Andrew Haigh

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.

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 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.

People like a bit of honesty in films.

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

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

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

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

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.

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 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 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'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.

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.

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

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.

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