Top 99 Quotes & Sayings by Andrew Haigh

In the end, with all of my films, I want to understand the continuity between these films and understand what they're trying to do.

I was not a happy teenager in the slightest.

A lot of gay-themed films are terrible. And mainstream audiences and the press aren't interested, understandably.

I'm interested in how we understand ourselves in our relatioships and how we define ourselves.

I think it is a burden... that we constantly realise that there isn't that much rhyme or reason to why something happens. If we think about that too much, it can make all of our decisions very stressful.

I've traveled a fair amount around the country and visited many states. It's amazing that Oregon is so different from Idaho; even though Portland isn't that far from Boise, it's a completely different city. Colorado is very different from Oregon. From a European perspective, I've always found that fascinating about America.

As a person, I am totally obsessed with the choices and decisions we make in our lives and how they dictate the course of our lives. Seemingly random choices that we make end up defining everything.

SXSW can feel very male, very straight, and very white, and though it's a great festival, when you have a film that's different, it's hard to find your place.

With supporting roles, you just want really good actors that can make it bigger than what's there.

I always quite like the idea of casting against type when I'm looking for and trying to understand who a character is.

Homophobia obviously still exists, but it is a lot more subtle, and it is a lot more in the background.

People don't think the struggles gay people have are worth talking about because everyone's decided that we're all equals now. Those struggles are much more subtle now. But the weight of being different does carry on.

I'm gay, and I know a lot of very liberal straight people, and, of course, they're absolutely fine, but they still won't necessarily come and see a film like 'Weekend.'

It fails everybody, pretty much, the American Dream, but people are driven by it. I don't think we're driven by the same sense of hope in Europe. We're driven by pessimism more.

There's something about film that offers this opportunity to stick to a very, very clear single protagonist's point of view, and I like that.

You can achieve one thing, but because of that, you have to adapt or lose something else. If you end up in a relationship, you sometimes have to lose the closeness of your friendships, for example, or you have to move away somewhere... For me, that creates the sense of melancholy which I think exists in most people's lives.

I always think that there's a weight of prejudice from the past that gay people perhaps carry around with them. Even if it doesn't exist so much around them, they still have a feeling of being excluded, and perceived prejudice is almost as unsettling as actual prejudice.

I wanted to make films since I was young. My background had nothing to do with anything creative, so it seemed an impossible task.

Being gay, you're kind of forced to ask, I suppose, very existential questions from a very, very early age. Your identity becomes so important to you because you're trying to understand it, and, I think, from the age of, like, 9, you're being forced to ask questions... that other kids maybe don't have to ask.

I am fascinated by that person who is trying to live authentically, but they are on the outside of society, so how do they manage in the world around them?

No relationships are perfect. When they develop, there are things that have happened before in your life that you maybe don't discuss. And there are always fault lines within every relationship. I believe it doesn't take too much pressure to be placed on those fault lines for them to start cracking apart.

In the early stages of being out, you meet all these people from all kinds of backgrounds, and the one thing you have in common is you're all gay, but then you start to realise how different your experiences actually are.

My straight friends accept I'm gay but they forget that some people don't. Even now, if I go into a party, people don't usually assume I'm gay, so you have to keep coming out. And if you say you've got a film with a gay subject matter, you can sometimes see people's eyes going, 'Oh! OK!'

I would certainly not support Trump in any way shape or form, but I want to have sympathy.

I do make films for personal reasons.

Lynne Ramsay's 'Ratcatcher' blew me away when it came out. When I started making short films, I would watch that film over and over again, marvelling at how that story visually unfolded.

Our past absolutely defines everything we do in the present. We can't help it. We're made by the events of our past, so there's no escaping it.

Lots of shows get cancelled, and then they never get to end their stories. It's just over.

My films are very everyday, and people don't always want to go to the cinema to see ordinary lives. They want to see something a bit more extraordinary. I get that desire, but it's not the kind of film I want to make.

I think the gay community is made up of so many little different things, different parts, different people... I think that can be quite hard for people. You think you've found your tribe, but actually, that isn't your tribe, and then you have to keep searching for what kind of makes sense.

When I started making films, it was never that I had this great ambition to only do gay-themed material.

I don't want a performance to give me everything. You can look at Charlotte Rampling in '45 Years,' and you don't really know what she's thinking, but you know something interesting is happening.

People like a bit of honesty in films.

I haven't got muscles, and I don't live in West Hollywood.

In stories, those are the moments that hit me the most: when people really don't expect it, don't have it much in their lives, and suddenly, an act of kindness. It's like, 'Oh, God! Heartbreaking!'

I think it's always interesting to me how we keep secrets from the ones we love the most. You could be so close to someone, but still there was something you can't express, you can't tell them, because it's almost too painful and too hard for you to articulate yourself, because you don't fully understand it.

When you make a film, everyone wants to define it.

I've certainly felt alone a lot of my life.

I love the fact that James Ivory made films about Britain, made 'Howards End' and 'The Remains of the Day,' or that Paul Thomas Anderson made 'Phantom Thread.' They're about Britishness, but they're from an American perspective. And I actually think they're fantastic in the way that they understand Britishness.

I didn't enjoy growing up. I was lonely. That's probably my base level to feel like that.

People have very difficult lives. We can judge them for making the wrong decisions, but if you look harder and understand that these lives can be difficult, hopefully you're at least a bit more sympathetic to the decisions these people have to make.

People's lives often don't turn out as they expect.

We get older, and we get more wrinkles, but fundamentally, we stay the same... You have the same fears and doubts and concerns and dreams and passions and all those kinds of things, so I feel like you don't change as much as you think you do.

Our lives are largely made up of a series of mundane moments, but those little moments are often the finesse that shapes our entire existence; it's not necessarily the big, dramatic events, although they do, too, of course.

I don't believe in 'happy ever after' at all as a concept.

For me, all you want from your actor is for them to engage on a deeply emotional level with the material. If you feel like that happens, directing the actors is pretty much done at that point.

Whoever my films are about, they'll hopefully still have my sensibility, whatever that is.

I have seen a lot of gay-themed films that didn't really express how I see being gay at this moment in the world. There never seemed to be a kind of authentic depiction of relationships.

When I made 'Weekend,' the idea that 'Moonlight' would win the Oscar would be like, Whaaaaat? Like, that's not going to happen.

I think people do like extremes in cinema. There are very few films told about everyday middle-class couples, which is odd to me, as there are a lot of everyday middle-class couples.

'Call Me by Your Name' is essentially the universal nature of love.

One of the reasons I wanted to make 'Lean on Pete' was that it wasn't about identity. For me, it's about something more essential underneath: the need to have somewhere to live, to be safe, and have someone to look after you.

Relationships are so important to all of us.

The longer you get in a relationship, the harder it becomes to confront problems.

I think people have this idea that I just lived in my place in England and never left. During 'Looking,' I was in America for four years. I've got a green card. I spend half my time there. It doesn't feel like an alien world at all.

If you don't open your eyes to other people's lives, you can't even begin to understand how the world works at all.

I've always felt like an outsider, whether in school or when I'm working or within the industry or just in society at large.

I only want to tell films that I really feel passionate about telling.

I'm not very good at thinking, 'This is the thing I should do now to help my career.' I mean, I want to keep my career going, but that's not what draws me to a story.

It's very important that all the supporting characters feel like they've existed in the world, that they've had a history, and they'll go on to have a history within the scope of the story rather than just popping up and then disappearing.