By Iain Blair

All of Us Strangers is the latest film from British filmmaker Andrew Haigh. Part time-traveling, supernatural ghost story and part meditation on loneliness, loss and love, the film recently swept the British Indie Film Awards with seven wins, including Best Director and Best Screenplay for Haigh; Best Film; Best Cinematography for Jamie D. Ramsay, SASC; and Best Editing for Jonathan Alberts, ACE.

The story starts one night in a near-empty tower block in London, when depressed screenwriter Adam (Andrew Scott) meets mysterious neighbor Harry (Paul Mescal). As a relationship develops between them, Adam is preoccupied with memories of the past and finds himself drawn back to his childhood home where his parents (Claire Foy and Jamie Bell) appear to be living, just as they were on the day they died in a car crash, 30 years before, when Adam was just 12 years old.

I spoke with Haigh — who has also written and directed Lean on Pete, 45 Years and Weekend — about making the Searchlight film and his love of post and editing.

I heard you had to build Adam’s apartment onstage and that you used LED screens for all the exterior views.
Yes, and it was quite complicated. We tried to shoot in a real location, but it’s almost impossible to light when you’re on the 20^th floor of a tower block. So we found an apartment we liked and shot plates out the windows of the landscapes, and then we used those plates with huge LED walls that surrounded the windows of the set.

It was basically a lower-budget version of how they do the Star Wars films — I wanted to see all the light changing outside and not have to blow all the windows out and have to use greenscreen. It was tricky to get it right, and I’d never used that technology before, but it worked really well.

You must have done a lot of tests?
That’s correct. We also decided to shoot 35mm, not digital, and that complicates it all because the LED walls are digital, so there was stuff to work out. I wanted to shoot on film because so much of the film, part of which is set in the ‘80s, is about the analog experience, such as photographs and vinyl records. So it would have felt weird to shoot digital. I felt film added to the period texture and that sense of the past bleeding into the present.

How tough was the shoot?
They’re always tough, but we had a decent schedule of six weeks and a big enough budget to get everything we needed, like all the extras for the club scenes. We shot all that over two days on-location at the iconic Vauxhall Tavern in London with 150 extras.

Jonathan Alberts, who cut HBO’s Looking and BBC’s The North Water for you, edited this. How did you work together?
He began working on it while we were shooting. He was close to the locations and then in the studio for those shoots, and he had an edit suite set up so that during lunch, I could look at scenes and discuss them. That’s a very important part of the editing process, even while you’re shooting, so you can understand what’s working and if you’re getting the right emotional tone. Are you pushing it too far? Or being too subtle? When you’re trying to find that balance, you need to see footage and know it’s working.

We did most of the editing at Vivid in London, and then we moved to LA for a month or so to finish up. We had a decent amount of time, and you need that in the edit so you can experiment and try different things. When you’re with a bigger studio like Searchlight, you have all the preview screenings and so on, so the whole post schedule gets extended. That was quite different from what I was used to in post on my other lower-budget films.

I trust my editor completely, but I’m there in the edit every day, which probably drives him crazy. But we discuss everything, and after several films together, we have a good understanding of exactly what we’re trying to do in the edit.

What were the main editing challenges?
The main one was all about calibrating the emotion. When do you release it, hide it or build it up? That all took some time to get right. The other big one was all the transitions between the modern story in London and the parents’ story in the ‘80s. How do we make them work seamlessly and feel like they’re all melding together and becoming entwined? We played around with that a lot.

When we shot it, there were a few more genre elements, and we either toned them down or cut them, which helped keep the film in an emotionally real place. The final 20 minutes were the hardest to cut and get right, and we also spent a lot of time working on the beginning. The start of the film is quite simple, but we had so many versions of those first 15 minutes as he goes to meet his parents, and your instinct is always to get there quicker. But I knew we couldn’t get there too quickly. You need to know why he feels he has to go back into his past.

Do you like the post process?
I was an assistant editor for a long time, and I love post, but it’s a stressful process. When you watch the first assembly, it’s like, “Does this even work? I don’t know.” Then I feel that as you get closer to the finish line, you’re happier with what you’ve done in post. But you are also more nervous because the world is about to see it, which is scary.

Talk about the importance of music and sound.
It’s so crucial. I worked very closely with our sound designer, Joakim Sundstrom, whom I’ve done a few projects with, and Emilie Levienaise-Farrouch, our composer. I bring them on early in my director’s cut so we can discuss what the sound needs to be, and my editor also spends a lot of time getting the sound right and playing around with the soundscape. Same with the music. We start with temps then add Emilie’s score and all the song tracks, like Frankie Goes to Hollywood and Pet Shop Boys, which really define the era. We did all the re-recording at Halo Post and then the final mix at Shepperton.

All period films need VFX, and there are quite a few. Who did them, and what was entailed?
I like working with VFX, and I love that so many are invisible in this, although there are a lot. Apart from all the usual cleanup and removing stuff, we added cranes to the shots outside the windows and did a lot of work with reflections, altering them and changing them.

We shot a lot of stuff that we then adapted with VFX in post to give them a slightly odd look and feel, like the scene in the elevator, where we made the reflections all a bit unreal. Then at the end there are some more obvious VFX shots. We used Union, Goldcrest and Cheap Shot, and our VFX team did a great job.

What about the DI? Who was the colorist? And how closely did you work with them and the DP, Jamie D. Ramsay?
The colorist was Joe Bicknell at Company 3 in New York. The DP was off on location somewhere in America, and I was in London, so we did it all remotely. I felt the film was shot so beautifully that the DI was more about pushing and tweaking certain elements. So we changed some colors, boosted others, increased the contrast in some scenes and did a lot of shaping. All films change in post, but I’m really happy with the way it turned out.

You adapted this from the novel Strangers by Taichi Yamada. Adapting a beloved novel for the screen can be notoriously tricky. How tough was it?
It’s always tough, but it helped a lot that I knew it was going to be a loose adaptation, so that gave me a lot of freedom. The novel is very different from the film, but the central idea is the same. Adapting the book was a long process but also a fascinating one. It was nice to have this idea that I really loved and then turn it into my own thing. I wanted to pick away at my own past as Adam does in the film. I was interested in exploring the complexities of both familial and romantic love, but also the distinct experience of a specific generation of gay people growing up in the ‘80s. I wanted to move away from the traditional ghost story genre and make it more psychological, almost metaphysical and supernatural.

It seems like a perfect fit for your sensibility.
Yes, you’re right. You’re always trying to find something that speaks to you, that works for you on a personal level and interests you. I definitely have to respond to the material, and this seemed like a very good way to explore various ideas I’m interested in about love and loss. And I loved the novel’s central conceit: What if you could meet your parents again long after they were gone, and now they’re the same age as you? It seemed such a great, emotional way to explore the nature of family, and that became my starting point.

The film has all these different elements, including time-travel fantasy, romance, drama and the enduring power of love.
It’s interesting because people have asked me, “What other films did you want it to feel like? What were your influences?” And I really can’t think of any. To me, it feels like it exists in the cracks of lots of different genres. So, it’s a ghost story, but not really. It doesn’t follow the logic of any ghost story. And it doesn’t feel like it belongs to fantasy. It feels grounded, but it’s also slightly surreal. It’s sort of balanced between all these genres, but to me the important thing was always the emotional arc of the story, the emotional journey. Everything else had to be in service to that, and the emotion was more important than logic. I wanted it to be a manifestation of Adam’s sexuality and his longing.

---

Industry insider Iain Blair has been interviewing the biggest directors in Hollywood and around the world for years. He is a regular contributor to Variety and has written for such outlets as Reuters, The Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Times and the Boston Globe.