There’s a good chance Andrew Garfield won’t get enough credit for his impressive performance in Andy Serkis’ “Breathe.” Sure, he’s got an excellent shot at Best Actor nomination, but considering he plays a character almost completely immobile for three quarters of the film it shouldn’t even be a question. In scene after scene Garfield can only react through his face. He can’t flinch or move a muscle in any other part of his body. Try it for a minute or, even better, five. It’s not easy.
As Robin Cavendish, Garfield portrays a man was paralyzed from his neck down after being infected by the polio virus in 1958 at the age of 28. Claire Foy plays Robin’s wife, Diana. A woman who essentially cared for her husband for decades while raising their son Jonathan, who as the film’s producer has found a way to bring his parent’s inspiring romance to the screen.
Garfield may be a great actor, but when I walked in to chat with him in a Toronto hotel conference room last month he couldn’t hide how exhausted he looked. He’d recently come off a four month run as Prior in an acclaimed revival of “Angels in America” on the West End and jumped into a whirlwind of press for “Breathe.” And that followed a busy fall and winter on the award circuit for “Hacksaw Ridge” (his first Oscar nod) while simultaneously shooting David Robert Mitchell’s follow up to “It Follows,” “Under the Silver Lake.” Oh, and he’s scheduled to, um, follow “Angels” as it returns to Broadway in February for an 18-week run.
So, perhaps another return to the Dolby Theater for “Breathe.” Perhaps his first Tony nomination in May. As zonked as he clearly was Garfield was as talkative as ever. And boy did have a justification on why he agreed to follow “Angels” back to New York and a slight tease about what to expect from “Under the Silver Lake.”
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Gregory Ellwood: Congratulations on the movie.
Andrew Garfield: Thank you.
I was talking to Claire and she said that you guys developed a shorthand on set.
Yeah, like a secret code, yeah.
A secret code?
Yeah, because Robin and Diana had that. They would have to communicate very subtly when Robert needed something, especially in public, you know? If Robert needed to go to the toilet, there was a code for that. If Robin needed to be saved from a boring conversation, because he couldn’t walk away, he would give some kind of signal to Diana like, “Move me on from this boring person.” Claire and I managed to get very close and intimate very quickly, and that was one of the joys of doing this project.
I’m sure you haven’t seen this movie yet called “BPM (Beats Per Minute).” It’s France’s Foreign Language Oscar submission. In it, one of the actors, Nahuel Pérez Biscayart, said they shot an extended scene for three days where he lied there and couldn’t move.
Oh my goodness.
When he was mentioning this I was thinking about you having the same challenge in “Breathe.” I know in theory, people might think, “Oh, O.K. That’s uncomfortable,” but how hard was that for you while making the movie?
It’s practice. I had to practice so that it could be second nature. Obviously, you have impulses, you have bodily impulses, you know? Constantly, we are constantly moving. We are always dancing, we are always in motion.
Right.
Even if we’re still, we’re moving. You know?
Yeah, yeah.
The blood is flowing and we are responding to the most tiny pieces of stimulus, every moment to moment. Look at the unique thing that [my publicist] Mara is doing over there right now. It’s totally wild and unique and it’s totally unconscious. I’m pretty sure she’s not even aware of that. How do you totally train your body to not respond? Especially if you’re choking to death, you know? How do you not tighten up, at least, or change your breath rhythm? How do you not start tapping your foot or shaking? It’s a fascinating and very, very difficult thing, but it’s just practice. I think it’s just practice, and practice, and practice.
Did you do it all on your own or did you get advice from anyone?
No, I did it on my own but I hung out with some people who were paralyzed. I asked them about what it does to the body, where the aches and pains happen, how they best stretch out, how they best get cared for with that because, obviously, they can’t do it for themselves. We talked about going to the bathroom and how quickly do you trust people with those kind of intimate moments? Of course, what it does to the psyche, what it does to the emotional life, what it does to the inner life, what it does to the other senses, what it does to sight and vision? What does it do to the eyes? What does it do to the eye sockets? Do the eye sockets get stretched? The facial muscles get more elastic? What does it do to hearing? What does it do to your ability to be in the moment? It’s all those psychological questions as well.
While you were shooting would you say, “Hey, I need a break, I need to stretch”? Or am I overthinking it in terms of what the process was?
No, it was different every day. I think I wanted to do whatever would serve that scene in that particular day, whatever would serve my fellow actors, whatever would serve myself in being able to live with the performance that I needed to give. Sometimes I stayed in the chair all day, sometimes I asked Claire to feed me lunch. Sometimes I would have to run around the room for a while in order to get the blood flowing, because everything had gone kind of numb and it was a scene where everything needed to be alive. It really varied day to day, what the moment required of me.
It’s really rare to have the real life subject you’re playing visit the set for a day or two. It’s uniquely more rare to have someone directly involved in the story producing the movie on a daily basis.
Yeah.
Was that nerve wracking?
No, no. It was beautiful because Jonathan is so beautiful. Jonathan isn’t precious. Yet, this is his heart we’re dealing with. This is his whole heart that we’re trying to put on screen. We obviously felt a huge responsibility to him and to get it right for him, for his parents, and all those people who loved them and knew them. But, the way that Jonathan creates that is that he gives you room, he lets you play. He lets you own your work. He totally entrusts you and will occasionally suggest something, but very gently and very subtly. He’s very graceful. He’s really his father’s son in that way.
