Latest / MUBI Podcast / ALL OF US STRANGERS — Andrew Haigh believes in the Power of Love

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ALL OF US STRANGERS — Andrew Haigh believes in the Power of Love · MUBI Podcast

• 0:00
  Heads up, this episode includes adult language, erotic themes, and something you might not be into... spoilers.
• 0:10
  If you're a regular listener to the show, you know that back in the mid 1980s, I was a teenager in the city of Pittsburgh, and the big commercial radio station played what you probably imagined they'd play in what was then a fading steel town.
• 0:24
  A lot of Springsteen, a lot of Zeppelin.
• 0:26
  There were also some country stations, oldies, soul.
• 0:30
  But then this one station changed its tune.
• 0:36
  WYDD-FM rebranded itself as the channel for Metro Music.
• 0:42
  WYDD, cruise with me Cruisin the MetroMetro music Synthy, modern, a lot of new wave or dance hits.
• 0:56
  And in May '86 there was this one single their DJs always spun...
• 1:02
  a throbbing dance pop number that kicks off with what might have been the first rap I ever heard.
• 1:08
  Sometimes you're better off deadThere's a gun in your hand and it's pointing at your headYou think you're mad... The first hit by the Pet Shop Boys.
• 1:15
  West End girls.In a West End town, a dead end worldThe East End boys and West End girlsWest End Girls topped the charts that year
• 1:25
  so it was everywhere: on YDD in the car while I was learning to drive, playing at boutiques, at the mall, or on a date with my girlfriend at Spinning Wheels Roller Rink.
• 1:34
  so it was everywhere: And that's how I thought of that song.
• 1:36
  so it was everywhere: A Euro cool background tune.
• 1:38
  so it was everywhere: Surely not as deep or political as the punk and indie rock I was starting to get into.
• 1:41
  so it was everywhere: Metro music.
• 1:44
  so it was everywhere: Faces on posters, too many choicesIf, when, why, whatHow much have you got? But a few thousand miles and an ocean away in Croydon, about a 50 minute drive south of the City of London, lived another teen named Andrew Haigh, who had a way different relationship to this band.
• 2:02
  so it was everywhere: I've always loved them when I was like, when their album, I think Please came out in '85,'84, '85, and I just listened to that LP over and over and over and over again.
• 2:13
  so it was everywhere: And that first album, which West End Girls is on, it's got this like feeling.
• 2:17
  so it was everywhere: If you listen to it now, it's all about late night, London, '80s, desire, longing, needing to find somebody, and for the little sort of gay boy in me that was starting to come to terms with who he was, I was like, this feels like it's telling me a secret.
• 2:35
  so it was everywhere: This is telling me to come to London.
• 2:36
  so it was everywhere: This is telling me that I can live this life, even if I didn't know all that kind of stuff consciously at the time.
• 2:43
  so it was everywhere: 38 years later, Haigh took the Pet Shop Boys and other glossy sounding music I used to skate to and used it to score one of the most beautiful and heartbreaking movies of the decade.
• 3:05
  so it was everywhere: I'm Rico Gagliano, welcome back to the MUBI Podcast.
• 3:08
  so it was everywhere: MUBI's, the global film company that champions great cinema.
• 3:11
  so it was everywhere: On this show, we tell you the stories behind great cinema.
• 3:14
  so it was everywhere: This is Season 11, we're calling it
• 3:16
  Needle On The Record: Side Two.
• 3:18
  Needle On The Record: By popular demand, this is the sequel to our season a while back all about needle drops.
• 3:22
  Needle On The Record: Those moments when filmmakers take a tune, drop it in their movie and magic happens.
• 3:27
  Needle On The Record: We're focused this time out on UK music of the '80s and '90s, and I can't think of a movie that uses that stuff in a more moving way than Andrew Haigh'sAll of Us Strangers, a hit drama that won or got nominated for just about every film award in Britain when it came out in 2023.
• 3:44
  Needle On The Record: It's about a gay man literally confronting his past, and it's as wrenching to watch as it was for Haigh and his star, Andrew Scott, to shoot.
• 3:52
  Needle On The Record: It was like me and Andrew were doing some weird therapy session with a film crew watching us.
• 3:57
  Needle On The Record: One way it gets the tears flowing for me is its use of '80s pop and dance tunes, because in Haigh's hands, it's clear this music was a light in some dark times.
• 4:06
  Needle On The Record: You know, '82, '83, '84, AIDS was starting to happen.
• 4:09
  Needle On The Record: I think it's written as a sort of, an answer to that as like, love can get us through this.
• 4:14
  Needle On The Record: You're gonna hear Haigh tell me all about the genesis and making of the movie.
• 4:18
  Needle On The Record: And then in the second act, we just geek out on all the music in it.
• 4:21
  Needle On The Record: Because since my teens, I have wised up, and now some of my favorite songs can actually be found on the soundtrack.
• 4:28
  Needle On The Record: So get ready for tears and laughs as we drop the needle on All of Us Strangers.
• 4:44
  Needle On The Record: So a lot of people first saw Andrew Haigh's work on the HBO series, Looking. That was a comedy drama he executive produced and co-wrote.
• 4:51
  Needle On The Record: It's about a group of gay guys stumbling through jobs and relationships in modern day San Francisco.
• 4:56
  Needle On The Record: But six years later, circa 2020, he was wrapping up work on a very different kind of series on location in the Arctic Circle.
• 5:04
  Needle On The Record: I'd been doing a show called The North Water, which was for the BBC, which we shot up in Svalbard, which was a crazy experience, shooting up on the ice.
• 5:14
  Needle On The Record: It's a sort of 19th century whaling story.
• 5:18
  Needle On The Record: And so I was editing that and then the pandemic hit.
• 5:25
  Needle On The Record: And so of course, no one was doing anything.
• 5:27
  Needle On The Record: We were all just stuck in our houses.
• 5:29
  Needle On The Record: So I spent, I don't know, a year and a half essentially in my apartment in LA.
• 5:32
  Needle On The Record: And that's when I started working more on the script.
• 5:39
  Needle On The Record: The script to a feature he'd been struggling with, an adaptation of a Japanese novel by Taichi Yamada called Strangers, with a plot that sounds exactly like what a screenwriter trapped in an apartment would work on.
• 5:52
  Needle On The Record: A Japanese television writer splits up from his wife and child and is living alone in Tokyo, lonely, meets someone in the same apartment building.
• 6:03
  Needle On The Record: They start a relationship.
• 6:04
  Needle On The Record: And then during the course of that relationship, he's drawn back to his childhood home.
• 6:10
  Needle On The Record: And in the story, his parents have died and he goes back and he finds them again, as they were before they died.
• 6:16
  Needle On The Record: That's when the novel turns into almost a ghost story, the woman he meets in his building turns out to be an evil spirit.
• 6:23
  Needle On The Record: Now, the supernatural is not really Haigh's kind of thing, but...
• 6:26
  Needle On The Record: I think the most important thing for me was this idea, which is that there are things in our past that we want to return to, but are unable to return to, because obviously the past is gone.
• 6:38
  Needle On The Record: I found that a really interesting conceit, being able to go back to that sort of period of time with your parents and be joyous at being reconnected with them, but then realizing that they don't know you at all.
• 6:49
  Needle On The Record: So Haigh took Yamada's story and that theme and made it his own.
• 6:53
  Needle On The Record: Changing the setting, the characters sexual orientations, and the things that haunt them.
• 7:03
  Needle On The Record: Meanwhile, work goes on for the Brits who'verelocated to the Costa.All of Us Strangers opens on Adam, played by Andrew Scott, a lonely, middle aged yes screenwriter, procrastinating, loafing around his flat in an eerily empty apartment building in east London until one night, after a fire drill, he gets a visit from the only other tenant in the place, a younger guy played by Paul Mescal.
• 7:27
  Needle On The Record: - Hello.
• 7:27
  Needle On The Record: - Hello.I saw you looking at me from the street.I'm Harry. Harry's drunk.
• 7:35
  Needle On The Record: And let's say solicitous.
• 7:38
  Needle On The Record: Okay, how about I come in anyway?If not for a drink, then for whatever else you might want. And Adam's tempted, but declines.
• 7:51
  Needle On The Record: Still, the next day, something about that encounter inspires Adam to take a train to his hometown, where his parents, played by Jamie Bell and Claire Foy, welcome him into his childhood house.
• 8:03
  Needle On The Record: Guess who I found loitering in the park?Is it him?Yes, it is you. Which is amazing because they both died in the '80s when he was a kid.
• 8:15
  Needle On The Record: Hi.- Do you live by yourself?
• 8:19
  Needle On The Record: - Do you own your own place?Yeah.- It's just a just a flat.
• 8:23
  Needle On The Record: - What did I tell you?What did I tell you?I told you he'd be doing well for himself, didn't I? Are they ghosts?
• 8:28
  Needle On The Record: Are they in his head?
• 8:31
  Needle On The Record: Either way, Adam keeps paying visits to tell them everything he never got to tell them about his life.
• 8:37
  Needle On The Record: Like that he's come out as gay and that he survived both being bullied and the AIDS era.
• 8:42
  Needle On The Record: Oh God, and what about this awful, ghastly disease?I've seen the adverts on the news and with the gravestones.Should I be worried about that?No. Jesus.
• 8:49
  Needle On The Record: Everything is different now.Everything's different. Except talking to them, he starts to realize maybe not everything is different.
• 9:01
  Needle On The Record: He still carries scars from it all, which he decides to share with Harry.
• 9:06
  Needle On The Record: Who can relate.
• 9:06
  Needle On The Record: He's got scars too.
• 9:09
  Needle On The Record: I'm really sorry.No, thanks.
• 9:11
  Needle On The Record: It was a long time ago.I don't think that matters. Adam finally lets go of his parents and the past.
• 9:18
  Needle On The Record: He and Harry fall in love.
• 9:19
  Needle On The Record: And even when their relationship takes a heartbreaking turn towards the end, Haigh leaves us with this gorgeous last shot of the two of them lying in bed, dissolving into pure light while on the soundtrack, a tune plays by the '80s pop kings Frankie Goes to Hollywood called The Power of Love. I tell you, just writing that synopsis put a lump in my throat, and when Haigh and I got to talking about the process of making this movie, it was clear he felt the same way for like, the entire shoot.
• 9:52
  Needle On The Record: I mean, it's not the same story as mine.
• 9:53
  Needle On The Record: My parents did not die in a car accident when I was nine years old, but my parents got divorced when I was nine years old, and I lived with my dad and didn't live with my mom.
• 10:01
  Needle On The Record: So there was still a fracture within the family environment.
• 10:04
  Needle On The Record: And also, I made things slightly more complicated for myself by filming it in the house I actually grew up in, in real life, which I hadn't been to for 40 years.
• 10:13
  Needle On The Record: Yeah, tell me about that.
• 10:14
  Needle On The Record: How was it complicated?
• 10:16
  Needle On The Record: Well, I think it's just it was a very strange environment to be shooting in.
• 10:19
  Needle On The Record: You know, there's a scene, for example, in, the parents bed when he's lying in bed with his mom.
• 10:23
  Needle On The Record: And that is the bedroom that I lay in bed with my mum and dad when I was seven years old.
• 10:28
  Needle On The Record: I haven't got particularly happy memories of being in that place.
• 10:31
  Needle On The Record: I was having a very hard time at school.
• 10:32
  Needle On The Record: I was being bullied at school like the character was being bullied in school in the story.
• 10:36
  Needle On The Record: And of course, it's the first time that I was starting, even at 9 or 10, to come to terms with my own sexuality and work out who I was.
• 10:43
  Needle On The Record: And that was the reason I was being picked on at school and all those kind of things.
• 10:47
  Needle On The Record: So even though the story is very different, it still was allowing me to go back to a past version of myself as Andrew Scott's character was going back to a past version of himself.
• 10:57
  Needle On The Record: Now, Andrew Scott, he's only a little younger than you, born in '76, so he would have gone through the same era, the '80s era.
• 11:05
  Needle On The Record: - Yeah.
• 11:05
  Needle On The Record: - A bleak time for gay men.
• 11:07
  Needle On The Record: And there are so many scenes where he's moved to tears.
• 11:11
  Needle On The Record: Tell me about shooting those scenes.
• 11:12
  Needle On The Record: I mean, I feel like both me and Andrew felt them very deeply.
• 11:17
  Needle On The Record: I mean, you could tell that they were working on set, that people were feeling them on set.
• 11:20
  Needle On The Record: But me and Andrew are the only gay people on set.
• 11:24
  Needle On The Record: - Really?
• 11:24
  Needle On The Record: - Yeah.
• 11:25
  Needle On The Record: My script supervisor was, he was, but there were very few people who were, which is just always the nature of being on film sets.
• 11:31
  Needle On The Record: Usually, pretty much, they are straight.
• 11:34
  Needle On The Record: So, you know, they were-- I knew that they were gonna be emotional and they were emotional.
• 11:37
  Needle On The Record: I remember just like every time Andrew would do it, we would talk about it and he would be like, I'm probably not going to cry.
• 11:45
  Needle On The Record: Like, let's just get this thing done.
• 11:46
  Needle On The Record: I don't think necessarily the character would cry in this moment of the scene.
• 11:49
  Needle On The Record: And I was like, okay, let's just see how it goes.
• 11:51
  Needle On The Record: And then each and every time the emotion would bubble up in Andrew and he would, you know, get upset.
• 11:57
  Needle On The Record: And he just, I think he just couldn't help it because the scene was bringing up so much, you know, stuff that of course he's experienced.
• 12:04
  Needle On The Record: And I was feeling the same thing in those moments.
• 12:05
  Needle On The Record: So they were very kind of special.
• 12:07
  Needle On The Record: It was like me and Andrew were doing some weird therapy session with a film crew watching us.
• 12:13
  Needle On The Record: And it makes sense. The movie is kind of about processing trauma.
• 12:16
  Needle On The Record: Something I was feeling intensely while I was watching this.
• 12:20
  Needle On The Record: I'm around the same age as you, by the way.
• 12:21
  Needle On The Record: I remembered the AIDS crisis, which as a straight guy, I only periodically think about anymore.
• 12:27
  Needle On The Record: Usually when I'm watching a movie about or set in the AIDS crisis.
• 12:31
  Needle On The Record: And it's crazy.
• 12:33
  Needle On The Record: There was a point in time where a whole population of the country was just regularly dying for living their lives.
• 12:40
  Needle On The Record: And now we don't think about it anymore.
• 12:43
  Needle On The Record: And it's like the impact that that leaves is never going to go away.
• 12:47
  Needle On The Record: To what extent was that foremost in your mind?
• 12:48
  Needle On The Record: No, I think it was really, really important.
• 12:50
  Needle On The Record: It was definitely, you know, in my mind, I think, you know, I'm of that generation that's-- I think it's called the middle generation.
• 12:56
  Needle On The Record: So it's not the generation of gay men that actually were destroyed by AIDS.
• 13:01
  Needle On The Record: It's that slightly strange generation afterwards that grew into their understanding of their sexuality, but associating it so closely with death.
• 13:10
  Needle On The Record: You grew into it thinking, wait, if I'm going to be gay, does that mean I'm going to die?
• 13:14
  Needle On The Record: And I think it's very hard for people to actually realize what that felt like.
• 13:18
  Needle On The Record: You thought, well, I've got no future.
• 13:20
  Needle On The Record: There is no future in my life.
• 13:21
  Needle On The Record: If I want to be what I want to be, I'm probably going to die.
• 13:24
  Needle On The Record: And at that point, people were not surviving- even into the early '90s.
• 13:26
  Needle On The Record: - Yeah.
• 13:29
  Needle On The Record: And I think it's left a really heavy scar on a whole generation of gay men that is often forgotten.
• 13:34
  Needle On The Record: And then the new generation of gay people that come up who don't worry about it as much.
• 13:38
  Needle On The Record: They're sort of like, what are you?
• 13:38
  Needle On The Record: Why are you so scarred by that?
• 13:41
  Needle On The Record: And you want to sort of just go, well, you know what?
• 13:43
  Needle On The Record: Just try living in that.
• 13:45
  Needle On The Record: And I think that's very much a part of, what the character goes through is sort of that kind of re bubbling up in him again, almost that fear coming back to the surface again and him trying to sort of get past that, which I think he does sort of get past it.
• 14:01
  Needle On The Record: And in the movie, you can tell, something that holds off Adam's fear and always has, is music.
• 14:07
  Needle On The Record: Like whenever we see him at his typewriter trying to write about his family, there's always an '80s record spinning in the background.
• 14:13
  Needle On The Record: Or there's a scene where he walks through a drenching rain to his parents house.
• 14:18
  Needle On The Record: - Sweetheart, you came back.
• 14:18
  Needle On The Record: - Of course I came back. And then while his mom dries his clothes, he literally takes refuge from the storm in his old room, which is papered with band posters of Frankie Goes to Hollywood and the Pet Shop Boys.
• 14:34
  Needle On The Record: Smiling, he thumbs through an old issue of Smash Hits music magazine and softly touches his copy of Frankie's LP Welcome to the Pleasuredome.
• 14:43
  Needle On The Record: Like it's something precious.
• 14:48
  Needle On The Record: So let's finally talk about the music.
• 14:51
  Needle On The Record: Is the main character's love of music so much present in the book?
• 14:56
  Needle On The Record: No. I don't think there's anything about music in the book.
• 14:58
  Needle On The Record: Not particularly.
• 14:59
  Needle On The Record: So how did music become such a huge part of this movie?
• 15:03
  Needle On The Record: I mean, it's present right from the beginning.
• 15:05
  Needle On The Record: I think for me, especially when I was a teenager, music was everything to me.
• 15:10
  Needle On The Record: Like, I just was obsessed by listening to music, you know, from like 1980 onwards when I realized I could save up my pocket money and buy a record.
• 15:19
  Needle On The Record: And I think especially there's a certain breed of kind of British music in the '80s that was really queer when the rest of the world wasn't queer, and it was sort of being quite radical just within the remit of pop music.
• 15:33
  Needle On The Record: It was political and it was queer.
• 15:35
  Needle On The Record: It was all of these things that I think has forged who I am today as a person was from those from some of those records I listened to when I was young.
• 15:43
  Needle On The Record: And I also just think, like now as an adult, when I go back to those songs, it drags me back to the feeling that I felt at that time.
• 15:53
  Needle On The Record: I don't think anything can do it-- Music is the best way to bring you back to a memory, to bring you back to the past.
• 15:59
  Needle On The Record: And I can remember listening to the first Pet Shop Boys album or like a Madonna album or Erasure, or The Smiths or whoever these bands were that I loved, especially when I was, you know, nine, ten, 11, 12, that really weird formative period.
• 16:13
  Needle On The Record: And then obviously onwards into my later teens, it was so important to me and I knew that that was so important in the film.
• 16:18
  Needle On The Record: And in a weird way, as he starts listening to music, like when he's working on his script at home.
• 16:23
  Needle On The Record: - The very early scenes.
• 16:23
  Needle On The Record: - Yeah, early scenes.
• 16:25
  Needle On The Record: He's listening to, you know, a Fine Young Cannibals song and it starts to bring him back emotionally to a state of mind that he remembers when he was younger, which sort of opens up an element of him that allows him to start this journey to go back home.
• 16:39
  Needle On The Record: It's also literally called Johnny Come Home. Yeah. It's, get back here.
• 16:44
  Needle On The Record: You know, you belong here.
• 16:45
  Needle On The Record: JohnnyWe're sorry Won't you come on home? So I really used music as a way to time travel, I suppose.
• 16:58
  Needle On The Record: Okay, we're getting to the part with the smiles.
• 17:00
  Needle On The Record: Andrew Haigh takes me on a tour through his movie's '80s playlist.
• 17:04
  Needle On The Record: From this track, to the time Frankie Goes to Hollywood brought perversion to the people.
• 17:09
  Needle On The Record: You open their album and there was a sleeve inside which was selling leather underwear with like, zips on.
• 17:15
  Needle On The Record: That's coming up in just a minute.
• 17:16
  Needle On The Record: Stay with us.
• 17:24
  Needle On The Record: Alright everybody, MUBI is the global film company that champions great cinema, bringing it to you wherever you are, in as many ways as we possibly can.
• 17:32
  Needle On The Record: We stream movies, we produce them, we distribute them in cinemas.
• 17:33
  Needle On The Record: Movies from any country, from legendary auteurs to brilliant first timers.
• 17:38
  Needle On The Record: We've always got something new to discover.
• 17:40
  Needle On The Record: And hey, if All of Us Strangers is your bag, here's another beautiful heartbreaker of a movie you're going to want to see on MUBI if you haven't already, it's called Aftersun. This is the incredibly assured sleeper hit debut feature from Scotland's Charlotte Wells.
• 17:55
  Needle On The Record: It also stars Paul Mescal in an Oscar nominated role.
• 17:59
  Needle On The Record: He plays a father who takes his tween daughter on a holiday in Turkey, and the two of them find themselves grappling with his depression, which neither of them really fully understand.
• 18:11
  Needle On The Record: This was one of the surprise indie hits of 2022.
• 18:13
  Needle On The Record: I remember none other than Barack Obama put it on his annual list of the best movies of the year.
• 18:18
  Needle On The Record: Also, since we're talking about music today, you should go back and listen to my MUBI Podcast interview with Wells about it, where we did kind of what you're about to hear me do with Andrew Haigh.
• 18:27
  Needle On The Record: We went through a bunch of the tracks and her thoughts about them, especially her now iconic deployment of the classic Under Pressure. Anytime I hear that song now, I think of that movie.
• 18:37
  Needle On The Record: Anyway, if you're in the UK, Ireland, Canada, Australia, and many other countries, you can stream Aftersun. And if you're in the US and Canada, may I suggest another movie,The History of Sound. This is yet another Paul Mescal movie.
• 18:52
  Needle On The Record: That guy is in too many amazing films.
• 18:53
  Needle On The Record: I hope he takes a vacation soon.
• 18:55
  Needle On The Record: He stars in it along with Josh O'Connor, and they play two music obsessives who travel and fall in love while making field recordings in Maine, post World War l.
• 19:04
  Needle On The Record: It's a great movie.
• 19:04
  Needle On The Record: It's gorgeous to look at.
• 19:06
  Needle On The Record: Subscribe to MUBI at mubi.com and enjoy.
• 19:10
  Needle On The Record: We have got details and links to all this stuff in the show notes of this episode.
• 19:14
  Needle On The Record: Speaking of which, let's get back to the episode.
• 19:23
  Needle On The Record: So if you listen close to the soundtrack of All of Us Strangers, thematically, the songs don't have much to do with each other.
• 19:29
  Needle On The Record: A minute ago, you heard a snippet of Fine Young Cannibals,Johnny Come Home. That's a melodramatic shout out to some kind of runaway.
• 19:36
  Needle On The Record: There's a cover of a Willie Nelson love song and a tune about the evils of urban sprawl.
• 19:41
  Needle On The Record: But they do have a few things in common.
• 19:44
  Needle On The Record: Like, for instance...
• 19:46
  Needle On The Record: I just loved those songs when I was young, so I just went back and I was like, what songs did I love when I was a teenager?
• 19:53
  Needle On The Record: Oh my God, I love that song.
• 19:53
  Needle On The Record: I remember listening to this.
• 19:55
  Needle On The Record: I love that song.
• 19:56
  Needle On The Record: And there's something about all of them that's sort of, I don't know.
• 20:00
  Needle On The Record: I would call it melancholic pop, you know, I think the Brits did melancholic pop better than anybody else.
• 20:06
  Needle On The Record: And The Fine Young Cannibals was one version of that.
• 20:09
  Needle On The Record: I just loved Roland Gift's voice.
• 20:11
  Needle On The Record: There was something sort of masculine and feminine about it that I just adored, and sort of felt like it was a good first song for him to be listening to.
• 20:19
  Needle On The Record: Yeah in the movie, it's the first song Adam plays.
• 20:21
  Needle On The Record: And not only is the chorus literally kind of telling him to come on home.
• 20:25
  Needle On The Record: There's also this lyric,"What is wrong in my life"that I must get drunk every night." Which kind of foreshadows the Harry character's problems.
• 20:32
  Needle On The Record: I mean, as you were deciding on songs, were you ever like, oh my God, it's like, this has been sitting here for 40 years waiting to be put in my movie.
• 20:38
  Needle On The Record: Yeah and the wonderful thing about music is you can be on the nose.
• 20:42
  Needle On The Record: Like you can be pretty obvious.
• 20:44
  Needle On The Record: Song lyrics are designed to be obvious, sometimes.
• 20:47
  Needle On The Record: They're like, we're just gonna say this quite blatant thing.
• 20:50
  Needle On The Record: Like, you know, we're worried, will you come on home.
• 20:51
  Needle On The Record: And I can put it in a film where-- And it sort of works because I know that if I'm in a certain mood and I want to be given some type of message, I might choose a record, to put it on, to give me that message.
• 21:04
  Needle On The Record: And I sort of love that that he chose to put that record on.
• 21:06
  Needle On The Record: That was his choice to put it on.
• 21:09
  Needle On The Record: Of course, it would be Johnny Come Home. Yeah, it's not some random choice.
• 21:12
  Needle On The Record: He's struggling to write about some story he wants to write about.
• 21:15
  Needle On The Record: I'm going to put on the Fine Young Cannibals,Johnny Come home. I kind of love that in this very ambivalent movie, where a lot of times I'm not even sure what's real.
• 21:22
  Needle On The Record: You just let a song straight up tell us what's going on.
• 21:25
  Needle On The Record: Exactly, exactly.
• 21:27
  Needle On The Record: But now let's talk about a moment where you do, it's kind of the opposite, where you use a song with lyrics that really have nothing to do with what the characters are feeling.
• 21:35
  Needle On The Record: A song called Build by the Housemartins, who honestly, by the way, are one of my favorite bands.
• 21:40
  Needle On The Record: And when I was going back through the movie before this interview, I was so excited because I was like, oh yeah, I'm going to be able to play the Housemartins on this episode.
• 21:55
  Needle On The Record: So this is playing in Adam's apartment in a scene where he's looking out his window at Harry outside, and he decides to invite him in after rejecting him at first.
• 22:07
  Needle On The Record: - Let's build- Let's build a house- where we can stay- Ba ba ba ba buildAdd a new bit everydayBa ba ba ba build But the song is actually not-- It's like a lot of Housemartins tunes, it sounds like maybe it's a hopeful love song, but it's actually this ironic poison pill of a lyric.
• 22:27
  Needle On The Record: Absolutely. Totally brutal.
• 22:28
  Needle On The Record: And it's not even about relationships, really.
• 22:30
  Needle On The Record: It's about this, I think, policy in '80s England to just pave over poor neighborhoods and erect new housing.
• 22:37
  Needle On The Record: Slow, slow and quick, quick, quickIt's wall to wall and brick to brickThey work so fast it makes you sickIt's buildLet's build It's a very sarcastic political song.
• 22:57
  Needle On The Record: But you're ignoring that and taking it as the literal, oh, we're going to build something now.
• 23:02
  Needle On The Record: A relationship or something.
• 23:02
  Needle On The Record: Why do that?
• 23:05
  Needle On The Record: Look, again, I adore the Housemartins.
• 23:07
  Needle On The Record: I'm pretty convinced that my politics has come from listening to the Housemartins.
• 23:11
  Needle On The Record: I think I hate the royal family from listening to Flag Day endlessly, by the Housemartins and I think they were geniuses.
• 23:19
  Needle On The Record: And I think Build is an amazing song.
• 23:21
  Needle On The Record: There's something amazing at the end that Paul does with his voice that I just think is incre--- Is unbelievable, and it feels like all of the emotion in you is bubbling up.
• 23:29
  Needle On The Record: It's buildIt's build So for me, what's happening in that moment, I use, I, you know, when I was writing the script, I would listen to that song and it always makes me cry, that song, if I listen to it in my headphones.
• 23:55
  Needle On The Record: But it's that weird version of tears that is not sadness, I don't know what it is.
• 23:59
  Needle On The Record: It's some magic that a voice and a sentiment can do.
• 24:04
  Needle On The Record: And I sort of like there's lots of things going on.
• 24:06
  Needle On The Record: He's sort of writing this story about home, which is making him melancholy, and Build is quite a melancholy song.
• 24:12
  Needle On The Record: It is about like, the past getting paved over, in a way.
• 24:14
  Needle On The Record: Yeah, absolutely.
• 24:16
  Needle On The Record: And we're destroying the past to make way for buildings that are disgusting and awful.
• 24:20
  Needle On The Record: And he's living in one of those buildings, that the Housemartins were complaining about, that people are building.
• 24:25
  Needle On The Record: And then at the same time, this person appears, and there's something about all of those things happening at the same time.
• 24:31
  Needle On The Record: It just creates sort of different levels of meaning because he's reaching out, but he's also wanting to go back.
• 24:37
  Needle On The Record: And there's a lot going on.
• 24:39
  Needle On The Record: And I just, yeah, we put it down on the track and I think we tried-- It was one of the points we tried, Erasure's The Circus as well, which is another great song again, which just has politics at its core, even though it feels like it's about something else.
• 24:52
  Needle On The Record: But Build was, you know, felt like the perfect song.
• 24:55
  Needle On The Record: For, say, American audiences who might know the Housemartins from, Happy Hour. That was like their big hit.
• 25:02
  Needle On The Record: How big a deal were they at that time in England?
• 25:04
  Needle On The Record: They were a really big deal.
• 25:05
  Needle On The Record: And I've actually used them before in things, which always makes me chuckle.
• 25:08
  Needle On The Record: I did this TV show calledLooking on HBO, and it was like a final wrap up movie.
• 25:13
  Needle On The Record: This is set in San Francisco in the modern day, when we made it.
• 25:16
  Needle On The Record: And I ended with,I'll Be Your Shelter, I think it's called, by the Housemartins.
• 25:21
  Needle On The Record: And everyone was like, why are you using this weird British song from the '80s?
• 25:25
  Needle On The Record: I'm like, I'm using this song.
• 25:25
  Needle On The Record: I love this song.
• 25:27
  Needle On The Record: It's going on.
• 25:28
  Needle On The Record: But you know, they were big.
• 25:28
  Needle On The Record: They were big.
• 25:30
  Needle On The Record: And then they went on to be the Beautiful South.
• 25:32
  Needle On The Record: And then obviously Norman Cook, who was in the Housemartins, went on to be Fatboy Slim.
• 25:36
  Needle On The Record: So they've still been part of like British musical heritage ever since they started.
• 25:41
  Needle On The Record: Alright, let's go to, the two big ones to me, first, Pet Shop Boys who appear often in this movie,You Were Always on My Mind. It practically becomes Adam's mother's monologue to him.
• 25:55
  Needle On The Record: Take us through that scene for somebody who either hasn't seen the movie or hasn't seen it in a while.
• 26:00
  Needle On The Record: He wakes up and he finds himself back in his bedroom, in his childhood bed, and he's wearing his childhood pajamas, which don't fit anymore, and they're too small.
• 26:10
  Needle On The Record: And he hears music playing downstairs, which is Top of the Pops, which is a big music show in the UK, especially in the '80s.
• 26:17
  Needle On The Record: He comes down the stairs, we realize it's Christmas, he comes into the room.
• 26:24
  Needle On The Record: The Pet Shop Boys are actually on the television and his parents are decorating the Christmas tree, and he helps them decorate the Christmas tree.
• 26:31
  Needle On The Record: And then as the song is playing, the mother starts to sort of sing along with the song...
• 26:36
  Needle On The Record: If I made you feel second bestI'm so sorry I was blindYou were always on my mind And then the father joins in.
• 26:47
  Needle On The Record: All the while, Adam's wearing his childhood pajamas.
• 26:51
  Needle On The Record: Tell meTell me that your sweet love hasn't died When did the idea come to choose that song for that moment?
• 27:02
  Needle On The Record: It was in the script. Like, lots of these are actually scripted.
• 27:05
  Needle On The Record: This was definitely in the script, this one.
• 27:07
  Needle On The Record: And that song is so interesting to me because it's a love song essentially.
• 27:11
  Needle On The Record: It's a man singing about a woman, and I love just turning that completely on its head.
• 27:17
  Needle On The Record: And when I read the lyrics, I'm like, oh my God, it's absolutely perfect for the mother to sing to her son.
• 27:23
  Needle On The Record: It's the lyrics, literally, that if she could write a song to say how she felt about her son, this would be the lyrics that she would sing.
• 27:30
  Needle On The Record: And it makes perfect sense because it was Christmas number one in 1986, or whenever it was when he's gone back to this Christmas at home.
• 27:38
  Needle On The Record: And also it speaks of something else that I was interested about.
• 27:41
  Needle On The Record: To me, like, I think that we learn our understandings of what we need in romantic love through what we understood about parental love.
• 27:49
  Needle On The Record: And so I love this idea that a love song that could be from a man to a woman or a woman to a man or a man to a man, can also become from a parent to a child.
• 27:58
  Needle On The Record: It worked perfectly for that.
• 28:00
  Needle On The Record: Again, very emotional scene.
• 28:01
  Needle On The Record: Tell me about shooting it.
• 28:03
  Needle On The Record: I mean, the scene is so ridiculous in concept.
• 28:05
  Needle On The Record: When I was writing, I'm like, oh my God, this could be an absolute disaster.
• 28:09
  Needle On The Record: How on earth is this going to work?
• 28:11
  Needle On The Record: He looks stupid in his pajamas.
• 28:13
  Needle On The Record: They're singing along to a pop song.
• 28:15
  Needle On The Record: It could easily just be like everyone literally laughing at the screen.
• 28:21
  Needle On The Record: But for some reason I felt like it would work.
• 28:23
  Needle On The Record: I felt like there's something sort of so magical about that idea, and I find it deeply emotional when I-- When I watch it.
• 28:30
  Needle On The Record: Yeah.
• 28:31
  Needle On The Record: And then as a sort of strange aside to this, which actually goes back to my dad, which is really fascinating.
• 28:37
  Needle On The Record: After my dad died, we were trying to work out what songs to play at his funeral, and I asked my stepmom what his favorite song was because I didn't really know what it was.
• 28:45
  Needle On The Record: And she said it was Elvis Presley'sAlways on My Mind.- What?
• 28:49
  Needle On The Record: - I was like, oh my God.
• 28:52
  Needle On The Record: So we played it at his funeral, was the Elvis Presley version.
• 28:56
  Needle On The Record: And then not only that, this is even weirder, I didn't even know-- This makes-- This is almost impossible that it's real: I found out that my dad had died while I was on the jury at the Venice Film Festival, so that was complicated, as you can imagine itself.
• 29:11
  Needle On The Record: I was in the final deliberations of the Venice jury, and I got a text to find out that my dad had died.
• 29:18
  Needle On The Record: So I left that day, and I was in the airport in duty free, in Venice, and the Pet Shop Boys, Always on My Mind came on the radio,- came on the music system.
• 29:26
  Needle On The Record: - Wow.
• 29:28
  Needle On The Record: And I was like, what the motherfuck is happening here?
• 29:31
  Needle On The Record: How is this happening?
• 29:32
  Needle On The Record: Like, why is the Pet Shop Boys playing in Italy in the duty free?
• 29:36
  Needle On The Record: And why is it Always on My Mind, why is it that song?
• 29:39
  Needle On The Record: And then I got back and found out it was also my dad's favorite song.
• 29:42
  Needle On The Record: So there's something weird about that song that has sort of had a life of its own.
• 29:47
  Needle On The Record: So yes, it ended up the song was played at my dad's funeral, but the Elvis Presley version of it.
• 29:51
  Needle On The Record: I mean, they really have played a huge part in your life.
• 29:53
  Needle On The Record: You also directed one of their recent videos.
• 29:55
  Needle On The Record: And then I've just always, as they've sort of gone in and out of fashion and back in again, I've always loved them.
• 30:00
  Needle On The Record: And we went to, I went to a concert recently, which was in London, which was all their B sides and their obscure songs and I'm in this room, and there were just so many middle aged gay people in this room, sort of crying and knowing all the words and singing along.
• 30:16
  Needle On The Record: And I was like, yeah, this is why the Pet Shop Boys mean so much to so many people.
• 30:21
  Needle On The Record: Yeah, a lot of these songs, to be honest, when I think of Frankie Goes to Hollywood, which we'll talk about now, I think of their single Relax, and I think of it as like big, sexy, cheeky, campy, and realizing that all of this music has deep emotional resonance and was probably geared to have deep emotional resonance was like very surprising to me.
• 30:45
  Needle On The Record: I mean, do you find that, that like straights are kind of like, don't get it?
• 30:49
  Needle On The Record: Totally. Like if you, you can see it online somewhere, there's the original music video they did for Relax. And it's basically Holly Johnson and Paul Rutherford in a weird sex club with like, there's a huge big man in leather, which looks like he's essentially urinating over an audience.
• 31:05
  Needle On The Record: It's the most obscene video in the world, and the song Relax is basically about not ejaculating when you're having sex.
• 31:13
  Needle On The Record: - It's about edging.
• 31:13
  Needle On The Record: - It's about edging.
• 31:15
  Needle On The Record: And so the fact that that was number one for like six weeks in whatever it was, 1983, is so insane to me.
• 31:22
  Needle On The Record: It's essentially two gay people have written a song about gay edging, and it has become a worldwide hit.
• 31:30
  Needle On The Record: And they're not-- They're unapologetic about it.
• 31:32
  Needle On The Record: They're wearing leather on stage.
• 31:34
  Needle On The Record: You open their album and there was a sleeve inside which was selling like leather underwear with like zips on.
• 31:40
  Needle On The Record: And you're like, what is happening?
• 31:42
  Needle On The Record: And I remember looking at that as a kid being like, this might be the sexiest thing I have ever seen in my life.
• 31:48
  Needle On The Record: And then and that album is a great album.
• 31:50
  Needle On The Record: Have you ever listened to the whole album again?
• 31:51
  Needle On The Record: It's a double album.
• 31:51
  Needle On The Record: Welcome to the Pleasuredome.
• 31:54
  Needle On The Record: It's Trevor Horn produced it.
• 31:54
  Needle On The Record: Genius Trevor Horn, who produced so much great music and what I loved aboutThe Power of Love. It's still big and it's booming and it's operatic, and it's slightly ridiculous, but also very emotional at the same time.
• 32:11
  Needle On The Record: Yeah, I mean, it closes the whole movie.
• 32:14
  Needle On The Record: Will you put a record on?- What would you like?
• 32:18
  Needle On The Record: - You choose. The last line is Andrew reciting a lyric from it to Harry.
• 32:25
  Needle On The Record: "I'll protect you from the hooded claw"Keep the vampires from your door" And I sort of felt like it was the perfect-- Again, it's saying exactly what I wanted to say.
• 32:37
  Needle On The Record: The power of love and the importance of it.
• 32:39
  Needle On The Record: But I think for Holly writing that song, it was about the power of love in the face of AIDS.
• 32:46
  Needle On The Record: That's why they wrote it.
• 32:46
  Needle On The Record: AIDS was starting to happen.
• 32:49
  Needle On The Record: I think it's written as a sort of an answer to that.
• 32:53
  As like: love can get us through this.
• 32:55
  As like: Dreams are like angelsThey keep bad at bay, bad at bayLove is the lightScaring darkness away, yeah And so I love the idea that at the end, there was this kind of weird song that maybe people play at weddings because they think it's cute or whatever it is, but it's got these deeper connotations towards queer love and queer transcendence through love.
• 33:28
  As like: The power of loveA force from aboveCleaning my soul And you know, again, everyone was like, I'm not sure you can end with this, like, really?
• 33:43
  As like: You're gonna end with Frankie Goes to Hollywood and they're gonna go up and you're gonna go up into the stars.
• 33:46
  As like: Have you gone crazy?
• 33:49
  As like: And most of the time I thought, oh my God, have I gone crazy?
• 33:51
  As like: This is like some, this is some, some choice.
• 33:56
  As like: But I felt like I've been quite restrained in a lot of my work, and this is still, in many respects still quite restrained.
• 34:03
  As like: But I wanted to end the film on basically a bombastic, emotional note.
• 34:10
  As like: I didn't want to be afraid of sentimentality, of emotion or whatever it was.
• 34:14
  As like: I'm like, just go for it.
• 34:16
  As like: Let those big banging drums that come in, let them come in, let them louder, pump them up.
• 34:21
  As like: Like, let's really embrace the bigness of that song.
• 34:24
  As like: I'll be aroundWith my undying, death-defying love for you The video for that song, I don't know if you have, remember it?
• 34:37
  As like: It's religious. It's--- They make it about Jesus.
• 34:38
  As like: - The birth of Jesus.
• 34:40
  As like: Love it.
• 34:41
  As like: And look, you know, I don't believe you know, I'm not a religious person, but, you know, Jesus, like, love through suffering, I guess.
• 34:47
  As like: - Yeah.
• 34:47
  As like: - There is something.
• 34:48
  As like: And there's so many of those images of people dying of AIDS.
• 34:52
  As like: And there's a sort of sense of looking like Jesus- on the cross in some of them.
• 34:54
  As like: - Yeah. Oh, yeah.
• 34:57
  As like: So I think there is, there's a choice to make that video.
• 35:00
  As like: And they wanted a Christmas number one, which I kind of love the subversive "fuck you" of that.
• 35:04
  As like: It's like, no, no, no, we want to be number one at Christmas, so we're gonna make a Christmas song.
• 35:08
  As like: - Was it?
• 35:08
  As like: - It was.
• 35:09
  As like: It was number one in the UK at Christmas. Yeah.
• 35:11
  As like: Talking about that video, the majority of comments on that, the official video are,"I came to this fromAll of Us Strangers." I love that, I love that they brought-- That that might bring more people to that song.
• 35:24
  As like: I think that's fantastic, to me.
• 35:26
  As like: There's been a very strange thing with this movie.
• 35:27
  As like: Like these are songs that I loved when I was 12 years old, living in, you know, a little suburban house, never thinking that I would, certainly not be a filmmaker, certainly not thinking I could ever be a gay person, but just loving this music.
• 35:46
  As like: And then now I'm in my like 50s, early 50s, and I'm like, oh wow, I've both become a director.
• 35:52
  As like: And these songs I've loved, I'm now, can put in my movie and be like, these things are important.
• 35:57
  As like: And I sort of love that.
• 36:09
  As like: And that's the MUBI Podcast this week.
• 36:11
  As like: I'm proud to say Andrew Haigh is working on his next film called A Long Winter for MUBI.
• 36:16
  As like: Look for that coming soon.
• 36:17
  As like: Meanwhile, follow us to hear more of our season about great movies with great music.
• 36:21
  As like: Next week we take a mid-season break, but the following week, join us on a trip back to 1998, when director Hype Williams took an '80s UK club hit, bathed it in black light and came up with an iconic moment in hip hop history.
• 36:34
  As like: In terms of like the most perfect musical soundbed for a scene that is top five, dead or alive.
• 36:42
  As like: The story of the movie Belly and the classic trackBack to Life by Soul ll Soul, featuring the tune's co-writer Simon Law and many more.
• 36:47
  As like: Follow us so you don't miss it.
• 36:50
  As like: If you love the show, please do hit pause and leave a five star review wherever you're listening, won't you?
• 36:55
  As like: I would appreciate that.
• 36:56
  As like: Also, you can find me on Threads or Instagram at Rico Gagliano that is Rico G-A-G-L-I-A-N-O.
• 37:04
  As like: I will nerd out on '80s music with you all day on those platforms and now let's roll credits.
• 37:10
  As like: This episode was written, hosted and edited by me, Rico Gagliano.
• 37:13
  As like: Ciara McEniff is our producer along with assistant producer Kat Kowalczyk.
• 37:16
  As like: Jackson Musker is our tireless booking producer.
• 37:19
  As like: Mastering by Stephen Colon.
• 37:21
  As like: Martin Austwick composed our original music.
• 37:23
  As like: Thanks this week to David Harper for taping Andrew and to Peter, Therese and Karina Lesser.
• 37:28
  As like: This show is executive produced by me along with Efe Çakarel, Daniel Kasman, and Michael Tacca.
• 37:33
  As like: And as always, to watch the best in cinema, subscribe to mubi at mubi.com Thanks for listening, go watch the movies and RIP Spinning Wheels.