'What if?' conversations intrigue Andrew Scott in 'All of Us Strangers'

When writer/director Andrew Haigh was working on the screenplay for “All of Us Strangers,” he thought back on his own childhood, the people he had lost and the experiences he had had.

“While the film is not autobiographical, it’s certainly very, very personal to me,” he says. “People who know me can see myself on that screen like I’m there.”

Even more surreal: The film was shot in Haigh’s childhood home, one that brought its own memories.

“It’s so important to feel intimately connected to the material…I wanted my collaborators to feel intimately connected, too. If I can put myself in a vulnerable position, I kind of hope that everyone else can come to that.”

Andrew Scott, who plays the leading role, was on board. “It’s so much about loving and being loved,” he says. Adam, his character, is in a purgatory of sorts, unable to move on from a relationship. “Some part of his growth as a person has been curtailed…and in order for him to live or love himself, you need to be seen by your parents.”

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Jamie Bell and Claire Foy play Adam's parents in "All of Us Strangers."

That introduces another “dream-like” section of the film: Adam “visits” his parents. Flashbacks to when they were younger put him back in their home, letting him talk about those issues that worry him. The parents (played by Jamie Bell and Claire Foy) died in a car accident when he was 12. That means he didn’t get a chance to talk with them about issues later in his life. Those conversations help him face realities in his 40s.

“It definitely goes in a very different direction than what the original novel (‘Strangers’) was,” Haigh says. “There’s the essence of the novel, but that’s what I love about adaptation. You can take an idea and make it your own and, somehow, you’re connecting with that original novel.”

The conversations Adam has are much like situations in a dream. “There’s a real potency to waking up our emotions,” Scott says. “Sometimes you can wake up incredibly upset, grief stricken, very angry. There’s something very childlike about the character for me to go, ‘It doesn’t take much to bring you back to childhood.’ He conjures up these people himself. It’s really about the wonder of love.”

For Haigh, it was often a matter of reconciling what the story was saying. “I knew that this could be a traditional ghost story. But that didn’t feel totally right. I guess what I always tried to concentrate on was, ‘What is the emotional truth of what Adam is needing or wanting in this moment?’ I just kept focusing in on, ‘Why have these people appeared in his life? What is he needing?’ It’s like existing in a sort of dreamscape.”

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Director Andrew Haigh, left, and Andrew Scott on the set of "All of Us Strangers." 

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Scott, best known for his work in “Fleabag” (as the “hot” priest) and “1917,” says “Strangers” delves into that part of the mind that enables people to have conversations with people they haven’t seen in 10 years or creating scenarios that haven’t happened.

“It’s something that we all think about,” he says. “We don’t know what’s going to happen to us after we die. There’s something that’s very human about trying to go beyond humanity and go beyond logic – even the idea of bringing people back in our imaginations is foolhardy, but we do. We imagine falling in love with people. We imagine people coming back to see us.”

For Adam, it’s also an opportunity talk to his parents about being gay, a conversation he never had.

“I’ve wanted, for a long time, to tell a story about family and its relationship to gayness or to queerness and how it can be very different for a queer kid to grow up within an essentially heterosexual family,” Haigh says.

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Director Andrew Haigh.

Scott related to the concept and saw the role as a collaboration of their experiences. “Our initial conversations weren’t about acting,” he says. “It would have felt a little perverse to create a character that was too far away from what Andrew’s experience growing up might have been or what my experience might have been. I wanted it to be sort of unadorned.”

As a result, when Adam has those conversations with his parents, they’re entirely natural.

“There’s an authenticity of what is coming out of Andrew in those moments,” Haigh says. “The emotion that comes out of Andrew is so genuine it makes me cry now, and I’ve literally seen it 2,000 times.”

"All of Us Strangers" is now in theaters. 

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