The power of love to shape time—bring it to a thrilling halt, speed it up wildly, blow it wide open so even our tiniest, most tender moments turn monumental—becomes the storytelling engine of director John Crowley and playwright Nick Payne’s exhilarating new take on a classic romance with We Live In Time.
REVIEW: We Live In Time uniquely portrays the complexities of life, love, and loss through its characters’ deeply personal journeys. Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield’s performances bring authenticity and raw emotion to their roles, making their struggles and triumphs feel real. The film’s narrative structure is non-linear, which mirrors the way people often remember their lives—out of order, with key moments highlighted. This approach adds depth and layers to the storytelling, allowing viewers to piece together the characters’ histories and relationships much like a puzzle. It handles grief and hope delicately, exploring how the characters cope with grief and find moments of joy1. The film does not shy away from the harsh realities of life but balances these with moments of love and connection, making it both heartwarming and heart-wrenching. Director John Crowley employs a range of cinematic techniques that enhance the film’s profound impact. From visual storytelling to a thoughtful score by Bryce Dessner, each element contributes to the film’s overall sense of intimacy and realism. Nick Payne’s screenplay significantly contributed to the film’s impact, he intricately crafted nuanced and multi-dimensional characters that are not merely characters on a page, but fully fleshed out individuals with complex emotions and relationships. Payne’s writing captures the essence of human emotion, weaving in moments of introspection, vulnerability, and strength. The dialogue is crafted to be authentic and relatable, allowing viewers to see reflections of their own lives and experiences in the characters’ conversations. This relatability helps to ground the story in reality and make its impact more profound. The screenplay adeptly balances moments of light and darkness, joy and sorrow. This balance ensures that the film resonates on multiple emotional levels, offering a holistic and well-rounded narrative experience.
Modern-day Londoners Almut and Tobias literally crash into each other as bewildered strangers. A decade later, having remade one another’s lives, they’d do anything to never let each other go. But no love story
is truly straightforward. And this light-handed, deep-hearted portrait of a marriage mirrors how we truly experience love: in fits and starts, outside linear logic, in fleeting but indelible moments that are gorgeous, funny, high anxiety, delirious, sad, and revelatory, sometimes all at once.
Crowley, known for his warm, delicate look at love and migration in the Oscar-nominated Brooklyn, allows We Live in Time to be driven as much by pure performance as playful structure. Mining a chemistry that is not just instant, but intensifying, Andrew Garfield and Florence Pugh create in guarded Tobias and fiery Almut a distinctly contemporary couple—two fiercely independent people with no idea how to combine their already-crammed lives and well-formed doubts, but who are moved to try. Their push-and-pull slides from flirtation to resistance to compromise to parenthood to defiance of the clock ticking against them by making their best moments last.
Says Crowley, “I was drawn to the idea of using time cinematically to express what it truly feels like to be on the inside of a relationship. Three different periods in Almut and Tobias’ relationship run against each other throughout the film: one period which spans several years, one period of about 6 months, and
one single spectacular day, the day their child is born. We’ve blurred the edges so audiences can drift between them and feel all the ways they blend into and inform one another.
When time becomes scarce, the couple’s reaction turns life-affirming. “Almut and Tobias are confronted by grief, as we all are ultimately, but this only sharpens their humour, their joy, their desire to live consciously,” says Crowley. “Their beautiful energy stands in opposition to life’s darkness.” Pugh felt drawn in by a fresh approach to the kind of smart, sparkling romances she was raised on, one that renders vivid the way love presses up against the confines of time and pushes us to risk more. “I was spoiled growing up by all the Notting Hills and Four Weddings and A Funerals, these quintessentially British, very human storylines we all wanted to watch, and be part of, and hopefully have one day. And this story taps into that same rich level of romance,” she says.
She continues, “The moment Almut and Tobias lock eyes, you know, no matter how much they wind each other up and how much they’ll evolve, they’re meant to be together. You’re totally ready to follow them through their every single high and every single low because their love feels so pure and real. And
no matter what is happening, there is always levity with this life-grabbing couple.”
Adds Garfield, “This is a story that cracks your heart open to the beauty and mystery of life, that honors the people who anchor us to this existence. The big lesson Tobias learns from Almut is that in any life worth living, you’ll inevitably have losses, but you’ve got to let in as much love as possible.”
In the deeply moving romance We Live In Time, Almut (Florence Pugh) and Tobias (Andrew Garfield) are brought together in a surprise encounter that changes their lives. Through snapshots of their life together – falling for each other, building a home, becoming a family – a difficult truth is revealed that rocks its foundation. As they embark on a path challenged by the limits of time, they learn to cherish each moment of the unconventional route their love story has taken.
Love and Payne: The Screenplay
The accidental, crash-bang collision of rising chef Almut and cereal marketeer Tobias began in the mind of acclaimed British screenwriter and Tony-nominated playwright Nick Payne.
Payne had earlier explored love across multiple quantum universes in his much-loved play Constellations. But now he started thinking about the effects of more everyday time—specifically, how we handle the fact that, one way or another, we’re constantly running out of it. This story couldn’t be a play, he knew, because nothing mimics the very keeper of time, memory, like a motion picture camera.
“On screen you can go anywhere,” Payne says. “So, I felt in a film about how a couple lives when their time is running out, you could play with time in a way that gives the audience a thrilling experience of it.”
When he pitched the ambitious love story to SunnyMarch (Benedict Cumberbatch and Adam Ackland’s production company), they were thrilled by its unconventional approach to romance; producer Leah Clarke says “Nick was given free reign.”
“It felt very fresh and like nothing that we’ve seen before” explains Ackland. And so Payne began to craft a story that would soon inspire a brilliant creative team to breathe life into it, including producer Guy Heeley, Crowley as director, and actors Andrew Garfield and Florence Pugh.
While the DNA of classic cinematic romances clearly courses through the story’s veins, Payne fractured the flow, allowing Almut and Tobias’s years together to run into and out of one another like a tapestry, in a similar manner to how relationships unfold inside our anxious, uncertain, dream-laden minds. He
then anchored the film in a part of London not often seen on screen—not glam, edgy, or fairy tale London, but South London’s leafy middle-class suburb of Herne Hill. And he had Almut and Tobias meet not in the flush of youth but in their 30s, when they already have fully formed lives, precious little personal time, and accumulated scar tissue wrapped around their hearts.
“Chances are they’ve both had a few relationships before you meet them,” Payne notes. “And I think you make quite different decisions when you fall in love in your 30s, which interested me.”
While avoiding romcom antics, Payne imbued Almut and Tobias with a keen sense of life’s funnier side. “I wanted the humour in the film to arise as easily as it could from the temperament of these two people,” he explains. “I saw Almut and Tobias as both naturally funny so it’s part of their rapport from the start.”
Payne and Crowley previously collaborated, and forged a lifelong friendship, on an acclaimed production of The Same Deep Water as Me, Payne’s incisively comic play set in the world of personal injury fraud.
When SunnyMarch shared the script with Crowley, he was excited to read it. But there was trepidation, too, he confesses. Though he’s always adored Payne’s vision, he was sure he wasn’t about to return so soon to the territory of heartbreak. As he read, he realized he was wrong. Still, it wasn’t the heartbreak in the script that got to him. It was how light and true Almut and Tobias felt, how much he liked spending his own time with them, and how excited he was by not only the creative risks of the structure but the emotional challenges of flipping a tale of mortality into a sharply honest ode to life.
“You don’t really choose what you do. It chooses you,” Crowley muses. “And when I finished Nick’s script, I thought OK, this is what I’ll be spending the next year-and-a-half of my life doing. I liked that Almut and Tobias’s love story didn’t have smooth edges, that it was sparky and tangled and honest in ways that intrigued me. I liked that Almut and Tobias are not particularly looking for anyone in their lives when they meet, but one day turns into another and you see how they start to build a life in that way. I liked the way the story is set outside linear time because it becomes about the choices Almut and Tobias make inside their relationship, which felt like something fresh. And I especially liked being able to play cinematically with time, which is so elemental to the nature of film, within what is also just a very funny, human, moving story.”
Crowley was keenly aware the pitfalls of melodrama lay in the film’s path. But he was clear-eyed that authentic emotion was the way out of them. The key, he says, was for Almut and Tobias to have “an absolutely truthful, embodied depth to them, which meant needing two great actors.”
“I thought, ‘What an opportunity to work with such deep themes and ideas through such elegant, delicate, subtle storytelling,’” says Garfield. “Love is such a vital human experience, and this story reminds us of the many ways that love runs through our lives. It’s not just a romantic love story. It’s equally a love story about a daughter and what her parents want to give her. It’s about the lasting ripples of love and how they permeate everything. If, while you’re reading a script, you’re crying and laughing within minutes of each other, you know you’re in great shape.”
Garfield continues, “Since Boy A, I’ve changed so much as an actor, and John has changed so much as a filmmaker, yet we always kind of knew one day we’d find a project together that felt just as meaningful to us. I love and trust in John as one of our most emotionally powerful filmmakers.”
Says Pugh of her approach, “I saw Almut as a really driven and really normal single woman, someone I could see myself in, and someone who I think audiences will see themselves in. It felt absolutely wonderful to play someone going through so many of the things someone my age really goes through, and it was nice to act off instinct. It wasn’t hard to reach for inspiration because I personally know so many wonderful, hardworking, opinionated women just like Almut.”
The greatest influence on Pugh’s performance became simply the profound connection she and Garfield felt from the get-go, which only kept growing. “Andrew and I had to go to places that were hugely intimate and hugely bare,” she reflects, “and I was so lucky to have the kind of deep trust in both Andrew and John to really go there. Andrew meticulously works on every single beat until it is true and right, creating a magical experience where I felt completely held in every way. Every single take felt so alive that Almut and Tobias became real to us, as did their caring and tenderness with each other.
The Micro and The Macro
When the gratifying production wrapped, Crowley knew the film’s journey was not even half over. As he headed to the editing room with Justine Wright (Locke), he anticipated the biggest challenge of his career to date. “I’ve been a big admirer of Justine’s work, and I knew this was going to be a long, daunting
edit since we were working with non-linear time and we would be trying to carefully balance micro moments with the macro of these two lives,” he says.
Crowley continues, “Ultimately, we had to break the structure of the film, rip everything out, and build it back, to allowing these three different chunks of time to flow together in a way that isn’t jarring, that gives you enough information, that’s true to the characters, and yet simultaneously feels playful and emotionally true. There is no fast way through that process. We were thinking a lot about time, and it took a lot of time, as well as patience. But along the way we made some great discoveries that brought us back to what we loved most about the story.”
For all its shifts through time, the story of Almut and Tobias leaves off with a notion that is starkly timeless: that what means the most to anyone is to live so well it inspires those around us.
At a time when cinematic romances that aren’t strictly frothy romcoms are increasingly scarce, Crowley hopes We Live in Time feeds an audience hungry for such stories.
“It’s one of the most primal stories you can tell, isn’t it?” reflects Crowley. “Two individuals meet and try to make sense of their lives together, only for life or fate or whatever you want to call it to have a different idea of their future, which only makes them love each other more.”
Garfield and Pugh say Almut and Tobias also left their marks on them. “It’s one of those stories that makes you want to do all the things you’ve always been telling yourself you should do but haven’t,” says Pugh. “We’re only here, all of us, for a very short amount of time on balance, so what a magical thing to spend that time loving others.
Garfield concludes, “What happens between Almut and Tobias comes down to questions we all ask ourselves: How do we do this thing called life? How do we love freely? How do we take the bridle off and let ourselves expand? When you take all the restrictions to love away, that’s when you find yourself as fully in the moment as possible.”
Director John Crowley
With a background as an award-winning theatre director, John Crowley received critical acclaim and his first awards in film in 2003 with his first feature Intermission, which starred Colin Farrell. He followed this with an adaptation of Harold Pinter’s Celebration starring Michael Gambon, Boy A starring Andrew Garfield and Peter Mullan and Is Anybody There? starring Michael Caine. He directed two episodes for the second series of True Detective for HBO, starring Colin Farrell, Vince Vaughn and Rachel McAdams.
Brooklyn, adapted by Nick Hornby from Colm Toibin’s novel and starring Saoirse Ronan, Domhnall Gleeson and Emory Cohen, won the Best British Film BAFTA 2018 along with three Academy Award
nominations. John’s latest film The Goldfinch, adapted from the Donna Tartt novel by Peter Straughan, starred Ansel Elgort, Aneurin Barnard, Jeffrey Wright, Nicole Kidman and Sarah Paulson, and was released by Warner Bros. In 2022, John directed a four-part adaptation of Kate Atkinson’s award-winning novel Life After Life for the BBC/House Productions. John recently directed Black Mirror S6’s ‘Beyond The Sea’ starring Aaron Paul. His latest A24-produced film We Live in Time.
Writer Nick Payne
Nick Payne is a playwright and screenwriter. His theatre work has played in London’s West End and Broadway garnering sell out audiences and multiple awards. His film Midwinter Break, directed by Polly Findlay and starring Ciaran Hinds and Lesley Manville, wrapped this summer and will be releasing soon. He is working on film, television and theatre projects in the UK and the US.
