All of Us Strangers, a film about ‘the pain we try to keep hidden away’

From the first shot of Andrew Haigh’s unconventional ghost story All of Us Strangers, we are introduced to the world of the uncanny. Sunlight streams through the windows of a glass building, molten and syrupy against Andrew Scott’s skin. There’s something surreal and insubstantial about his reflection in the window. Then, we see the building itself, a new high-rise in Stratford, inhabited by only two men: Adam and Harry.

Adam (Scott) is a screenwriter who lives alone, subsisting on Chinese takeaways. He seems lost in his own world as he tries to write about his parents who died in a car accident when he was a child. When he decides to jog his memory by returning to his childhood home, he returns to find his parents apparently alive – but exactly as they were 30 years ago (by now, Adam is older than them). Loosely based on the novel Strangers by Taichi Yamada, Haigh re-appropriates the ghost story with a  naturalistic bend, which allows Adam to re-engage with his grief and its entanglement with his queer identity.

The film also delves into Adam’s burgeoning love with his young, enigmatic neighbour, Harry (Paul Mescal). “It was such a joy, playing Harry, playing someone different to any role I’ve had. He’s a little bit frightening – and drunk, sexy and forward,” Mescal tells Dazed. The film unpicks the unsettled state of modern queerness – of feeling estranged by a heteronormative society even during a time when queerness is supposedly celebrated. Haigh takes this mutable sense of temporality and creates a sense of suspended, circular time as the film vacillates between two timelines, one focused on the past with his parents and another in the future with Harry.

At its core, All of Us Strangers is an exploration of queer love and intimacy across time. As Haigh says: “Love is the centre of Adam’s story. With both his parents and with Harry, love is about feeling seen.” Below, we speak to Paul Mescal, Andrew Scott, Andrew Haigh about the film.

In the film, the use of mementos, from photographs to music, are really evocative. Why did you want to invoke the past through these symbols? 

Andrew Haigh: We shot the film in my own childhood home and I wanted to feel like I was putting myself into it. It’s my most personal film. I wanted to return to there because it’s the space I imagined while writing the script. I hadn’t been there for 45 years, yet I could remember so viscerally the smell of the house, the feel. The soundtrack is composed of songs I loved as a kid. I’ve always loved The Pet Shop Boys. It was a kind of therapy – of staging my memories to work through them. Memories exist like time travel in our mind constantly, it all feels as real.

The whole film is about feeling. We want you to feel the emotion of it, the texture, the sensuality of it, in a phenomenological way. Music just draws you back to the past in such a visceral way. The records have such an analogue texture to it, of real things and textures. That’s why we shot it on film, to keep that sense of materiality. 

Andrew, what drew you to Adam’s character and the story? 

Andrew Scott: It was the central idea of returning to the past. I find the character to be someone I really recognised and a character who goes on such a strong journey. He’s in every scene except two shots. What’s so interesting is that the film’s ghostly concept seems like such an audacious idea, but what’s so wonderful is that people walking outside in Soho right now are having conversations with people in their head who are not alive. Our imagination is so alive, and time is not a linear logic. To bring that memory to life is not as absurd as you might think. 

Paul, what drew you to Harry’s character and the film? Aftersun and All of Us Strangers both tackle the ghosts of the past, memory and grief. What draws you to this complex subject and different ways of embodying it?

Paul Mescal: I think Harry is a beautiful character. He has an immense capacity to love somebody even though he’s dealing with extraordinary pain. We don’t really see a huge amount of it in the film, but there are instances where he talks about his incredibly difficult relationship with his family.

I think I am more interested in the past than I am in the future in general. I think the past is what informs our behaviour. There’s something about the past that feels unattainable. But what’s amazing about this film – its magic – is that it allows you to interrogate the past and to revisit conversations. That’s what’s so tragic about the past: once it’s gone, it’s locked there.

For every film, I usually create a playlist tailored to the character, to try and understand them. For Harry, I was listening a lot to ‘Adios, Florida’ by A Winged Victory For the Sullen. 

Can you tell us a bit about the cinematography choices? The film features a lot of superimpositions and reflections in windows and mirrors. The first time we see Harry and Adam, they are both seen through the glassy reflection of a window or mirror. 

Andrew Haigh: I knew that the film, even while naturalistic, couldn’t feel entirely real. It had to feel like it was hovering somewhere in a liminal space. In the opening shot, you almost ask, ‘Is it a reflection? Is it you?’ We aren’t quite sure what we are seeing. 

I’m obsessed with reflections. On a philosophical basis, as a queer person, you spend a lot of the time reflecting and performing something which actually isn’t you. Especially when you’re in the closet. You spend the whole time reflecting an image to the world. That can be very disconcerting for you on a psychological basis. Reflection is the perfect way to express that. In this film, the reflection is often even different from who you are. It changes through the film when we play with those reflections and I find that really interesting. Towards the last scene, they get closer, and expose their real selves. I returned to some Francis Bacon paintings as references just to articulate what felt right aesthetically. 

What was it like working with Andrew Haigh in his own home? Did you bring any of your personal mementos to set?

Andrew Scott: It was so generous of Andrew to let us film in his home. It throws down the gauntlet in terms of authenticity. I just felt I had to bring my own biography even if it’s not my own geography. One of the great pleasures was to speak to Andrew about how we grew up and the pain that we’ve been through – the 80s and 90s was a difficult time to be queer. We’ve come so far in relation to our experience in the world and I felt so seen by the script and by Andrew’s other films in the past. I brought my own sense of truth and my own experience. 

I wore this golden chain that I’m wearing now too, and it catches the light in the film in a lovely way.

“People walking outside in Soho right now are having conversations with people in their head who are not alive” – Andrew Scott

It’s remarkable the way you manage to transform into a child again in the house through your body language and this vulnerability we see in your face. 

Andrew Scott: When Adam says, ‘It doesn’t take much to make you feel the way you felt back there,’ I think it resonates. You know, I live a very happy life now and I’m comfortable with who I am, but there was a time when that wasn’t the case. The pain of that time, as much as you try and suppress it, it’s very potent. To be able to do that again, that feeling is not as far away as I might have imagined. It was also a catharsis to do it again. 

The coming-out conversations with Adam’s family are particularly poignant, capturing the sense of the atemporality of modern queerness. What was the process of writing them?

Andrew Haigh: It was quite painful to write those coming-out sequences. It wasn’t just coming out to his mother, which has its own complications, pain and terror. But it’s a reminder of how he used to feel back then. So, all of those things that the mother said, all those things that happened to him at school that the dad mentioned, those were things that happened to Adam – look, they happened to me, to a lot of gay kids back then. It’s a reminder of how I used to feel. The film is about the pain we try to keep hidden away, the grief and the trauma of being gay at that time. For Adam, it’s about that coming to the surface again, remembering how he used to feel. For me as a director and writer, and for Andrew as an actor, it brought all of those feelings back again. I got eczema again, which I haven’t had since I was a kid. My body literally reacted to how I used to feel when I was younger.

Harry is often a protector to Adam – taking care of him when he’s ill, taking him home from the club. Yet, we see brief moments of his immense pain throughout the film. Paul, how did you represent this pain bubbling under the surface? 

Paul Mescal: That’s the tragedy of the film. Harry is laughing at his own pain a lot of the time. Because that’s how humans are. It’s so difficult to talk about ourselves so directly – when we try to talk about things that cause us pain, I think we generally try and laugh through because it deflects from the rawness because if you really go into those feelings, sometimes you can’t really get out of it. And I think Harry’s a master chameleon. I wanted to play Harry as somebody who’s trying to hide his pain the whole way up until the ending. I wanted him to not show his pain, and I think I failed in the moment when I said, ‘I know what it’s like to stop caring about yourself’, because I was looking at Andrew and he was upsetting me so much. 

The pain reveals this idea that, despite Harry being more forward and more sexually liberated, he still feels this pain and this shame because of his family. Essentially, if families aren’t caring and thoughtful, they can breed shame, which is ultimately quite damaging and you see the damage that it does to Adam. Adam has the privilege of being able to revisit those conversations with his parents. Harry doesn’t get that opportunity with his own and they’re still living, so I think it’s a wonderful illustration of how shame is bred in society, particularly in a home environment.

The love story features two different generations of queer men. How did you decide to represent their difference but also their shared sense of dislocation?

Andrew Haigh: There is a big difference between the different generations of queer people. They’ve grown up without the shadow of AIDS. We didn’t know how our lives would progress into the future then. Whereas, there’s now gay marriage and so much progression. Yet, to be queer in the world now still means you’re different and that’s still difficult. Some young people who seem great from the outside are still dealing with their trauma of being at school. Yes, it’s better, but it doesn’t mean it’s easy. I think we can often fight against the generation that came before, but it’s important that we see ourselves in this lineage together. 

Paul, how did you approach building this tender sense of intimacy and chemistry with Andrew?

Paul Mescal: I loved Andrew as an actor before we knew each other properly. And when I started to know him more, we just really liked each other. I find that it’s actually easier to play sex scenes than it is to play the tenderness after sex. Because you’re both inhabiting a physical language – that distinct feeling of lying on a bed and talking to somebody you love after having sex. The tenderness required in your quality of touch is something you can’t really block and write. It’s not like you’re going to touch his hand like this at this particular moment. It just doesn’t work like that. So I think we do have this innate thing called chemistry, which I find impossible to describe. 

The way you guys look at each other in the film is so sexy. I couldn’t look away.

Paul Mescal: That’s the bit that scared me. When I saw it for the first time in the audience, I asked Andrew if he remembered me doing that. The most illicit moment is not actually the sex, but my eyes looking up to Andrew when I’m about to go down on him. 

How do we tackle queer loneliness for future generations?

Andrew Scott: I think the problem of queer loneliness comes from a basic thing: that people assume everybody unless told otherwise is straight. Everyone from a benign aunt to a taxi driver asks if you have a boyfriend if you’re a girl, and a girlfriend if you’re a boy. That’s the assumption. That’s why I love the embracing of the word ‘queer’ – as some people exist within a scale, defying this binary of choice. It’s very difficult to define – do we write down and laminate all our sexual fantasies to define us? 

The way we talk about sexuality has to ultimately change. It’s the accidental cruelty of the benign aunt or the parent. That’s what makes people feel lonely. And, it’s not something you can defend as a child, because you don’t know or can’t fully articulate it yet. It’s this quiet and subtle feeling of loneliness that permeates these lives. I remember Geri Halliwell years and years ago with this little camp boy on TV, a Spice Girls fan – and the TV presenter asks ‘are you going to have a girlfriend when you grow up?’ and Geri Halliwell adds in, ‘or boyfriend’. That’s a wonderful thing, it’s a tiny thing but it offers the option. The reframing of how we talk to our youth.

All of Us Strangers is available in UK cinemas from January 26.