Winter is coming just as Mike (Fred Hechinger) is coming of age in Andrew Haigh’s follow-up to All of Us Strangers, called A Long Winter. Haigh bases his screenplay on the eponymous novella by Irish writer Colm Tóibín and sets this family drama in the snowy Colorado Rocky Mountains as a mother disappears into a storm, while her son holds out hope that he will find her. At the Toronto International Film Festival, where the picture screened as a Special Presentation, Cineuropa spoke to the British director about his new film, which had only premiered at Telluride days earlier – in particular, he broke down the wondrous process of creating a welcoming, oneiric film world.

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Cineuropa: It’s common to frame introspective films like A Long Winter, which make us confront our own feelings together with the protagonists’, as therapeutic. How do you feel about this, since your movies work against traditional narrative expositions?
Andrew Haigh: They do. With every film, including this one, I’m asking the audience to come and join me in this [film] world, to be part of it and to start to feel it through its own rhythms. As a viewer, I love that when I’m watching something – to feel like I'm allowed in.

That feeling is tied to the sense of space in the film. Can you elaborate on how you built Mike and the mountainous landscape as main characters?
From the very beginning, I was thinking about Mike’s own inner journey. He starts off [the movie] with what I’d call “narrow attention”: he’s looking down as he's walking along a trail. He's trying to keep the world out – be it the mountains, what his mother might be going through or his familial troubles – but then, slowly, his attention begins to broaden, until he starts looking up more often. With that, he seems to embrace the world around him, but that really means that he’s also embracing his interior world. In particular, he’s understanding his mother in a better way once she's gone – seeing more of who she was as a person, not just as a mother.

Which is a traumatic shift for every child!
We don't want our parents to be anything other than our parents, but we can't become adults and grow properly until we realise that our parents are flawed. That they’re doing their best while dealing with their own traumas. Those are the kinds of things I spoke to Fred [Hechinger] a lot about. I’d also tell him to imagine that he’s breathing differently [throughout the film]. I told him, “Your breath is tight and contained at first, and as you’re allowing yourself to sink into the environment, it will allow you to understand yourself better.”

How did you achieve that hypnotic sense of space while working with cinematographer André Turpin for the first time?
We had lots and lots of conversations! With André especially, we spent a long time together, talking. Not necessarily talking about what we wanted the film to be, but just about ourselves. What I want is all of my key creative collaborators to bring themselves into the movie, too, since it’s not just mine; it’s their movie, too. So, the more they can bring their own personal experience to it, the more I think they can also feel the texture of the film as I do. In terms of images, it was about constructing a subtle shift: how do we make it feel like there was a slow expansion [in Mike’s world] without ever really noticing a change happening?

Did you take a similar approach to the music and sound design?
Even though the film is set in the 1950s, I didn't want it to feel like a period piece in the traditional sense of the word. I didn't want you to look at it and go, “Oh, it's set in the 1950s, and it does sound and look like that!” I was trying to evoke a sense of the 1950s that would feel more like a dream world that’s somehow elevated above reality. So, the questions of how to shoot it, score it and edit it all so it would feel real, but not quite real at the same time, were the ones we had to solve. With the rhythms we constructed, I was aiming for the feeling of living in a dream inside your head, rather than a documentary snapshot of the 1950s.