We Live in Time director reveals the film's original ending — and why he changed it

Warning: This story contains spoilers about We Live in Time.

We Live in Time is a film about mortality, but it's not a film about death.

The film follows chef Almut (Florence Pugh) and her husband, Tobias (Andrew Garfield), tracking their love story across time and pinging back and forth from their meet-cute to her eventual death from cancer within its non-linear timeline. But director John Crowley and writer Nick Payne were adamant that viewers wouldn't be subjected to a deathbed scene or a sequence showing Almut wasting away.

"This is a film which deals with cancer," says Crowley. "It's not a film which is about physical decline. There are films that do that journey fantastically well; this isn't one that was ever looking to do that. That is because the question that the film is posing is — how do two people make a meaningful life together in the face of this? Rather than just, 'Here's a portrait of this and the ravages that it can do to a body.' There was never a scene where you saw her expire as it were."

Garfield adds that there was no need for a farewell scene because, in many ways, the film is a series of goodbyes. "There was never a bedside death scene," he notes. "That was never in the script. Every scene of their relationship is a goodbye scene in a way. From the beginning, there's this weird awareness of the urgency of their lives together. Anything extra would've felt too much because every single scene is them somehow saying goodbye to another day, another moment, another aspect of their love."

While there wasn't ever a death scene, the film didn't always end as it does now — with Tobias and daughter Ella (Grace Delaney) waving goodbye to Almut as she skates away from them at an ice rink, then cutting to a scene of Tobias and Ella cracking eggs like Almut taught them to some time later.

"That's not how the film ends in script form," reveals Garfield. "There were a few things that were rearranged, and there were a few scenes that are no longer there that we shot that aren't part of the final cut that were editorial choices that John made. So, when we were shooting that ice skating scene, we weren't aware that was going to be [the last scene with Almut], and neither were we aware that the egg-cracking scene between me and our daughter was going to be the final scene."

Instead, Crowley originally intended a scene that now occurs near the climax of the film to be the end of the movie — the one where Almut announces she's in remission following her first cancer diagnosis.

"The old structure was her walking into the doorway going, 'I'm in remission.' I felt very good about it when we shot it. It was a beautiful scene, very moving, and I was sure that it would play as a gesture of how she lives on after death somehow," he explains.

"In life, death is irredeemable, right?" the director continues. "Somebody dies, they die. And in storytelling, it's not. You tell stories about mortality because it's one of the ways that you can deal with something like this and conjure up meaning out of this black hole. I was sure that if we had one shot after the actual death to see her again out of time and sequence, that would make sense. But it felt almost literal; it was confusing."

So, they moved that scene up and chose to end with the final two scenes we see now, which Crowley feels better reflects the experience of grief. "The small detail of them waving goodbye at the ice rink takes on a degree of finality to it," he says. "Then, the empty rooms feel truer to the awfulness of grief in a way — that sense of 'You're kidding, that's not the end. She's not gone, right?' That's what death is — the hope that she's going to walk through that door any second."

Additionally, Crowley felt that the ice rink was of a piece with the other liminal spaces in the film, which stand in juxtaposition to the home that Almut and Tobias build together. "When we were doing the location hunting, we kept searching for liminal spaces," he explains. "There are a lot of spaces where people pass through to go to other places. That's how they meet, on a road. There's corridors in hospitals, there's anonymous hotels, and then, the ice skating. There are places you go to and move through, and these two people bump into each other in that. Then, in contrast to that, you have their domestic setup. It's very naturalistic because they're literally building their nest in contrast to these places."

Still, Crowley didn't want to overdo it by adding obvious visual metaphors to the scene at the ice rink. "The ice skating does feel like it's liminal between this and another world," he notes. "It's a threshold, but we didn't do it in a way that would make it feel white light-ish. We tried to keep it just as a day out and a bit of fun. When you can get the waving — which worked beautifully to carry a degree of weight without it hammering anybody on the head — that's gold dust.

"It's just the everyday playful reality of a child waving to her mom," he concludes. "And you feel the wave of something more significant underneath it than that. I was aware of its symbolic value, and I was also a bit wary of it."

It also helped that the performers weren't aware that these scenes would play as the film's conclusion when they shot them. It allowed them to focus on the scene's intention rather than trying to play a metaphor or instill some sense of finality or greater meaning. For instance, Garfield played the final egg-cracking scene as he did all of the scenes in the story after Almut passed away.

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"All those scenes with our daughter after Florence's character is gone, it was really about doing everything I could to be the representative of her mother and keep the memory of her mother alive," Garfield says. "It felt like this was one of the rituals we do to conjure the spirit of mum, to give you something physical and tactile, as her daughter, to take with you. Whenever you do something as banal and as frequent as cracking an egg, you won't be able to avoid feeling the spirit of your mum all around you. Tobias, as dad, was creating a ritual for himself and for her."

A ritual that, like the film, transcends the limits of space and time.