Andrew Haigh has built a career watching people at the precise moment their lives come apart — and finding, in the wreckage, something close to grace.
Haigh came up as an assistant editor, a job he initially took for money but stayed in for the education.
It was a great place to understand how films are put together, but also to work out how I wanted to put a film together — the rhythms I wanted, how I wanted to tell my stories.
That instinct for rhythm has become central to his filmmaking work. A career reel played with crucial scenes from his potent works such as “Weekend,” “Lean on Pete” and HBO’s “Looking.” Haigh is required to fall in love with his actors before he can shoot them.
“Once I’ve fallen in love with them, you care about them and you want to show them for their brilliance,” he said.
He keeps rehearsals light and conversation heavy, talking around a project rather than drilling it, hoping performers will offer up “those flickers of vulnerability” that most people instinctively conceal.
The preoccupation is personal. Asked about his fascination with families coming apart, Haigh traced it to his own childhood.
“My family fractured when I was very young. I was nine years old,” he said. “I’m fascinated by what people do when things crumble. Can we be resilient? Can we find a way to cope?”
From “Weekend” through “45 Years,” sex in a Haigh film tends to be less about sex than about identity.
“It’s a way for you to understand yourself as much as it is connecting with somebody else,” he explains.
“People want to work with me now, and that’s an incredible thing,” he explained. “I never thought that would be something I’d reach.”
A Long Winter
Courtesy of TIFF
“A Long Winter” is where much of that history converges.
The film makes the question easier to answer. “A Long Winter” plays like Haigh’s response to “This Boy’s Life” by way of “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford” — a coming-of-age wound set against a mythic, pitiless frontier, patient enough to let the landscape carry much of the emotion.
Hechinger, all raw nerve and watchfulness, announces himself as a star. Balfe is haunting as a mother whose absence hollows out everything around her. Moss-Bachrach, grizzled and heartbreaking as the father, gives the film its ballast. It is not an obvious mainstream play. But then, neither is much of Haigh’s filmography.
This time, the circumstances are a bit different.
“A Long Winter” comes from Mubi, a distributor whose ambitions have expanded significantly after “The Substance” broke through with five Oscar nominations, including best picture. Mubi now has both the appetite and, increasingly, the campaign infrastructure to make a film like this part of the conversation.
None of it is guaranteed but Haigh’s films have never been. His work has a familiar history of being passionately embraced by critics and audiences before finding itself left off the final list.
At 53, Haigh also suggested that the work may be entering a new phase.
The films about missing mothers, fractured families and unclaimed grief may have run their course. He described projects that would take him somewhere different, including a film about the environment and a television project set in 1980s New York.
“I’m very different from when I started making movies,” he says. “I always want the film to speak to where I’m at in my life.”
