Andrew Haigh Opens Up about Growing Up Gay and 'All of Us Strangers'

In a new interview, openly gay auteur Andrew Haigh talked about growing up gay during a homophobic time in England, and how gay men might be attracted to men like their fathers.

Haigh told The New York Times about having been bullied at school for being gay in the 1980s, when – as is happening now in various places in the United States – classroom discussion of the existence of LGBTQ+ people, their families, and the issues they face was banned in the UK.

"I think most queer kids from the '80s kept everything very, very hidden," Haigh recalled of that time.

Unsurprisingly, the experience has had a lasting effect on who he is, and thus on his work.

"There was so much that I was made to push down and forget and not talk about," Haigh reflected, adding, "it doesn't take a genius to look at my films and think that all of those themes come out within the stuff that I make about feeling alone, about searching for stability, about trying to understand the past and change it somehow in order for you to move forward."

"Pretty much the filmmaker I am now is because of how I was as a kid," Haigh said.

That, plus considerable talent. The 50-year-old director behind acclaimed gay films like "Greek Pete" and "Weekend" – as well as the HBO series "Looking" – has crafted a sensational movie that adapts a ghost story by novelist Taichi Yamada and transforms it into a highly personal (and, judging from the response of audiences and critics alike, universal) story of love, loneliness, and alienation.

That, Haigh told EDGE in a recent interview, was his aim. "Nobody wants to see a story that is just about something very specific – that has nothing else to say," the filmmaker mused. "You have to always ground it in something universal bubbling underneath.... I didn't want to make it just for one group of people, so I'm really pleased about that."

In the movie, Adam (Andrew Scott), a middle-aged screenwriter, begins a love affair with his neighbor, Harry (Paul Mescal), who seems as lonely as Adam is. As the two men grow closer, Adam ventures back to the town where he grew up and finds his late parents (Jamie Bell, Claire Foy) alive once again, younger than he is now and living in the house where he grew up.

"I loved the central idea in the novel about the parents but wanted to add this layer of this relationship and how that relates to the grief of losing his parents, wrapped up in the trauma, as he sees it, of growing up an outsider, growing up gay," Haigh told the Associated Press. "I felt they meshed in a really interesting way."

"Those kind of traumas and pains and struggles can be linked," Haigh added. "And I always wanted to tell a story about the pain that we carry around with us, and how easily it can come to the surface again."

The strange meeting allows for healing conversations – including a crucial coming out scene – and allows old wounds to heal while new, deeper connections are forged.