Weekend turns 15 this year. Andrew Haigh's film follows two men, Russell and Glen, who meet at a club and spend one weekend together before one of them is set to leave the country, turning what starts as a one night stand into something neither of them planned for.
The film almost never got made. Haigh and his producer were asking for around a hundred thousand dollars to shoot it, and most funding bodies turned them down outright, unconvinced that a story built around two people talking in an apartment had a market. One funder eventually came through with around eighty thousand dollars, barely enough to cover a sixteen day shoot with a crew of about fifteen people.
Haigh shot the film in sequence and leaned hard into realism, filming in actual nightclubs with real patrons rather than extras and letting Tom Cullen and Chris New improvise large stretches of dialogue so neither actor knew exactly where a scene was headed before it started.
That approach paid off. Weekend holds a 95 percent on Rotten Tomatoes today, and it effectively launched Haigh's career, leading directly to 45 Years and, later, All of Us Strangers.
Fifteen years on, it remains one of the most unguarded romances in recent film, made on almost nothing by people who simply would not let the funding gap stop them.
