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Andrew Haigh
Andrew Haigh: ‘What interests me is the way in which loving relationships define us.’ Photograph: Karen Robinson for the Observer
Andrew Haigh: ‘What interests me is the way in which loving relationships define us.’ Photograph: Karen Robinson for the Observer

Andrew Haigh: ‘It takes a kind of insane self-belief to go on’

This article is more than 8 years old

The British director won acclaim with his 2011 drama Weekend, about a fleeting love affair between two men. His new film, 45 Years, stars Charlotte Rampling and tells the moving story of an elderly couple facing marital crisis. Here he talks about relationships, identity, and the hard slog of making it in the movies

It could be used as a new critical yardstick: how long does a film stay with you after you leave the cinema? Can it be dismissed in the time it takes to wipe a cheek with a handkerchief? Director and writer Andrew Haigh’s 45 Years, based on a story by David Constantine, is in that rare category of films that continues to move, is subtly shattering and does not loosen its hold. It is about a couple in their 70s, outstandingly played by Charlotte Rampling and Tom Courtenay, who are about to celebrate their 45th wedding anniversary when a letter arrives with news that threatens the balance of their marriage and reminds them – and us – of the unknowability of others. The past, as LP Hartley famously put it, is another country and, in this film, what happened there is open to drastic reinterpretation.

On a breezy summer morning, I meet Andrew Haigh – good-looking, bearded, engaging – in a hotel in Holborn which everyone appears to be treating like a second office (the room in which we talk is called “The Study”). The film is a new departure for him: his first features were about young gay men. His debut, Greek Pete (2009), described a year in the life of a London rent boy. His second, Weekend (2011), was a melancholy film about a passion that ambushes two men over a single weekend and which achieved cult status at speed. It won Haigh the London Critics’ Circle award for breakthrough British film-maker and he made it on to the New York Times list of 20 international directors to watch (the only UK director on the list). But he tells me now that the difficulty with making gay films is that “because there is so little gay representation on screen” the gay element tends to overshadow other critical issues. And being typecast as a “gay film-maker” can be divisive: “There is still this weird feeling that gay people are fundamentally different from straight people when, actually, we have similar fears and doubts and hopes – although we might have slightly more emotional baggage to drag along for being a minority.” He needed to unburden himself of some of his ideas in a non-gay framework.

The film team review 45 Years Guardian

45 Years is set in Norfolk in a way that recalls Noel Coward’s line: “very flat, Norfolk”. It catches the uncompromising atmosphere of England’s most unyielding county. The palette is drained of colour, delicately suggestive of the flatlands of old age and, in the opening shot, we see Charlotte Rampling’s Kate from a distance, walking her dog along a field with mist at its edges. The house she walks back to, and in which she and her husband, Geoff, live, is pleasantly unexceptional. Haigh explains that it was important to resist prettifying: “I don’t want to overcomplicate my films with beauty. Houses on screen, especially in British films, tend either to be opulent or dreadfully run down, whereas most people live somewhere in between.” This middle ground, he implies, is matched by the emotional ambiguity of his characters’ lives.

But what of Charlotte Rampling herself? Didn’t Haigh worry, before casting, that she might appear implausibly glamorous as a retired teacher? “One hundred per cent. I desperately wanted her to do the film but the reservation was: would you believe Charlotte Rampling would walk around a local department store in Norwich?” He adds: “And I was living in Norwich at the time because my partner was doing an MA in creative writing at UEA… Anyway, we gave Charlotte the clothes and makeup of an everyday woman but did not want to downplay her beauty. She has such passion and intrigue and I did not want to lose that. What I love so much about her is that you watch her face and she invites you in to look but there is always an ‘OK, don’t get too close,’ and I love that conflict. She made sense of the film’s exploration of the idea that you can never truly know someone. She possesses it.” Courtenay’s Geoff, meanwhile, passes the Norwich department store test to excel as an unshaven, dazed, vulnerable old man while, at the same time, giving us glimpses – mischievous flashes – of his younger self.

Haigh does not rehearse his actors. “Rehearsals steal spontaneity from the process. I have tried them but don’t know what to do with them.” What matters is creating an environment that convinces, that allows the chemistry to be right: “Creating a world that feels as if they have been together for decades, choosing books for their shelves, deciding which mugs they are going to have, what their daily routine is.” In lieu of rehearsals, he spent three days in Paris with Rampling, mulling over her character. He did the same with Tom Courtenay in London. Then they just went ahead and shot the film.

Towards the end, Geoff says: “The choices we make when we are young are pretty bloody important.” Looking back on his own 42 years, Haigh reflects that, when he was younger, he was unaware of how momentous his choices might be: “Am I going to university? What jobs am I going to do? Am I going to come out? Who am I going to try to have a relationship with?” At that age, you are more likely to “drink and take drugs than care about your choices. It is only when you look back that you realise: Oh my God, if I hadn’t done that, I wouldn’t be here today doing this.”

The film is exceptionally sensitive to time. It creates space for reverie but does not drag. “Time interests me,” Haigh says, “Our lives are like a wave that keeps going gently forward while nothing seems to be happening and yet, the older you get, the more you realise time is running out. I like compressing time. My films don’t have a great deal of plot, they are relatively slow paced, but the condensed time framework gives energy and a certain forward momentum.”

Haigh was born in Harrogate – both his parents are from Yorkshire. His father worked as a salesman for a drinks company, his mother was a housewife (she now has her own company). When – and because – they separated, he went to boarding school which was, “pretty hideous for me. Being surrounded by 1,000 white, middle-class people is not my idea of an education”. He studied history at Newcastle and, at that point, had not come out. “I found it very difficult to come out. It took a long time. I wasn’t out at university. I was still in relationships with girls. I didn’t really come out until my mid-20s. I didn’t tell my family until then and it was a very difficult process for me.”

He is upfront, too, about another difficult process: becoming a film-maker. It might seem as if he had a good start when he reveals that his first job in film was as Ishmail Merchant’s assistant for Merchant Ivory Productions, but the reality was far from luxurious: “I sent a CV and badgered them and said please give me a job and they paid me – it is illegal now, thank God – £50 a week.” But he admired their “personal, passionate way of working” while likening the experience to joining a “slightly dysfunctional – very dysfunctional – family”. He went on to be a runner for TV shows, a trainee assistant editor on Notting Hill and worked on Gladiator, which was “really exciting”. But pursuing a dream requires persistence: “It is very, very hard, you have to keep at it. Everybody thinks you should give up – my family did. My dad was saying: ‘Look, maybe just go into a nice graduate scheme and get a normal job.’ They worry – of course they do – that you’re not going to have any money.” What is hardest of all, he explains, is plucking up the courage, once you are employed in the industry, to leave it again to do your own thing.

In 2003, Haigh made that break and went to the “not particularly prestigious” LA Film School. He had been rejected by the National Film and Television School in Beaconsfield and had been thinking, “I’m never going to make it.” Trying to direct and write involves “rejection after rejection after rejection and it is scary. It can take a year to write something and some people will think it is rubbish and it can be hideously embarrassing to show it to anybody but you have to deal with all these things. You have to have some kind of insane self-belief to go on.”

Tom Courtenay and Charlotte Rampling as Geoff and Kate in 45 Years.

In the context of his difficulty with coming out, it might seem surprising that he has made such sexually explicit films. Were the films another – more public – way of coming out? He laughs and says that going from being in the closet to making “a film about male escorts having sex” was a big jump, as was inviting his parents to the screening of Greek Pete, along with all the male escorts from the film: “They all sat together. My parents are incredibly supportive and have no issue with anything. I felt liberated. Afterwards, my mum was chatting away to the main guy in Greek Pete at the BFI after-party and I was like: ‘Gosh, this was certainly not something I expected.’” The film cost a mere £5,000 but enabled Haigh to call himself a film-maker: “It only just qualified as a feature film. I had to extend the credits to get it to 70 minutes! But it made me feel: ‘I can do this.’” It was “completely uncommercial but a way for me to deal with my sexuality and do something relatively shocking to kickstart myself”.

Haigh now lives in San Francisco, where he has been working on the gay comic drama Looking for HBO (I ask him whether the series was a hit and he laughs disarmingly and says: “No!”) He looks forward to coming back to London – he misses it. During our time together, we touch on the subject of melancholy, a quality Haigh’s films share and which he insists defines his character (it is a stretch to believe this on the strength of our upbeat meeting, but I do). “Funny how you forget the things in life that make you happy,” says Charlotte Rampling’s Kate in the film. And melancholy is not the only thing that links Haigh’s work. I put it to him that, if you were to discount the sex, Kate and Geoff (no children, doting on their dog) could be a gay couple? “Absolutely. Relationships are relationships. There is still a struggle to understand each other. Weekend could have been about a man and woman and 45 could have been about two men.”

Above all, Weekend and 45 Years examine love – in youth and age. “It is very hard to know what love means,” says Haigh. “Weekend is about love’s first excitement and 45 Years about what that love can become. What interests me is the way in which loving relationships define us – we come to understand our identity through them.” And this becomes more complicated over time because: “You change but the love does not change.”

It was only after seeing the film and meeting Haigh that I read the David Constantine story that forms the basis for 45 Years. And I found there lines that address Haigh’s doubt about what love means as the self hangs on in there, defying change. This is the question the film asks: “Whatever is in there behind the eyes or around the heart or wherever else it is, whatever it is that is not the husk of us will cease when the husk does but in the meantime never ages, does it?”

45 Years is released in the UK on 28 August. Andrew Haigh will be talking at Somerset House, London as part of the Films of My Life series on 17 August

  • This article was amended on 9 August 2015. An earlier version said that Weekend was released in 2001. This has been corrected.

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