Inside the Birthing Scene in ‘We Live in Time’

You wouldn’t expect the romantic drama “We Live in Time” to have an action scene, but it does — at least that’s how Andrew Garfield sees it.

In the middle of the time-hopping story of a young couple battling a cancer diagnosis, there’s a hilarious yet touching sequence when Almut, played by Florence Pugh, gives birth on all fours in a gas station bathroom as her partner, Tobias (Garfield), nervously coaches her through the delivery with the aid of two shockingly helpful employees.

“It’s the big action event,” Garfield said. “It’s the Indiana Jones sequence.’”

The birth scene is a showcase for both the acting skills of Pugh and Garfield and the unique tone of the film, which mashes up humor and tragedy. It was also a logistical challenge for the director John Crowley and the actors who had to deal with the intensity of the material as well as an actual weeks-old baby who arrived for the grand finale.

For Crowley the birth was the reason he wanted to make the movie in the first place. A number of elements potentially swirling around each other meant “we could create a scene that was thrilling and refusing to be one thing at one time,” he said in a video interview, noting that the “absurdity of the situation” lives alongside the “genuine sort of jeopardy of it.”

The idea for Almut’s chaotic labor was inspired, in part, by the screenwriter Nick Payne’s own experience when his wife was giving birth to their first child. The hospital where she was supposed to deliver was extremely busy at the time, and the couple was told they might have to go to another facility in a different part of London.

“I just spent a long time very nervously worrying about that,” he said in an interview. The trip to a Croydon hospital would take him by a gas station, and “I would drive past that thing and think, ‘This is where we’re going to end up.’ It was basically my own anxiety.”