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. At the 53rd Telluride Film Festival, the British writer-director received the Silver Medallion, the festival’s career tribute, alongside Sandra Hüller and John Malkovich. The honor recognizes a sensibility built one film at a time rather than a single breakout.
It also coincided with the world premiere of “A Long Winter,” his first feature since “All of Us Strangers” and the culmination of a project he had been chasing for nearly two decades. While onstage before his new film bowed on the first night of the serene Colorado festival, Haigh seemed faintly astonished to be there at all. When asked when he first pictured himself as a filmmaker, he suggested that it still hadn’t happened.”I never thought it would be possible,” he says, describing a childhood far removed from the creative industries.
And then, step by step, I started thinking about it more seriously and trying to make it work.” 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. 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. I was nine years old,” he said. Can we find a way to cope?” That interest in intimacy dates to his first film, the 2009 docudrama “Greek Pete,” a portrait of a London escort made for a few thousand pounds.
Watching his subjects navigate sex and their persistent need for connection reshaped his understanding of what his work could explore. From “Weekend” through “45 Years,” sex in a Haigh film tends to be less about sex than about identity. Two decades into his career, being “an Andrew Haigh film” has become its own shorthand — a designation that, he acknowledges, has made the notoriously difficult task of financing intimate, unhurried movies somewhat easier.
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