Quotes from Andrew Haigh

Men are both bad and awful. And women are both bad and awful. And they can both be good and wonderful on both sides.

If you don't have money or you come from a background that doesn't have money, it's harder to achieve your ambition in life. It's not that you can't, but it becomes harder. Inequality is one of the worst things that can exist in our society, so I am interested in those kind of things.

I think the gay community is made up of so many little different things, different parts, different people... I think that can be quite hard for people. You think you've found your tribe, but actually, that isn't your tribe, and then you have to keep searching for what kind of makes sense.

The kinds of films I like are the ones that take their time. If you reach an emotional pinnacle too early on in a film, that's kind of it. I think, as in real life, when you're getting to know someone, it starts off slowly.

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.

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.

For me, it's very important that shows about gay people are messy and complicated and are truthful about what we do.

If I can do a scene in one shot, it's in one shot. Most of my shots are pretty long. I think with 'Looking,' what we have in the first minute is a whole episode of a traditional TV show. I like to let things breathe; I like to let things have a certain tone.

Of course everyone should have the right to get married. But I think people need to remember sometimes that we don't all need to be the same. There's thousands of different types of relationships that people can have, whether it's completely monogamous or it's not monogamous, or they're married, or they're single or whatever it is.

My influences are all over the place. Different films have spoken to me at different times in my life, and they've helped create my idea of the kind of films I want to make.

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.

I haven't got muscles, and I don't live in West Hollywood.

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.

One of the reasons I wanted to make 'Lean on Pete' was that it wasn't about identity. For me, it's about something more essential underneath: the need to have somewhere to live, to be safe, and have someone to look after you.

When I was growing up, I was watching fairly standard American cinema.

I'm really bad at knowing if something I've done is any good. I can't work it out; I can't be objective about anything I do.

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.

'Looking' was always a niche show for a niche within a niche. It's a gay-themed show, so you're not going to get millions of straight people watching it - that's the inevitability of it.

I think people do like extremes in cinema. There are very few films told about everyday middle-class couples, which is odd to me, as there are a lot of everyday middle-class couples.

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!'

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.

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.

My films are very everyday, and people don't always want to go to the cinema to see ordinary lives. They want to see something a bit more extraordinary. I get that desire, but it's not the kind of film I want to make.

I've always felt like an outsider, whether in school or when I'm working or within the industry or just in society at large.