray Adam’s mother and father, Haigh said he was looking for characters who could feel like Scott’s parents, but who also felt personal to him. “I wanted them to make sense as Andrew’s parents, but I also wanted them to make sense as my parents,” he explained. “So I was trying to find people that made sense for both things, which wasn’t always easy.”
His parents weren’t the only things he wanted in the film to feel deeply personal. The filmmaker, who said his aim was to create a story that felt both specific and universal, revealed that Adam’s childhood home also had a direct connection to him.
“Anybody that knows me would know that [the film] is pretty personal. For example, I shot the film in my old childhood home, so the house was my old house, and I hadn’t been back there for 45 years,” he said of the home, which was the first house his family lived in and is located just outside of London. “When I wrote the script, I had that house in mind, and then I went back there, went to the door and they said, ‘Yeah, OK you can film here.’
“It was a very emotional, strange experience shooting scenes in my old parents’ bedroom with the actors,” he continued. “I felt like I’d become a child again.”
During the moderated conversation, Haigh also opened up about the film’s intimacy scenes from both a filming and editing perspective. The mind behind Looking and Weekend is somewhat known for his artistic take on intimacy scenes, but when it came to All of Us Strangers, the intimacy moments he says were ultimately different from what he’s done before — despite the director still believing that “they have to feel like they have story relevance, otherwise there’s no point.”
“We actually spoke a lot with the actors about how we wanted it to feel,” he said. “I wanted it to feel real and tender and delicate, and a bit sexy and a bit dirty sometimes — all of those things that sex is.”
For Alberts, the job was made easier by Haigh’s strength in this element of storytelling. “I think Andrew has a real ability for directing actors in that situation,” he said. “The other thing is there are so many possibilities when you have such great actors and you have such a nuanced performance, you just have a wealth of material and good material.”
Beyond wanting to try something different stylistically with this intimacy scenes, Haigh said another thing that was different this time around was the presence of an intimacy coordinator.
“We had an intimacy coordinator which I never used before, which was its own thing,” he said. “But I’m all for them. I understand why they exist. I think they’re a great thing. It’s a slightly strange experience when there’s now four of you talking about the scenes when before it was just the three of you, but I completely understand why they exist.”
