“IT WAS NOT THE EASIEST day.” This is how the British filmmaker Andrew Haigh sums up the experience of deciding whether to come out to his father, again. “My dad went through a decline into dementia as I was writing and making the film,” he says of 2023’s emotional gut punch All of Us Strangers. “He has a memory of me, but he asked me if I had a wife. I suddenly felt like I was young again, about to have to come out to my dad.”
To raise the emotional stakes, this conversation happened the night before he was shooting a scene in which the film’s not-exactly-autobiographical protagonist, Adam, comes out to his own not-exactly-autobiographical father. “The feelings were absolutely the same: ” You should also know that this suddenly just-about-exactly-autobiographical father-and-son scene, like much of the film, would be shot in Haigh’s actual childhood home just outside Croydon, England. “I didn’t even know how to comprehend it,” he says. “I’ve got some version of my dad sitting in the chair where my dad used to sit, in let’s say.”
