If you were to watch Lean on Pete and then picture the person who had made it, you would be unlikely to come up with Andrew Haigh. The film is an adaptation of the third novel by an alt-country musician about a neglected teen called Charley and a knackered racehorse (Pete) who wander the lonely scrublands of Oregon. Its director is a soft-spoken 45-year-old from Harrogate, in Yorkshire, who’s “quite scared of horses, actually”.
Haigh’s breakthrough was Weekend (2011), which, like his debut, 2009’s Greek Pete, gave an intimate account of the lives of gay men in contemporary Britain when such projects were still rare beasts. “Now,” says Haigh, “people want to put money into films about gay experiences, whereas when I tried to make Weekend, no one wanted to.”
That film’s success led him to San Francisco, to shoot his much-missed HBO series Looking, about three sexually fraught – and adventurous – friends. But his next move belied a fondness for curveballs: 45 Years, starring Tom Courtenay and Charlotte Rampling, was a polite, brutal portrait of a middle-class marriage in sudden meltdown. “After Weekend, everyone was like: ‘Why would you do a thing about two old people? That seems crazy.’ When the film did quite well, everyone was like: ‘Oh yeah, it makes total sense!’
“I’m not very good at thinking, ‘This is the thing I should do now to help my career.’ I mean, I want to keep my career going, but that’s not what draws me to a story. So Lean on Pete was just …” He pauses. “I love the story.”
Weekend and 45 Years were portraits of a couple. So too is this one, which takes care to avoid any of the Disneyfied sentimentality that often afflicts the boy-and-his-horse/dog/dragon subgenre. “There are no closeup shots of the horse’s eyes looking at Charley. It’s not about trying to create a fake connection between the two of them. Charley needs that horse for his own purposes, but the horse is always just a horse. This isn’t Black Beauty.”
Despite the alien environment, Haigh says he connected immediately with his protagonist when he first read Willy Vlautin’s book. “I felt like I understood him,” he says. “I felt heartbroken for him; I wanted to reach through the pages and pick him up and just hug him and tell him: ‘You’ll be fine!’”
After Haigh’s parents divorced, he had a miserable time at boarding school, where he says he experienced the particular sort of adolescent loneliness we watch Pete help Charley through. “I was not a happy teenager in the slightest.” But it was more specific than that. “It was also about growing up gay in the 80s; not the most joyful of times. There is definitely a world in which this story, for me, could be about a gay kid coming to terms with being gay.”
Haigh’s star is the newcomer Charlie Plummer, an 18-year-old actor best known for his turn as kidnap victim John Paul Getty III in the troubled Ridley Scott production All the Money in the World. In him, Haigh found an inscrutable quality he has long prized.
“I don’t want a performance to give me everything. You can look at Charlotte Rampling in 45 Years and you don’t really know what she’s thinking, but you know something interesting is happening. It’s the same with Charlie. I want the audience to lean in, to engage. I want them to try to understand, because I think that’s a problem in the world, isn’t it? We don’t lean in a bit harder to understand what someone is thinking and feeling.”
Haigh’s special talent as a film-maker comes not through fireworks or bullying but his humanity. One of Lean on Pete’s most memorable lines comes from Charley’s fickle, often-absent father, in a rare moment of parental counsel: “All the best women have been waitresses at some point.” It’s lifted direct from the book, so Haigh can’t take credit, but the sentiment chimes. “The whole life of waitresses is dealing with people all the time, especially in a diner out there in America. The whole of humanity is there in front of them and, I think, his point – and I suppose my point – is that when you see all that life in front of you, you’re more likely to be compassionate.”
It is perhaps this valuing of human (and animal) kindness – rather than any particular location, sexuality or subject matter – that most defines Haigh’s work. “In stories, those are the moments that hit me the most,” he says. “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!”
Lean on Pete is released today
