Andrew Haigh, One of Our Best Filmmakers, Has Always Worked Under the Radar. That Changes With ‘All of Us Strangers’

Later, Haigh tells me stories about working for James Ivory and Ismail Merchant as an assistant early in his career. Ivory, he points out, only won his Oscar five years ago, at 89 years old—setting a record for the oldest Oscar winner ever. And he didn’t even win one for one of the many classics he directed—he did so for his screenplay for Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me By Your Name.

“Some directors get lifted up and some directors—even if they’re brilliant—just get kept down below a little bit,” Haigh says about Ivory. “I think the whole Oscar idea and success, as a filmmaker, you realize it’s [about] a different thing. It doesn’t necessarily mean better films.”

In Haigh’s case, it’s not hard to understand it. We live in a time obsessed with multiverses, blockbuster IP and extraordinary superheroes. Haigh meanwhile, makes films about the exceedingly ordinary. These are stories of unexceptional people with unexceptional destinies. They make the most of what they can with the life that’s given to them. Haigh considers these characters with radical empathy, never passing moral judgment; instead giving them space for complexity

“Everybody is very, very complicated,” Haigh says. “They’re a product of what’s happened to them. The idea that we are active players in our own lives is not really true. We’re passive most of the time and we’re just reacting to how we get treated and what’s happened to us in our lives.”

The evening before our coffee, Haigh was at a screening in the Museum of Modern Art in New York, as part of a series geared toward critics and awards voters. It’s become a regular stop for Oscar contenders going into winter. And after months of doing promo without his actors due to the actors’ strike, Haigh was accompanied to the screening by his stars Andrew Scott and Jamie Bell.

At the end of that screening, Bell told the audience about his own family, how his father walked out on them before he was born, and how playing a father in Strangers, he found himself acting out conversations and scenarios he never actually experienced in his life. In playing the character, Bell said, he found himself acting as the father he never had.

Looking out at the audience, his director and co-star beside him, he said: “It’s amazing how cinema can sometimes fill those spaces, and help you heal.”