‘All Of Us Strangers’ Helmer Andrew Haigh & Editor Jonathan Alberts On Crafting An Extremely Personal “Puzzle” Of A Film – The Process

When Andrew Haigh’s longtime editor Jonathan Alberts first read the script for his latest feature, All of Us Strangers, he saw that the writer-director was entering into new territory.

“It felt to me…like what you were trying to do was a little different than what you’ve done before,” Alberts tells Haigh on The Process, “within the same Andrew Haigh kind of family, but certainly something that wasn’t exactly what you were comfortable with, maybe.”

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Part of this came down to genre and tone. “Usually, my films are pretty based within a grounded reality,” Haigh explains, “and so trying to make something that was taking off from reality pretty quickly within the story was certainly a little bit nerve-wracking.”

The other most daunting aspect to the project for the filmmaker was the fact that, while not autobiographical, it was nonetheless extremely personal to him. “People who know me know how much of me is within the film,” says Haigh. “So [making the film was] a nerve-racking process because you’re essentially saying, ‘If you don’t like this, I’m going to feel like it means you don’t like me, on a very basic, personal level.'”

Interestingly, in heading into his work on the film, Alberts felt the same. The script resonated so personally, he said, that it felt like it was written with him in mind. “I think when I read it, I was pretty floored. Not that it had come out of you, but that you’d brought it together in such a way that was super moving,” says the editor. “Oftentimes I’ll read a novel and feel a really strong emotional reaction to it, but that doesn’t often happen in a script. I think it was really beautifully written and you could feel it on the page, for sure, and that was super exciting.”

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An acclaimed romantic fantasy loosely inspired by Taichi Yamada’s 1987 novel Strangers, All of Us Strangers follows the lonely gay Londoner Adam (Andrew Scott), who one night in his near-empty tower block, has a chance encounter with Harry (Paul Mescal), a mysterious neighbor who punctures the rhythm of his everyday life. As a relationship develops between them, Adam is preoccupied with memories of the past and finds himself drawn back to the suburban town where he grew up, and the childhood home where his parents (Claire Foy and Jamie Bell), appear to be living — just as they were on the day they died, 30 years before.

The emotional underpinnings of the Searchlight title, Alberts explains, had to do with an experience he and Haigh shared of “growing up in the ’80s, growing up gay, kind of growing up with the specter of AIDS happening and trying to deal with all sorts of feelings of grief or trauma and shame and all of these things.”

While All of Us Strangers was tricky, both tonally and as a story rooted deeply in internal experience, another challenge of the project for Alberts was figuring out how to grapple with the way in which the protagonist ends up “slipping between these worlds of the 1980s and contemporary London” in the story.

“We wanted the audience to feel dislocated, but anchored, not mired in confusion, but consistently questioning, is this real? Is this not real?” says the editor. “I feel like you always want to have an audience ask those questions, and you want to keep them active, and to keep putting the puzzle together. But when you’re creating a film that is essentially a bit of a puzzle, it’s always a question of, is this puzzle going to fit together? Because you can create a puzzle that doesn’t quite fit together, and people are just like, ‘I don’t know what’s going on.'”

This is often the case, Alberts says, “in early cuts of films,” though All of Us Strangers was “delicate editorially,” on the whole, and could have easily been steered in the wrong direction.

Part of the goal for Haigh, as far as the viewing experience, was to leave his audience looking inward and asking themselves questions of their own lives in the aftermath. “We wanted the film to live on and linger on in their minds, so that asking those questions reveals stuff about their own lives and stuff about their own stories,” he says, “stuff about the people they’ve loved in their lives and the people they’ve lost.”

Recently landing a British Independent Film Award for his work on the pic, Alberts came to All of Us Strangers after collaborating with Haigh on numerous acclaimed projects over the last decade, from films like Lean on Pete and 45 Years, to shows like HBO’s Looking. In conversation with the filmmaker on The Process, the pair talk cinematic references that informed All of Us Strangers, from Cries and Whispers to Jacob’s Ladder and Solaris, how Alberts got even further into Haigh’s vision for the film via music playlists, why the relationship between a director and editor is a “weird” and “intense” one, and more.

World premiering to critical acclaim at Telluride, the Gotham Award-nominated All of Us Strangers debuts in theaters on December 22. View the full conversation between its writer-director and editor above.