Andrew Haigh, creator of the critically acclaimed queer film ‘All of Us Strangers’, believes that queer representation and stories in Hollywood only give “an illusion that everything has changed.”
During the Q&A after the screening of ‘All of Us Strangers’ at the British Film Institute last January 17, Haigh gave his full honesty on how he has viewed Hollywood’s change in the past decade as far as queer acceptance is concerned if there was even any change at all.
“I think that there’s an illusion that everything has changed. And it’s much easier. But I don’t know if that’s true,” he said. Haigh explained that he has pitched several queer projects, but he has not received any enthusiastic response. “I don’t think it’s because of the queerness. It’s about what you’re saying about queerness.”
‘All of Us Strangers’ is one of the most notable queer films he created. It stars Andrew Scott, Paul Mescal, Claire Foy, and Jamie Bell, and tells the story of a lonely gay man who looks into his past so he can confront his trauma.
An example he gave was a historical love story “where you’re saying it was rough in the past, and now everything’s fine.” By Hollywood’s standards, it would be just “all good.”
He also shared that “a year or two ago,” he tried to pitch a TV show around the Act Up grassroots political organization of the 1980s aimed at helping people with AIDS. This show would have been based on Sarah Schulman’s book “Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP, New York, 1987-1993.”