“Florence gave birth eight times that day”: John Crowley on his multiple timeline romcom We Live in Time

Part romcom, part weepie, director John Crowley’s melodrama We Live in Time explores the relationship between chef Almut (Florence Pugh) and corporate lackey Tobias (Andrew Garfield). It was shot predominately in south London, as the attractive pair potter around Herne Hill and take walks in beautiful Brockwell Park, as young lovers are wont to do. The narrative jumps between three different timelines in their relationship: we swoon as the pair fall in love, laugh as Almut gives birth in an unlikely setting, and agonise when she gets diagnosed with ovarian cancer.

Using a lively, truthful script from Nick Payne, for whom he directed The Same Deep Water as Me at the Donmar Warehouse in 2013, Crowley – who is best known for his acclaimed 2015 adaptation of Colm Tóibín’s novel Brooklyn – was initially slightly resistant when he read the first half of the screenplay, thinking the narrative was “a little sad, a little too dark”. But “when I got to the birth scene in the petrol station in Croydon and the mixture of absurdity, jeopardy and the ultimate profundity, I was laughing through my tears,” Crowley says. “I knew when I read it I was in.” 

The day after he arrived in London following the film’s world premiere at Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), Crowley sat down to discuss how that birth scene was filmed, his juggling of multiple timelines, and the influence of Nicolas Roeg.

Was the non-linear narrative of the final film there from the start?

John Crowley: It was in the script. Nick has form with this; he wrote a play called Constellations [2012], which was about a relationship across multiple universes. It’s what gives the script an almost metaphysical quality, trying to express something of what it feels like to be on the inside of a relationship so that you get to see a relationship in many different facets rather than just following one line.

Do you have any favourite non-linear films?

Nic Roeg is the director who I revere, and his non-linear work Don’t Look Now [1973] and Bad Timing [1980] would be two that play with time in a way that is still thrilling. He once said in an edit room, “All time is available all the time.” I loved that idea. It was one of my little talismans going to set every morning. The idea that a film generates its own relative time universe and what you need to do is make each of those time sequences run in contrast to each other in the edit. It’s not consistent with life, but it is expressive of life, and that’s what we were trying to get at.

Brooklyn really broke me. This really broke me. Why is it you keep making films that make people weep buckets?

I don’t set out to do it, I swear to God. I set out to try and do really truthful work. Maybe I’m just really sad or something. In the cases of both films, the aim is to not just drop the audience into a bath of sadness and say, “Goodbye, good luck.” It’s more to maybe dip them gently in the sadness of life and then give them a little bit of a sunny upland to take out as they go out in the end.

How do you balance the comedy of the film with the rather sad story at its heart?

That was very, very much the tone of the way those actors played. Florence and Andrew are both very funny people. They’re adept with the comedy. Once they’d caught on to the tone of it, that actually you’re spinning between these things, they’re like a pair of trapeze artists. They can be in the saddest scene and can fly to an opposite tone. You think about a scene like the one where she has to explain to him, “I got a call from the hospital, and I’m going to have to face this terrible operation.” And in the middle of it he finds a wry moment where he says, “You’re note-taking his accent, by the way,” or they’re chatting and he goes, “Well, I vote shagging.”

Did you do much research or get technical advisors for the hospital scenes?

We did. Most people know what hospital waiting rooms are like, and getting this slightly realer side of contemporary UK life was very important to me. I didn’t want it to feel false. Yet at the same time, we got obsessed with the idea of liminal spaces. There are a lot of slightly bland places where people pass through – hotel rooms, supermarkets, Croydon, petrol stations and a corridor outside the A&E. What you have is these two people crashing into each other and trying to make a life out of that. So the blandness of those spaces was very important to me.

The birth scene is a real standout. What can you tell me about filming it?

We shot it across two days. It was bloody intense for those actors. We had a midwife on set who was fantastic, who worked in great detail with Florence. Florence hasn’t given birth and wanted to get it exactly right, so Penny was very, very helpful to her about the actual noises. I was running in giving notes and the midwife was giving notes; it was a two-hander in that way. We did very long takes. So Florence gave birth eight times that day. Each take would’ve been around 15, 16 minutes long. So their exhaustion is real by the end of it.

By the end, we introduced a real baby; that baby does not give a damn about the sound, about the camera. The baby is just pure need. That brought a whole other level of reality to what they were doing and to their wonder and awe. Handling that little child made it very special. By the time we got through the whole thing, it’s fair to say they felt like they had been through it for real. It was a very special couple of days and one of those sequences that you shoot where the actors come out the far side of it and feel slightly changed by it.

We Live in Time had its UK premiere at the BFI London Film Festival and is in UK cinemas from 1 January 2025.