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.
— Andrew Haigh
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.
'Call Me by Your Name' is essentially the universal nature of love.
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.
I always quite like the idea of casting against type when I'm looking for and trying to understand who a character is.
People like a bit of honesty in films.
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.
Homophobia obviously still exists, but it is a lot more subtle, and it is a lot more in the background.
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.
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.
Whoever my films are about, they'll hopefully still have my sensibility, whatever that is.
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'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.
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 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.
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!'
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.
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.
I only want to tell films that I really feel passionate about telling.
When I made 'Weekend,' the idea that 'Moonlight' would win the Oscar would be like, Whaaaaat? Like, that's not going to happen.
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.
I wanted to make films since I was young. My background had nothing to do with anything creative, so it seemed an impossible task.
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 didn't enjoy growing up. I was lonely. That's probably my base level to feel like that.
When you make a film, everyone wants to define it.
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.
Relationships are so important to all of us.
I haven't got muscles, and I don't live in West Hollywood.
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.
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.
Lots of shows get cancelled, and then they never get to end their stories. It's just over.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
With supporting roles, you just want really good actors that can make it bigger than what's there.
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.
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.'
I've certainly felt alone a lot of my life.
I do make films for personal reasons.
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.
I'm interested in how we understand ourselves in our relatioships and how we define ourselves.
The longer you get in a relationship, the harder it becomes to confront problems.
I was not a happy teenager in the slightest.
When I started making films, it was never that I had this great ambition to only do gay-themed material.
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've always felt like an outsider, whether in school or when I'm working or within the industry or just in society at large.
A lot of gay-themed films are terrible. And mainstream audiences and the press aren't interested, understandably.
