We Live In Time has emotional intelligence and heart, with the wit and chemistry of a lived-in romance, and it’s a bitter-sweet combination.
At the Toronto International Film Festival I sat down with star Andrew Garfield and director John Crowley, and the duo set a tone that mirrored the movie; careful and funny but thoughtful, and with deep praise for the film’s star, Florence Pugh.
“Yeah, she’s a real force,” Garfield said, “and I’ve obviously–like everyone else–I’ve been a fan and seen that in her since Lady Macbeth, when she was really young, and seeing her choices and how she’s worked since. It’s inspiring. I knew I wanted to work with her.”
“I knew I was a fan and then you take a leap of faith and you kind of go, well, I hope we get along, and I hope that neither of us cause problems for the other, at the very least.”
“Then we discovered this real simpatico kind of respect and care for each other, support of each other’s work, support in each scene and each take, and a kind of building, each scene together. It was inspiring, and it was a joy to go to work every day on this, for sure, in large part because of that dynamic and because of the playfulness that could occur and the naturalness that could be happening. So, yeah, it’s beautiful.”
For Crowley, the relationship and the connection between the actors was a matter of time, they approached it, “Slowly. Gently,” he said.
“You can’t invite it to be released. I think there’s a lot of nonsense talked about about chemistry in lots of ways; you cannot manufacture it. So what was great was you have two great actors who are both creatively ambitious for their own work, wanting to go places perhaps they haven’t before.”
“I think quite quickly, without it being articulated–in an almost non-verbal way–[they] trusted that together they’d make something bigger than each of them. That it would be about the two of them in the film, and my job was to somehow keep everything from getting in between them, distracting, to clear the way and occasionally nudge one way or another.”
Watch the full interview above for more on making the film, what Crowley sees as the heart of the story, and Garfield’s main idea for playing Tobias to Pugh’s Almut. The film is in theatres on Friday, October 18.
Photos Courtesy of Sphere Films
