Irish director John Crowley (“Boy A,” “Brooklyn”) and his “We Live in Time” actor Andrew Garfield hosted the last of this year’s star-studded San Sebastian press conferences for their Official Selection player, which will close the 72nd edition of the festival this evening.
Also starring Florence Pugh, “We Live in Time,” written by acclaimed playwright Nick Payne (“The Crown”), is the time-twisted love story of Almut and Tobias. Through disordered snapshots of their life together, the two experience great joys like parenthood, meeting each other’s families, a marriage proposal, and life-changing tragedies such as divorce and a recurring ovarian cancer diagnosis. The couple learns through their shared memories to cherish each moment of the roundabout path their relationship has traveled.
During Saturday morning’s press conference, Garfield said he was in a contemplative place when Payne’s screenplay crossed his desk. “When I read [the script], I was in deep contemplation of the meaning of life. As always, but maybe more pronounced in that moment. I was thinking about life, death, love, meaning, time… standing at the age of 39 and 40, kind of a mid-life crisis, looking forward, looking backward, looking exactly where I am, and thinking, ‘What now?’”
“This script arrived, and it was as if I had written it from that place,” he elaborated, recalling that he had to ask himself, ‘How did I write this so well? I’m not a writer.’”
The actor reasoned that if both he and Payne were musing on the same ideas, “these things, “there’s gotta be something to it, something universal in this story.”
That’s not to say the script was particularly maudlin. In fact, for Garfield, it was thrilling. As soon as he read a particular scene that involved an ambulance, a traffic jam, and a filthy gas station bathroom, “I knew I wanted to do it. It felt like the central action sequence, the Indiana Jones action sequence of this film.”
When one journalist referred to Garfield and Pugh’s characters as heroes for carrying on so bravely in the face of a recurring ovarian cancer diagnosis, the actor objected.
“I struggle with that word right now in our culture,” Garfield elaborated. “Anyone in my life who has been through something similar to what Tobias and Almut go through would reject the idea of being heroic. People in my family and close friends who have been through things of the most horrific nature, the kind of things where you have to wonder if the universe has any justice in it, those moments where you think ‘What is the setup here and how am I supposed to carry on?’ The ones that do find a way to carry on, would reject outright the idea of being heroic. It’s necessity.”
“What I love about these two people is that they represent this strange, mysterious, undying, inexplicable want to live in the face of the most horrific heartache and loss. And how we, as human beings, find that strength, that want, that little flame of longing to live over and over and over again. There are probably people in this room going through something not dissimilar from these characters, facing death and choosing to live anyway. I find that remarkable,” he added, garnering the loudest applause of the morning.
Compared by one of the journalists in the room to legendary “Lawrence of Arabia” and “Doctor Zhivago” director David Lean, Crowley blushed and praised “Brief Encounter” as “one of the great romantic dramas.”
“David Lean? I’ll take that,” he chuckled at the compliment, adding that he is inspired by filmmakers like “David Lean and Nicolas Roeg… and of course, David fired Nicolas on ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ for telling him to ‘f*ck off.’ So a bit of David Lean, a bit of Nicolas Roeg with a bit of U.K. ‘f*ck off.’”
In his opinion, what those directors and others of their generation did so well was to tell complete stories that had romance in them rather than trying to build a story around romance. “When you do that, there is space for an audience to find itself in the work, and that really gives it something.”
“This might sound odd,” he said of his own film, “But when I first read it, I didn’t think this is a romantic drama. I thought, ‘This is a great story about death.’ It’s really fearless and funny, and it’s trying to attain some of the mystery of what it means to fall in love, get married, and have a child with someone.”
“We Live in Time,” which premiered at the Toronto Film Festival earlier this month, is produced by European powerhouse Studiocanal – which is also selling the film – and Benedict Cumberbatch’s SunnyMarch in the U.K. Indie heavyweight A24 will give the film a limited theatrical release in the U.S. starting Oct. 11.
