“We can all understand that feeling of being alone in the world trying to find ways to not be alone.”
― Andrew Haigh
“If you don’t open your eyes to other people’s lives, you can’t even begin to understand how the world works at all.”
― Andrew Haigh
“Men are both bad and awful. And women are both bad and awful. And they can both be good and wonderful on both sides.”
― Andrew Haigh
“It’s always very important that you can completely disagree with someone, but it doesn’t fundamentally mean that they are bad people.”
― Andrew Haigh
“SXSW can feel very male, very straight, and very white, and though it’s a great festival, when you have a film that’s different, it’s hard to find your place.”
― Andrew Haigh
“A lot of gay-themed films are terrible. And mainstream audiences and the press aren’t interested, understandably.”
― Andrew Haigh
“People don’t think the struggles gay people have are worth talking about because everyone’s decided that we’re all equals now. Those struggles are much more subtle now. But the weight of being different does carry on.”
― Andrew Haigh
“My straight friends accept I’m gay but they forget that some people don’t. Even now, if I go into a party, people don’t usually assume I’m gay, so you have to keep coming out. And if you say you’ve got a film with a gay subject matter, you can sometimes see people’s eyes going, ‘Oh! OK!’”
― Andrew Haigh
“I’ve always felt like an outsider, whether in school or when I’m working or within the industry or just in society at large.”
― Andrew Haigh
“I am fascinated by that person who is trying to live authentically, but they are on the outside of society, so how do they manage in the world around them?”
― Andrew Haigh
“I think people do like extremes in cinema. There are very few films told about everyday middle-class couples, which is odd to me, as there are a lot of everyday middle-class couples.”
― Andrew Haigh
“My films are very everyday, and people don’t always want to go to the cinema to see ordinary lives. They want to see something a bit more extraordinary. I get that desire, but it’s not the kind of film I want to make.”
― Andrew Haigh
“Lots of shows get cancelled, and then they never get to end their stories. It’s just over.”
― Andrew Haigh
“You can achieve one thing, but because of that, you have to adapt or lose something else. If you end up in a relationship, you sometimes have to lose the closeness of your friendships, for example, or you have to move away somewhere… For me, that creates the sense of melancholy which I think exists in most people’s lives.”
― Andrew Haigh
“When I started making films, it was never that I had this great ambition to only do gay-themed material.”
― Andrew Haigh
“I think it is a burden… that we constantly realise that there isn’t that much rhyme or reason to why something happens. If we think about that too much, it can make all of our decisions very stressful.”
― Andrew Haigh
“I’m not very good at thinking, ‘This is the thing I should do now to help my career.’ I mean, I want to keep my career going, but that’s not what draws me to a story.”
― Andrew Haigh
“I was not a happy teenager in the slightest.”
― Andrew Haigh
“I don’t want a performance to give me everything. You can look at Charlotte Rampling in ’45 Years,’ and you don’t really know what she’s thinking, but you know something interesting is happening.”
― Andrew Haigh
“In stories, those are the moments that hit me the most: when people really don’t expect it, don’t have it much in their lives, and suddenly, an act of kindness. It’s like, ‘Oh, God! Heartbreaking!’”
― Andrew Haigh
“The longer you get in a relationship, the harder it becomes to confront problems.”
― Andrew Haigh
“I haven’t got muscles, and I don’t live in West Hollywood.”
― Andrew Haigh
“Whoever my films are about, they’ll hopefully still have my sensibility, whatever that is.”
― Andrew Haigh
“I’m interested in how we understand ourselves in our relatioships and how we define ourselves.”
― Andrew Haigh
“Relationships are so important to all of us.”
― Andrew Haigh
“As a person, I am totally obsessed with the choices and decisions we make in our lives and how they dictate the course of our lives. Seemingly random choices that we make end up defining everything.”
― Andrew Haigh
“No relationships are perfect. When they develop, there are things that have happened before in your life that you maybe don’t discuss. And there are always fault lines within every relationship. I believe it doesn’t take too much pressure to be placed on those fault lines for them to start cracking apart.”
― Andrew Haigh
“Our past absolutely defines everything we do in the present. We can’t help it. We’re made by the events of our past, so there’s no escaping it.”
― Andrew Haigh
“In the end, with all of my films, I want to understand the continuity between these films and understand what they’re trying to do.”
― Andrew Haigh
“I do make films for personal reasons.”
― Andrew Haigh
“When you make a film, everyone wants to define it.”
― Andrew Haigh
“Homophobia obviously still exists, but it is a lot more subtle, and it is a lot more in the background.”
― Andrew Haigh
“I’ve certainly felt alone a lot of my life.”
― Andrew Haigh
“I didn’t enjoy growing up. I was lonely. That’s probably my base level to feel like that.”
― Andrew Haigh
“One of the reasons I wanted to make ‘Lean on Pete’ was that it wasn’t about identity. For me, it’s about something more essential underneath: the need to have somewhere to live, to be safe, and have someone to look after you.”
― Andrew Haigh
“I’m gay, and I know a lot of very liberal straight people, and, of course, they’re absolutely fine, but they still won’t necessarily come and see a film like ‘Weekend.’”
― Andrew Haigh
“I always think that there’s a weight of prejudice from the past that gay people perhaps carry around with them. Even if it doesn’t exist so much around them, they still have a feeling of being excluded, and perceived prejudice is almost as unsettling as actual prejudice.”
― Andrew Haigh
“People like a bit of honesty in films.”
― Andrew Haigh
“I have seen a lot of gay-themed films that didn’t really express how I see being gay at this moment in the world. There never seemed to be a kind of authentic depiction of relationships.”
― Andrew Haigh
“I wanted to make films since I was young. My background had nothing to do with anything creative, so it seemed an impossible task.”
― Andrew Haigh
“I always quite like the idea of casting against type when I’m looking for and trying to understand who a character is.”
― Andrew Haigh
“With supporting roles, you just want really good actors that can make it bigger than what’s there.”
― Andrew Haigh
“There’s something about film that offers this opportunity to stick to a very, very clear single protagonist’s point of view, and I like that.”
― Andrew Haigh
“It’s very important that all the supporting characters feel like they’ve existed in the world, that they’ve had a history, and they’ll go on to have a history within the scope of the story rather than just popping up and then disappearing.”
― Andrew Haigh
“I love the fact that James Ivory made films about Britain, made ‘Howards End’ and ‘The Remains of the Day,’ or that Paul Thomas Anderson made ‘Phantom Thread.’ They’re about Britishness, but they’re from an American perspective. And I actually think they’re fantastic in the way that they understand Britishness.”
― Andrew Haigh
“When I made ‘Weekend,’ the idea that ‘Moonlight’ would win the Oscar would be like, Whaaaaat? Like, that’s not going to happen.”
― Andrew Haigh
“’Call Me by Your Name’ is essentially the universal nature of love.”
― Andrew Haigh
“I think people have this idea that I just lived in my place in England and never left. During ‘Looking,’ I was in America for four years. I’ve got a green card. I spend half my time there. It doesn’t feel like an alien world at all.”
― Andrew Haigh
“I only want to tell films that I really feel passionate about telling.”
― Andrew Haigh
“It fails everybody, pretty much, the American Dream, but people are driven by it. I don’t think we’re driven by the same sense of hope in Europe. We’re driven by pessimism more.”
― Andrew Haigh
“People have very difficult lives. We can judge them for making the wrong decisions, but if you look harder and understand that these lives can be difficult, hopefully you’re at least a bit more sympathetic to the decisions these people have to make.”
― Andrew Haigh
“We get older, and we get more wrinkles, but fundamentally, we stay the same… You have the same fears and doubts and concerns and dreams and passions and all those kinds of things, so I feel like you don’t change as much as you think you do.”
― Andrew Haigh
“I think it’s always interesting to me how we keep secrets from the ones we love the most. You could be so close to someone, but still there was something you can’t express, you can’t tell them, because it’s almost too painful and too hard for you to articulate yourself, because you don’t fully understand it.”
― Andrew Haigh
“Being gay, you’re kind of forced to ask, I suppose, very existential questions from a very, very early age. Your identity becomes so important to you because you’re trying to understand it, and, I think, from the age of, like, 9, you’re being forced to ask questions… that other kids maybe don’t have to ask.”
― Andrew Haigh
“I think the gay community is made up of so many little different things, different parts, different people… I think that can be quite hard for people. You think you’ve found your tribe, but actually, that isn’t your tribe, and then you have to keep searching for what kind of makes sense.”
― Andrew Haigh
“People’s lives often don’t turn out as they expect.”
― Andrew Haigh
“In the early stages of being out, you meet all these people from all kinds of backgrounds, and the one thing you have in common is you’re all gay, but then you start to realise how different your experiences actually are.”
― Andrew Haigh
“That’s the biggest thing I struggle with. We could never hope to represent every gay person in America. There will be people who will say, ‘Well, my experience of being gay isn’t like that,’ to which I can only say, ‘That’s fine.’”
― Andrew Haigh
“America is so diverse.”
― Andrew Haigh
“I’ve traveled a fair amount around the country and visited many states. It’s amazing that Oregon is so different from Idaho; even though Portland isn’t that far from Boise, it’s a completely different city. Colorado is very different from Oregon. From a European perspective, I’ve always found that fascinating about America.”
― Andrew Haigh
“I feel like, throughout lots of my life, especially growing up, I felt powerless.”
― Andrew Haigh
“If you’re struggling, it’s easy to feel powerless until you take control of it and assert what you want. I can understand that feeling. I can understand how it feels to be alone, to not want to get help from people and to not trust people who are actually wanting the best for you. I feel like that’s true for a lot of people, actually.”
― Andrew Haigh
“It’s always important to try and get a real sense of the world around my characters. I especially think it helps actors.”
― Andrew Haigh
“I would certainly not support Trump in any way shape or form, but I want to have sympathy.”
― Andrew Haigh
“You can’t expect to connect with everybody, and that’s all right. The more I make films, I’m learning that you don’t have to make films for everybody. A film can be made for a smaller group of people than that, and it still warrants an existence.”
― Andrew Haigh
“I rode a horse once when I was young, and I fell off. I never wanted to ride a horse again.”
― Andrew Haigh
“Horses terrify me.”
― Andrew Haigh
“Coming from a different perspective on a society is really interesting. I love the Paul Thomas Anderson’s ‘Phantom Thread,’ and that’s a version of Britishness and Englishness made by an American.”
― Andrew Haigh
“We pass people in the street and ignore them when they’re clearly suffering. It makes you wish we could all feel when someone needs something.”
― Andrew Haigh
“If I can do a scene in one shot, it’s in one shot. Most of my shots are pretty long. I think with ‘Looking,’ what we have in the first minute is a whole episode of a traditional TV show. I like to let things breathe; I like to let things have a certain tone.”
― Andrew Haigh
“’Looking’ was always a niche show for a niche within a niche. It’s a gay-themed show, so you’re not going to get millions of straight people watching it – that’s the inevitability of it.”
― Andrew Haigh
“I went through a period of watching probably too many Bergman films in a row. I felt like I’d discovered the answer to what cinema should be.”
― Andrew Haigh
“My influences are all over the place. Different films have spoken to me at different times in my life, and they’ve helped create my idea of the kind of films I want to make.”
― Andrew Haigh
“When I was growing up, I was watching fairly standard American cinema.”
― Andrew Haigh
“Lynne Ramsay’s ‘Ratcatcher’ blew me away when it came out. When I started making short films, I would watch that film over and over again, marvelling at how that story visually unfolded.”
― Andrew Haigh
“I don’t believe in ‘happy ever after’ at all as a concept.”
― Andrew Haigh
“For me, it’s very important that shows about gay people are messy and complicated and are truthful about what we do.”
― Andrew Haigh
“Class is really interesting to me, maybe because I’m from England where there is a pretty hideous, deep-rooted obsession with class. I don’t like the obsession with class, but it certainly interests me.”
― Andrew Haigh
“If you don’t have money or you come from a background that doesn’t have money, it’s harder to achieve your ambition in life. It’s not that you can’t, but it becomes harder. Inequality is one of the worst things that can exist in our society, so I am interested in those kind of things.”
― Andrew Haigh
“I like going to a new environment with open eyes.”
― Andrew Haigh
“The endings to me are the key moment in ‘Weekend’ and ’45 Years.’ I know how I want my gut to feel at the ending. Even if I can’t articulate in words what that feeling is, I’m trying to find ways to get there.”
― Andrew Haigh
“Certain people like the way I make films, and others do not. I’ve come to terms with the fact that there’s no other way I can make films. If I tried to do it in a different way, it would never work.”
― Andrew Haigh
“The kinds of films I like are the ones that take their time. If you reach an emotional pinnacle too early on in a film, that’s kind of it. I think, as in real life, when you’re getting to know someone, it starts off slowly.”
― Andrew Haigh
“For a long time, gay men fought to be seen as different, doing our own thing: This is our lives; this is what we do. Accept it. There’s a conservatism that has come into the gay community: ‘We’re just like you, just like everyone else.’”
― Andrew Haigh
“Of course everyone should have the right to get married. But I think people need to remember sometimes that we don’t all need to be the same. There’s thousands of different types of relationships that people can have, whether it’s completely monogamous or it’s not monogamous, or they’re married, or they’re single or whatever it is.”
― Andrew Haigh
“There have been some good British gay films.”
― Andrew Haigh
“In my own life, my parents divorced when I was young. I lived with my dad, not with my mum, after they got divorced. And it’s been part of my life.”
― Andrew Haigh
“If I see someone break down in tears, I don’t necessarily feel empathy for them in those moments unless it’s really warranted. I feel like a tear needs to be warranted in a movie; it needs to be earned.”
― Andrew Haigh
“I’m really bad at knowing if something I’ve done is any good. I can’t work it out; I can’t be objective about anything I do.”
― Andrew Haigh
“You work really hard on something, and you know you can’t always make great work. It just doesn’t happen like that, I don’t think, at least not for most people, anyways.”
― Andrew Haigh
“I think there’s always a conflict within me about being comfortable and secure and then being an individual and fighting for what I want to be on an individual basis.”
― Andrew Haigh
“We have a choice every day to do whatever we do, and that choice is quite scary because it could absolutely change everything about our lives. It’s important to keep reminding myself that I have a choice.”
― Andrew Haigh
“Personally, I don’t like to talk too much to the actors about the camera choices because I feel like the way I want them to perform is as if it feels very rooted in the real world and that I’m essentially stepping back and just watching and hoping they feel safe with me watching.”
― Andrew Haigh
“I think all of my male characters, I suppose, in all of my films, they’re not necessarily the traditional version of masculinity.”
― Andrew Haigh
“The reality of our lives is never like what you see in those romantic comedies or dramas. Things don’t always end good. Things don’t usually end good.”
― Andrew Haigh
“I’m happy to do gay material, and I’m gay, and I’m not embarrassed about it, but it’s nice not being limited to only doing gay material.”
― Andrew Haigh
“I think the films that work the best are the ones that seem to be about one thing but then, under the surface, bubbling away, are lots more important questions that you’re not really aware of, and when you leave the cinema, your mind is ablaze with different thoughts!”
― Andrew Haigh
“Our lives are largely made up of a series of mundane moments, but those little moments are often the finesse that shapes our entire existence; it’s not necessarily the big, dramatic events, although they do, too, of course.”
― Andrew Haigh
“For me, all you want from your actor is for them to engage on a deeply emotional level with the material. If you feel like that happens, directing the actors is pretty much done at that point.”
― Andrew Haigh
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