All of Us Strangers always feels real, even if it doesn’t always quite look real. This is the key masterstroke of Andrew Haigh’s metaphysical drama, which finds a lonely screenwriter in his 40s named Adam (Andrew Scott) falling for his mysterious new neighbor, Harry (Paul Mescal)—while also reconnecting with his long-dead parents in the flesh, as if they never left the home in which he grew up. These explorations of aching intimacy stay grounded in the cast’s nuanced portrayals—scenes of everything from a heated sexual encounter to a wrenching late-in-life coming-out resonate as true, no matter the plane of reality on which the film is operating.

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This was the goal for Haigh and his cinematographer, Jamie D. Ramsay, as they got to mapping out All of Us Strangers, which has met wide critical acclaim since its Telluride premiere in September and is a strong awards contender, currently up for several awards including best feature at the Independent Spirit Awards and best actor (Scott) at the Golden Globes. They deftly intermix stark naturalism with what Haigh identifies as the movie’s “liminal space,” that ethereal area wherein the film’s bigger ideas about love and loss get thoroughly unpacked. 

With Strangers now out in select theaters, Haigh and Ramsay selected a handful of critical scenes to discuss, from the rich ideas behind them to the complex methods of executing them. Light spoilers follow.

The Encounter

This is the first time Adam sees his deceased father (played by Jamie Bell), with the visual language communicating a sense of unease from our hero’s unreliable point of view, as the trees rustle in the wind. Adam winds up following him to the home where he was raised—and only then do we realize exactly who this stranger is to him. It’s the initial scene to test the audience’s sense of reality.

Andrew Haigh: We talked a lot about trying to get this moment right, so it’s filled with mystery and strangeness, but still felt grounded in where we are in the world. This is weirdly one of my favorite shots in the whole film. I love how the dad appears from behind Andrew [Scott]’s head. You see Andrew open his eyes as if the magic is happening, and then the camera just moves very delicately and then you just see this little tiny figure.

Jamie D. Ramsay: What was important about this for us was to create that feeling that something is different and something is moving. It’s introducing the spirit. We had big old wind machines and we shuffled the schedule around to try and find a gap in the weather to get some good light—some very rare British sunlight sneaking through the bottom of the clouds. We had two afternoons to shoot this whole scene. The tricky thing was trying to bracket the different pieces of the blocking, across the park, through the trees, out into the field, so that in the cut it all seems that it’s slipping into, as Andrew puts it, this liminal period of time.

Haigh: Those fucking wind machines, though. I will just say they were a nightmare. [Laughs] It’s like a helicopter going off as you’re trying to have this beautiful, subtle, delicate moment, and there’s this constant drone of a wind machine, with people screaming over the noise.

The Hug

A particular pain point for Adam, in reuniting with his parents, is the fact that he could never come out to them before they died when he was still a child. In one of the film’s most poignant moments, then, he finally comes out to his father as gay—an anxious, ultimately deeply tender scene filmed in increasingly tight close-ups.

Haigh: There’s no point going into a really tight close-up until we feel the audience is ready to be into that close-up and the actor is ready to be that close up. This is probably the tightest we get in the whole scene. It’s such a special moment, this hug. I love the way you can feel the texture of that sweatshirt he’s wearing. You really can feel it. So much of the film for us was about texture and allowing that to come through as a source of memory and what that can do for Adam in that moment.

Ramsay: I remember us speaking about eye-lines when it came to the scene, and how we wanted to start wider on the eye-line and slowly creep in and tighten it up as the things started to thaw during the conversation. What I thought was so beautiful about how you guys ended up cutting this was how you tighten up to this moment here. I remember watching the blocking of the scene, Andrew, and just seeing how it evolved and how these two responded off one another. It was one of the scenes in the film where I had to struggle to keep it together while shooting it. It was really, really touching and intense.

We never overtly storyboarded stuff or anything like that. It was really just being honest about watching how your blocking evolved and just seeing where those moments naturally occurred, and Andrew and I were responding to those.

Haigh: If you force it too much, you lose some of the magic. We’re working out exactly how the scene is going to feel when you realize that this is the moment we need to be close. This is the moment when we want to reveal something within a close-up. It’s often instinctual; you can only plan so much. There’s no point sitting in a room somewhere days before and planning exactly when you’re going to go close and when exactly you’re going to stay wide.

Ramsay: It was so important for me to observe Andrew’s process of rehearsal and blocking because there was so much nuance that happens between him and the actors during that phase, which actually educates me as well. This was a film where I wanted to have my hands on the camera and operate, listening to all of that direction and understanding the nuance of it would just allow us to be so reactive in the moment.

The Club

As Adam grows closer to Harry, a turning point in their relationship arrives on the night they go out clubbing. Filmed with a dizzying, elliptical dreaminess, the joy and promise of the evening gradually descends into something more slippery and unclear, leaving us to question the reality of the moment—especially once they take ketamine.

Haigh: I’ll let Jamie go on this one, because—Jesus Christ, this was a crazy day.

Ramsay: [Laughs] The club day had two levels to it. On the one hand, it was supposed to be representative of how a night out evolves, so there’s the pragmatic evolution of a night out, which starts exuberant and real and you’re in the mix and everything seems to be presented as normal. Then as soon as the guys go to the bathroom and have the ketamine, then it goes into another level—all of our poetic license occurred off the back of that. That was important just to be able to represent these stages practically. How would the lighting evolve through these stages? How would the camera language evolve?

We started off fairly traditional club-scene lighting. We wanted to use a fair bit of analog lighting that was representative of the ’80s, ’90s party time, so we had quite a lot of old stage lighting heads that we rigged up in the club. We had a little bit of intelligent lighting and then a broad spectrum of film lighting. It was important for all of it to be plugged into one source so that we could program everything to the music so that it was beat-matched and things like that. Then it was just about how we evolved the chaos of that lighting throughout the stages of the night. There was a 20% and then a 50%, and then right at the end it was 100% chaos with strobe at 80%.

When the boys came back from the bathroom, that’s when the flashing and the disco lights and everything were at max. It really needed to feel euphoric, almost as if we were in a pool of liquid and floating around. The ambience and the atmosphere needed to be palpable and almost as if you’re breathing in the light. What ketamine does to your world is it excludes all peripheral context and it just narrows you down into singular focus. That’s when we started to break the fourth wall and focus on singles between the two boys. The operation of the camera became really slippery and three-dimensional and rocky, representing the feeling of their legs being pulled out. The introduction of reflection, how reflection played a role there. All in all, I think we did that in one day.

Haigh: Yeah, it was one day. It was a long, noisy, long, noisy day. Jamie just did incredible work here, because it is so difficult to make clubs feel real and to really get across the sensation of being on drugs and how that feels in your body. It’s very, very complicated. And I think it was done masterfully. This whole sequence, when I saw it in the edit, I was so relieved. A bad club scene just cannot work, but it looked so beautiful. I adore it.

Ramsay: You cast a lot of extras that were part of that specific club scene. A lot of them had been going there for 20 years, I remember that story.

Haigh: Yeah, exactly. I used to go there, to this club in London, constantly all the time in the late ’90s. We got the right crowd. All those kinds of decisions are so important, that you’ve got to get the right people. There’s no point in having the wrong people in the background, otherwise the whole scene doesn’t work. And you’ve got to cram. And there was so little room. It’s not a big club and there’s 200 people, and there’s poor Jamie trying to get these crowds of people with the camera. Everybody’s dancing around him.

The Elevator

In their deserted London apartment building, Adam and Harry first get to know each other in the structure’s elevator, surrounded by their own reflections. This shot captures the rare moment where we’re with Harry alone.

Haigh: I’m always fascinated by reflections, about how they portray something different than who you really are or who you feel like you are inside. They can really help show that disconnect that we all feel in the world and that sense of isolation that we can feel. This elevator was a big, big conversation. We knew we were going to be in it a few times and we built it. It’s a box that we built on set with two-way reflective glass. We are based behind the glass shooting through glass, so obviously we don’t see ourselves, and then it was about manipulating some of those reflections just to give it this slightly off-balance feel. It was really important to me and Jamie from the very beginning of the film that even though it felt relatively realistic, it didn’t feel completely real. We needed the whole film to feel slightly shifted from reality from the very, very first frame of the film in order for you to buy and slip into what the film becomes. I love this shot. It’s the only real time we see him alone away from Adam.

Ramsay: When you shoot through two-way glass as opposed to the usual way of shooting reflections, you never experience the first reflection. So it’s always a carbon copy of the first reflection. So the character’s seeing their first reflection, but the camera never sees it. So what you’re actually seeing is a replicated blueprint of that to infinity. It’s almost as if objectively you’re seeing the multiple characters that exist in the personality, or the shattering of the personality. I thought that was beautiful.

The Sex

Adam and Harry are at their most vulnerable in Strangers’ vivid, nuanced sex scenes, which are both lovingly and exactingly shot by Ramsay. This frame, for instance, precisely identifies differences between the two men, as well as the ways in which they’re opening each other up. The rigorous character work was balanced by Haigh’s desire to make his sex scenes, well, sexy. Mission accomplished.

Haigh: This is just sexy. I don’t know what to say about it other than it’s just so sexy. [Laughs] Look, I think it’s an absolutely beautiful shot and it is very sexy, but also it speaks to their physicality, the way that they are positioned in the frame and the way that Harry is so open and comfortable—so relaxed in his position. And Adam is not. He’s less open. But it really helps the scene because what’s interesting is Harry is not necessarily as emotionally open as we think he is, and as the scene develops and we’re closer to them and he opens up about his life, there’s a contradiction there that I think is really fascinating. There’s also a certain vulnerability about the shot too. We’re always trying to find that strange mix of vulnerability and openness and beauty and sexiness and all of those things in an individual shot.

Ramsay: I remember us speaking about how we would represent the male gaze in this respect, and how to represent a subtle, poised sensuality that was never overt and never in your face. This actually goes for everything that you put forward on this movie. It was always about just having a subtle touch. Whereas one could look at a still frame of this and think that it’s a fairly robust image, what it felt like on the day, and then what it felt like in the cut, was exactly what you’re saying—it really represented this dance between the two of them, this push and this pull and this discovery. It’s always this part of a relationship when you’re getting to know each other and you’re starting to get comfortable and starting to feel each other’s physicality and presence. That’s always such a beautiful phase in a relationship.

Haigh: The position of Andrew’s hand is so important in making this shot what it is. The way that it’s so delicately there at the base of your stomach, which is such a vulnerable area. His hand is so gently on there, and Paul is so open to wanting that touch—that connection in this moment makes it a beautiful image.

It’s not done exactly beat for beat, but we have a lot of discussions about where hands are going to go. In the scene the first time that they have sex, there’s lots of legs—there’s lots of hands-on legs and feeling of thighs. We always knew that this is what we wanted. That was all discussed, and we know where Harry is going to go and where Adam’s going to go and it’s all absolutely discussed. But you also still hope there’s a little bit of freedom. I want the DP to be using their instincts about where to go within a scene. We want to be a third person within this scene watching.

Ramsay: With regards to the operating of this, it was exactly what you say now about just being the third person, the unseen person in the room—where in effect, you are also making love in that moment and you are responding to the emotion that’s being put across. Just setting this tone of this hallowed space on set, that was also part of the reason why we chose the 35 mm—the inherent discipline that’s around shooting on 35 mm. It’s so different from a digital discipline. And that discipline went hand in hand with this hallowed space that you created on set, which was the energy and the respect and the love and the passion that everybody had to make it.

The Nightmare

Strangers’ sense of reality comes gradually undone in the final act, never more so than in this cinematic tour de force. Adam’s relationships with Harry and his parents appear to blur in a sequence that seems to resemble both a child’s nightmare and an adult’s fantasy, anchored by the elaborate one-take shot of an adult Adam curling into bed with his mom and dad—or so he thinks.

Haigh: I knew this was a really important scene. It’s a long scene as well. It’s a good five or six pages. Initially we’d actually talked about doing coverage, and in the end, we didn’t. It’s all just one shot. I am so glad that we made that decision because I don’t think the scene would actually work without that sense of sustained tension within the shot. The way that the shot ends, the way it goes through from him feeling like he needs protection and safety and gets into the bed—we get closer and closer and closer and we’re feeling this beautiful intimate connection, and then there’s something bubbling up within. A fear starts to develop that he might lose all of this again and it’s going to vanish. It was a very complicated shot set-up, as Jamie will discuss, but it’s almost the exact length of a roll of film as well. You’re timing it almost perfectly. We did a bunch of takes where it ran out before we got to the end of the scene.

Ramsay: This scene arguably is representative of the entire film and the tragedy of him as a character. What was important was to find the essence of what a nightmare is. A nightmare is something that you can’t escape. Your subconscious mind is dealing some cards to you and you can’t escape it. And I think that’s what won us over in the sense of wanting to do it as an uncut shot, because we just wanted no escape from this moment. We didn’t want to pop the bubble of belief and the tension created by the shot.

Technically, I remember having to set up the system so that we could run a 1,000-foot mag so that we could actually hold the take. Running out on 400 feet was something that ultimately would mess you up. So we had a 1,000-foot mag on a 35 mm camera with a zoom lens above a bed in Andrew’s parents’ home that he grew up in. [Laughs] It had a very low ceiling, with a piece of equipment that probably weighs 50 kilograms in the end. It was probably the most challenging scene to do, and I remember in the beginning that it was a little bit tough to get the cast on board. It was a very delicate scene for them from an emotional perspective and this ballet of getting them in and out of bed was quite distracting. You and I were really like, “Guys, just please trust us on this one. It’s going to be beautiful, we have to make it work.” And I think eventually we won them over.

Haigh: We were sitting outside. Jamie and I were in the corridor just outside the bedroom watching the shot. You are using whatever that machine is to move the camera and move the zoom and do all those kinds of things. There was so much tension. We were both so tense. Because you know it’s a long scene. You need the whole shot to work. You need everything to work, every movement, every line of dialogue, every emotional beat, and the tension is insane when you’re waiting. I think we did 12 takes in the end. But it works. Sometimes when you take those risks, it really does. There’s some magic that appears when you take those risks. They don’t always pay off, but this one absolutely did.

This interview has been edited and condensed.