Andrew Haigh | FILM
FOR PETE’S
SAKE
A ndrew Haigh is eight coffees deep into his press day for new i lm Lean on Pete, but you’d never guess it. He’s relaxed and thoughtful, open and conversational. We talk about his heritage and how his father drove his mother across the border from Lancashire to make sure little Andrew was born in Harrogate so he could play cricket for Yorkshire. But, as Haigh notes, it was all for nowt: ‘I can’t even throw a ball so he was pretty disappointed with that’.
Haigh’s third feature i lm, 45 Years, made waves in 2015 when Charlotte Rampling and Tom Courtenay took home Silver Bears from the Berlin Film Festival, with Rampling going on to collect an Oscar nomination. For its writer-director, the praise from critics was universal. For anyone who’d followed his progression since stepping out of the editing studios where he spent the i rst decade of his i lm career, such acclaim was not hugely surprising. Awards and special mentions have l owed since Haigh’s 2009 debut with short i lm Five Miles Out, while The Weekend (2011) took home audience awards at SXSW and San Francisco LGBT Film Festival, and he scooped the Breakthrough British Filmmaker prize from the London Film Critics’ Circle. Following on from all this success, Haigh’s latest i lm, Lean on Pete (adapted from the Willy Vlautin novel), again showcases his actor-friendly style, as a lone teenager crosses the US with a stolen horse and the hope of i nding his remaining family.
How did Lean on Pete come about? I actually read the book right after The Weekend and got the rights pretty early on. I loved the story and the central character of Charley [played by Charlie Plummer]. I found it heartbreaking and I wanted to reach through the page and protect this kid who had fallen beneath the cracks and was left stranded and alone. I knew it was a slightly higher budget than I could get off the ground after making The Weekend. 45 Years was happening at the same time and the
fact that it did well helped enormously in terms of raising money and my proi le. That allowed us to do things we couldn’t do before. How different was it working with a much larger cast? It is strange. Obviously I’m with Charlie every day, so that’s the central relationship. But you’ve got Steve Zahn in for four days, Chloë Sevigny was probably only six or seven days, then someone else comes in. In some way it helps the i lm, because the i lm is about Charley on this journey and people drifting in and out of his life.
There’s a naïve optimism about Charley: you might think yourself more world-wise but you sure wish you could share his outlook . . . Charley is driven by hope, even though some terrible things have happened to him. He’s not ready to believe there isn’t an answer, that he will i nd the person he is looking for, that he’ll live a normal life. He does trust people, and Charlie Plummer does a very good job of this. Sometimes he feels like a child and other times he feels like an adult: at that age of 15 you’re teetering between the two. You’re capturing an actor during that change too; it’s fascinating that you can capture that change in someone.
We haven’t even mentioned the horse, but this isn’t really his story is it? You’re telling a story about a boy and an animal, and there are certain expectations and ideas of what that is. I wanted to avoid that as much as I could. I didn’t want it to be sentimental. A horse is a horse, it’s not a human being, and it doesn’t understand what Charley is going through. This is a story about Charley and how in that moment he needed that horse.
Lean on Pete is on general release from Fri 4 May. See review, page 70.
Praise and prizes have been heaped upon fi lmmaker Andrew Haigh since his 2009 directorial debut. As his next movie prepares for release, he tells Scott Henderson about bigger budgets, horses vs humans, and avoiding sentimentalism 1 Apr–31 May 2018 THE LIST 67