According to director John Crowley, the ending of We Live in Time was changed

• Andrew Garfield and Florence Pugh starred as a couple diagnosed with cancer in We Live in Time.
• BI spoke to director John Crowley about how the film’s tone balances romance and melodrama.
• Crowley also discussed the most challenging scenes and how the ending changed.

We Live in Time, a new film with Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield as a couple dealing with a cancer diagnosis defies easy categorization.

Constructed as a non-linear narrative, the film follows the decade-long relationship between Tobias (Garfield), a Weetabix salesman, and Almut (Pugh), a former figure skater turned Michelin chef.

It’s funny and romantic, but it’s not rom-com. It’s a dramatic and heartbreaking film about cancer, but it’s not intentionally weepy like The Fault in Our Stars or A Walk to Remember.

While We Live in Time director John Crowley found balancing the film’s many tones a challenge that encouraged him and his cast, some of the costumes were less enthusiastic.

“Obviously it made our financiers very nervous because the script is unsettling,” Crowley told Business Insider, adding that it’s this tone that gives the film its “vibration.”

“He constantly refuses to settle for one thing. And that’s why he refuses the railings of rom-com or melodrama.”

Still with Garfield and Pugh, the two beloved and reliably profitable stars at the center of his film, Crowley, who is best known for his Oscar nomination Saoirse Ronan the Brooklyn vehicle, after all, is little to worry about.

The undeniable chemistry between Pugh and Garfield, both on screen and during their press tour, created a lot of buzz for the film, with them discussing everything from shipping nude to getting excited recording sex scenes. When Pugh was unable to appear at the London Film Festival because she was filming another film, Garfield walked the red carpet with her life-size cardboard cutout, for the fun of the fans.

And here’s the movie’s most unintentional meme: carousel horse, whose strange facial expression, captured in the corner of one of the film’s promotional photos, went viral.

“It was so friendly, everyone was teasing about it,” Crowley said. “For now, any publicity is good publicity. That’s not always true today, but I think it was in this case.”

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Below, Crowley talks to BI about the most challenging scenes to shoot for Pugh and Garfield, how the ending changed, and how much crying there was on camera.

The actors — and the director — went through an emotional drain

When it came to translating this troubled script to the screen, Crowley praised Garfield and Pugh for “hitting the bullseye every day.” He pointed to a large one birth scenethe film’s pivotal sequence, in which Almut ends up delivering their daughter Ella in a gas station bathroom after they’re stuck in traffic on New Year’s Eve, is one of the most grueling scenes to film.

“(Pugh) gave birth eight times in one day,” Crowley said. “And these takes lasted a long time. There were like 16-minute takes or something like that.”

He also pointed to the climactic kitchen argument between Almut and Tobias over her decision not to undergo treatment and instead focus on studying to compete in a cooking competition as one of the scenes that was “extremely raw” and difficult for Garfield. The scene was shot near the end of filming, and Garfield, who had gone through much of Tobias’ emotional arc at that point, was left “deeply upset” after filming.

“In a way, he could feel Tobias’s grief himself after that scene, which is that she left. She’s going to do what she wants to do, and I’m left to watch. But she left,” Crowley recalls. “He felt it was the beginning of the end.”

In 2019, Garfield also lost his mother to cancer.

“It really hit him very, very hard,” Crowley added.

This level of lingering emotion was not unique to Garfield either. Crowley said he, too, was emotional on set, watching Garfield and Pugh act out some of the film’s most intense scenes. And six months later, he strained again, editing the film.

“There was a lot of emotion on that set,” he said. “Yeah, I was a wreck.”

The ending of “We Live in Time” was originally different

The sequence of scenes in the film, which tells the love story of an out-of-order couple, was also changed during the editing process. The scenes originally intended to open and close the film ended up in completely different places.

Crowley said the film originally opened with Tobias and Almuth twirling on the fairgrounds, where they went to celebrate Almuth’s remission from cancer. The original ending was in the endpaper; the final dialogue scene was Almut walking through the door of their apartment and telling Tobias that she was in remission after her first bout of cancer.

Both of these scenes still exist in the film’s finale, but instead they’ve been placed three-quarters of the way through and take place chronologically, with Almuth first revealing his remission, and then the two going to the fairgrounds to celebrate.

The finale that made it to the screen is a beautifully restrained sequence: after participating in the Bocuse d’Or cooking competition, a satisfied and fulfilled Almut takes Tobias and their daughter Ella to the ice rink. The family skates together, harkening back to Almuth’s past as a figure skater, a passion she abandoned due to grief when her own father died.

This scene ends with Almut riding away from her partner and daughter and waving to them, functioning as Almut’s farewell for both her family and the audience. In the next scene, Tobias and Ella enter the family cottage after an unspecified period of time. It is never said out loud, but it is clear that Almut is dead.

Crowley said there was never any plan to show Almuth’s death on screen. “It was never filmed,” he said. “The sequence of skating and waving on the other side was always intended to have a farewell meaning.”

For Crowley, this scene was intended to convey to the viewer a sense of sudden finality when someone you love dieswhich is always sharp and felt too soon.

“They wave goodbye in this beautiful moment of triumph, and then it’s just emptiness. I think you must be joking, right? She comes back, of course, which is how you feel when someone leaves,” he said.

He also points to the dog that first appears in the film’s final scene as a subtle hint that Almut has died, harkening back to an earlier part of the film when Almut half-jokingly offers to take the older dog. help her daughter cope with the idea of ​​death.

The moment of breaking the eggs is another motif that returns in the finale. This happens three times throughout the film: in the opening scene, when we first meet Almut, and then at the beginning of Tobias and Almut’s relationship, when she explains to him her method of breaking eggs (always on a flat surface and into smaller bowls before transferring them to a larger bowl) and then in the final scene where Tobias and their daughter use Almut’s method of breaking eggs after her death.

It’s a brief moment that takes on a greater meaning: a simple, profound way to show how Almut lives for his daughter.

Crowley knew it would be risky to end the film with what could be perceived as no conclusion. But whether or not every audience liked it, for the director — and for his characters — it was the truest ending.

“It would be a truer expression of what it feels like to lose someone very dear to you,” he said. “It seemed like the right place to leave them and go on this journey.”

“We live in time” is already in cinemas.