ANDREW HAIGH

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.

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.

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.

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 all of my male characters, I suppose, in all of my films, they're not necessarily the traditional version of masculinity.

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 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.

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

You can't expect to connect with everybody, and that's all right. The more I make films, I'm learning that you don't have to make films for everybody. A film can be made for a smaller group of people than that, and it still warrants an existence.

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.

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.

If you're struggling, it's easy to feel powerless until you take control of it and assert what you want. I can understand that feeling. I can understand how it feels to be alone, to not want to get help from people and to not trust people who are actually wanting the best for you. I feel like that's true for a lot of people, actually.

I feel like, throughout lots of my life, especially growing up, I felt powerless.

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

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

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

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

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 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.

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.

We can all understand that feeling of being alone in the world trying to find ways to not be alone.

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 rode a horse once when I was young, and I fell off. I never wanted to ride a horse again.

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

I do make films for personal reasons.