How Andrew Garfield, Florence Pugh's time-skipping romance captures the essence of love and loss

We can control our choices, but the one thing we can't harness, shorten, or expand is time.

InWe Live in Time, Tobias (Andrew Garfield) and Almut (Florence Pugh) learn that the hard way in a love story that bounces back and forth over the course of several years as they navigate an injury-laden meet-cute, their careers, and Almut's cancer diagnosis.

For director John Crowley, the scattered timeline enables him to convey some deeper truths about relationships and connection. "The nonlinear aspect of the film gave it a degree of complexity and allowed us to skip around multiple different facets of the marriage in a way that felt like we could cover a huge amount of emotional tones and territory in a short space of time," he tells Entertainment Weekly. "That also made what was already two meaty roles for two great actors even better because it is epic within a postcard size."

Though we open on Almut and Tobias already partnered and with a young daughter, the film then jumps to the night they first met, when Almut hits Tobias, who's in search of a pen to sign his divorce papers, with her car. The story hops and skips between this meet-cute, the sequence of events that leads to their relationship (including an emotional kitchen monologue from Tobias), Almut's first cancer diagnosis, her growing success as a chef, her preparation for the Bocuse d'Or (essentially the culinary Olympics), and more.

"It was always the ambition to run three time frames against each other — one across a day, one across six months, and one across five years — and to, within that, hopefully capture the sense of what it feels like to be on the inside of a relationship," Crowley continues. "We don't live our lives in a particularly linear way. If you think back on a relationship, it can often be shards of memories, some of which can be quite long and in depth and can play like a one-act play, some of which might be a snapshot. It's about two people trying to create a life for themselves. What happens to the meaning of that when the time gets curtailed?"

Pugh, whose Almut is an ambitious chef and fiercely loving soul, finds the approach allowed her to give more weight to each scene, even if it wasn't all that different from shooting non-chronologically, as is the norm on most films. "Every scene in a movie is specifically there for a reason, but when it's jumping around like this, every single snapshot that you're seeing in their life is a core memory," she says. "It's the main event of what is going on. In that sense, I felt there was a reason for every single scene as to how it then made the rest of those eras within the 10 years fold into each other. It gave me a bit more attention to detail in every single moment."

"The different outcomes are in each scene," he explains. "They're in the possibility of the choice made within each scene. You can see the different outcomes in the eyes of these two characters. In every single moment, every single conversation, every single decision, it feels like there's a thousand different ways that this can go, and this is the choice." Garfield means this as a more spiritual thing, not actually seeing these multiple options on screen, but instead, in the performances, as they both scan a room or each other's faces trying to reach a conclusion in any given moment.

Crowley adds, "What he's getting at is that life is contingent. It's really tiny choices which somebody makes, and they're not aware that it's anything to do with destiny. Your life is hanging by a thread, and maybe looking back, it makes sense, but not going forward."

For Garfield, the narrative structure also underscores the film's sense of fate. "It was fun dealing with the cause and effect of each event," he reflects. "There was something with the script that really appealed to me in the sense of the mystery of one's life and this invisible golden thread between all of these different events that are seemingly so disjointed, but amount to a support for the idea of destiny."

Nick Payne, who wrote the screenplay, also penned the play Constellations, which similarly experiments with time in a relationship. That theater piece also introduces the concept of the multiverse and the notion that there are a million different possible choices and outcomes in any relationship. Crowley and his actors wanted instead to give a sense of a march toward the inevitable. Still, Garfield feels that all those possibilities play out in the palpable choices that are left unsaid.

To craft an intense bond that is at times hilarious and others heartbreaking, the script requires exquisite chemistry between its two leads. For Garfield and Pugh, it wasn't so much about establishing a rapport or going out for meals together. It was more intangible than that. "There was something very magical that happened straight away," Pugh gushes. "We wanted to be great for each other, we wanted to meet each other, and we wanted to be there for each other. That just naturally evolved and got stronger and more knowledgeable each day, so by the end of the movie, it felt like we were saying goodbye to a whole world that we had created and a whole idea of what their lives were."

Garfield adds that he looks for the same qualities in an acting partner as he does in real-life connections. "It's that thing that you always hope for in a relationship with anyone in your life," he says. "Whether it's a parent, a friend, a partner, there's some divine third thing that gets created together that is an energy. Maybe that is chemistry — these two souls meeting and the energy they bring dancing together in a way that is profound. They see themselves in each other."

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In some ways that was easy for Garfield to tap into as he has a very personal connection to the film's subject matter. He lost his mother to pancreatic cancer in 2019, and telling a story about two partners muddling through the fallout of a similar diagnosis brought that all bubbling to the surface. "It was a gift," he says of the experience of making the movie. "Grief is a gift. That's one of the beauties of this film — it frames grief as one of the only access points to true love. There's no way of experiencing connection to life until we understand and experience a connection to death. It's the reclamation of grief as a gift, as a reminder of knowing of how much you loved and how much you continue to love. All of the unexpressed love is what grief manifests."

Garfield hopes his own experiences that he channels into Tobias will provide comfort to others. "What's amazing is that it's universal," he concludes. "It's been this way since the dawn of time, and everyone in the audience is going to have some version of this experience. That's reassuring to know that this unique pain that I feel is not that unique. It's unique to me, but it's shared by every other human being that lives in a way that is full of longing to connect and to live a life of meaning."

We Live in Time hits theaters on Oct. 11.