A love story with beautiful emotional depth, We Live in Time, starring Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield, directed by John Crowley and written by Nick Payne, had its audience in tears at the film’s Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) premiere in September. A heartbreaking drama with dialogue the will make you want to weep at times, while giggle at other moments, the idiosyncrasies of Payne’s script make this a compelling journey.
Told in a non-linear format, throughout We Live in Time we see the evolution of the relationship between Almut (Pugh) and Tobias (Garfield), including their initial meeting when Tobias gets hit by Almut driving her car. With the romance sparked, even under odd circumstances, Almut and Tobias’ love story continues, including the couple navigating Almut’s ovarian cancer diagnosis, and their journey to having their daughter.
“It felt like the ambition of the film was to capture something about the nature of what it feels like to try and make a life with somebody else in its very simple, basic, everyday, banal way, and also in the most profound way that transcends time,” Crowley told Yahoo Canada during TIFF.
“Thematically it’s just like, well what else is there apart from talking about the sacredness and the sanctity of life, and how the only way it’s meaningful is if we acknowledge that everything comes to an end at some point,” Garfield said in a separate interview. “So it just felt like I need that film. So I’m pretty sure if I need it, I imagine everyone needs it, because I need it on a deep level and I think we all need our hearts cracked open now in our culture.”
“I think we work really hard to avoid feeling things and that feeling might be the key to unlocking the necessary imagination and experience to create new systems in our culture and to replace the systems that are broken, and that will fail and die at some point. And I think we need systems that are heart-centred, rather than productivity-centred.”
For Pugh, she relished in Almut’s ambition, while also being able to explore the complexities of motherhood with this character.
“I was so excited to play a current day driven, successful young woman that had a dream and was going after it,” Pugh stressed. “I was also really excited about introducing the very common predicament of a young woman also having to figure out if she’s going to be a mum or not.”
“Those were themes that I was just really happy to be exploring and really excited for that to be on screen, because I know many women that are going through that, and many women that are constantly juggling whether they should or they shouldn’t. … As well as the fact of playing a woman who is so gorgeously ready to be vulnerable with someone that she’s fallen in love with.”
One of the most talked about scenes since the film’s premiere has been the moment when Almut gives birth to their daughter in a restroom at a gas station, after the couple get stuck in terrible traffic on the way to the hospital.
“Just to let you know, at the beginning of every take, on action, my first behaviour was having wet wipes, and I was cleaning off the sink and I was cleaning the floor,” Garfield said. “That was considered by this character.”
Cleanliness aside, it was a scene that Garfield described as “iconic” and unlike anything he’s ever read.
“I had never seen a scene like that in a film script and let alone on screen before,” Garfield said. “It felt utterly unique and that’s hard to achieve, and kind of iconic, as the dramatic centrepiece event of the film.”
“The trust that obviously Florence gave me and us in the room with the position that she’s in, literally, physically, to feel that safe with us and feel that vulnerable with us was a privilege to be a part of.”
Pugh added that it was an “exhausting” and “tiring” experience to film this moment, which ends with her and Garfield having to navigate handling a real 11-day-old baby, even passing the baby through her legs.
“The prosthetic took about three hours to get on,” Pugh explained. “And it was heavy.”
“So usually after about like two hours I’d start getting achy back, and [Andrew] would have to start massaging my back, … and my knees would start hurting and I’d have to lie down on my back in between takes. … And then obviously, doing that whole scene, it was very, very physical. It was the panting and groaning and pushing, and pushing and sweating, … and we shot it for two days. And each day, both of us were very aware of how important it was that we got it right, how important it was that we were in that moment every single take.”
But it was actually how Payne wrote that scene in particular that made Crowley agree to direct the film, after his initial hesitation.
“When I started reading it, at first I was a bit resistant,” Crowley said. “I thought, I don’t really know I want to make anything as nakedly emotional as this again, because Brooklyn, Goldfinch, I just had a big series called Life After Life.“
“The bit that sort of kicked the doors open, no pun intended, was the birth scene in the petrol station. When I read that scene I realized I was laughing out loud with tears in my eyes, and this sort of mixture of emotions between the sheer absurdity of the situation that these people find themselves in, which I found totally credible, and I’ve had friends who’ve had, maybe not in a disabled loo in Croydon, but very similar dramatic birth situations imposed on them. The sort of crazy humour of that unfurling and then flipping into something deeply moving and profound at the end of that, I thought, oh God this is great stuff.”
In addition to the impact of the birth scene, there’s another moment that’s particularly affecting in the film, that was actually the first heavier scene the actors shot, which brought the crew to tears.
It’s a moment where Tobias and Almut are in a car park after she gets her second cancer diagnosis. Almut asks Tobias, what if she doesn’t know how to go through cancer treatment again. As we linger in that moment in the movie, the reality of what she’s saying sets in deeper.
“Of course, they can’t really talk about what they’re talking about because it’s too devastating and when I saw that the strong, burly men behind the camera all had tears in their eyes afterwards, I was like, ‘OK something’s happening here,'” Crowley shared. “Afterwards, Florence came over to me and Andrew, she called both of us over, she went ‘I don’t understand. That was too easy.'”
“She was slightly shocked and surprised, because she was on the far side of a very big emotional scene and it’s almost as if she sort of rocketed straight through it, and it was because of what was going on between her and Andrew. And I think she had never felt that degree of attention and intimacy from another actor in a scene, in a way that was actually almost allowing her to fall into the scene, and he was responding back, and the exchange was profoundly connected. That was a very big day for them because the level of intimacy in their performance dropped a whole other level in that scene.”
We Live in Time is now in Canadian theatres
