Here’s our first look at Andrew Haigh’s “A Long Winter,” a small, intimate character study, this time set against the isolation of the Colorado Rockies.
Haigh tells THR that he first read Colm Tóibín’s short story “A Long Winter” around the time it was published in 2006. He kept trying to get the adaptation off the ground, originally planning to shoot it in Spain like the story, but nobody wanted to finance it. The project eventually found a new life after the acclaim of his last film, “All of Us Strangers.”
Set in 1950s Colorado, the film follows Mike (Fred Hechinger), a young man living with his troubled father (Ebon Moss-Bachrach), after his brother (Kit Connor) heads off to Korea and his mother (Caitríona Balfe) disappears. Mike heads into the freezing wilderness looking for his mother.
For Haigh, the film feels like an “endpoint” in his career so far. Shot on film with cinematographer André Turpin, “A Long Winter” was filmed in the Calgary wilderness, the same area used for “The Revenant.” Haigh says shooting on film was never up for debate and describes the movie as “my version of The Revenant — a slightly more delicate version.”
Keep an eye out for this one as it is headed to three big film festivals: Telluride, Toronto and New York. It could have been four, as it was accepted for Venice competition, but Haigh had to opt out due to scheduling issues that conflicted with the Telluride premiere.
Haigh’s last four films, including “Weekend,” “45 Years,” and “Lean on Pete,” were acclaimed, but it’s “All of Us Strangers,” starring Paul Mescal and Andrew Scott, that broke him out, and was his most commercially successful film. This success has led to Haigh being attached to a number of other projects, including “McGlue,” “In the Belly of the Beast,” and a Leonardo da Vinci biopic for Universal.
For Haigh, the film feels like an “endpoint” in his career so far. Shot on film with DP André Turpin, “A Long Winter” was filmed in the Calgary wilderness, the same area used for “The Revenant.”