It takes a trouper to star in two emotionally draining major films opening just weeks apart in parallel award season runs. That level of professional commitment is multiplied when both productions demand grueling physical preparation. For Andrew Garfield, who played a hero in Mel Gibson's high-powered World War II epic "Hacksaw Ridge," representing a physically abused and spiritually embattled priest in Martin Scorsese's "Silence" added a further demand.
Garfield, who has no faith of choice, dug deeply into the very different theological beliefs of the films' Seventh-day Adventist and Catholic characters.
He was widely praised for his portrayal of Desmond Doss, a devout pacifist who served as a combat medic in the battle of Okinawa, the first conscientious objector to armed combat in U.S. history to receive the Medal of Honor. But no approval has equaled what he received for playing a Jesuit missionary in feudal Japan. After Scorsese premiered "Silence" at the Vatican, he said Pope Francis had jokingly recommended that Garfield be ordained as a priest.
"It just so happened that I'd been very interested in these themes," he said in a philosophical tone during a recent phone conversation. "It was a real kind of double-hitter in that way. Both of these just landed in my lap, and I thought, 'This is God-given and I get to go and explore these things with these great filmmakers.'"
Each is the sort of thoughtful, spiritually focused, adult film that for business reasons is not often made anymore. Garfield said that after a two-film run as the Amazing Spider-Man, the value of these stories and the opportunity to work with filmmakers of unusual skill was unavoidable.
"The opportunity to work with Martin Scorsese doesn't come along, well, ever. When that happens you stop and you say, 'I'll do whatever you want me to do.' Let's see what comes of it," he said, an attitude he shared with co-stars Adam Driver and Liam Neeson. He found the story irresistibly "enticing and extreme." He was intrigued from the start by the nature of his character, Sebastiao Rodrigues, a Portuguese Jesuit priest whose total certainty of belief is challenged in 17th-century Japan.
"The question is what is it to live a life of faith, what is it to serve your fellow man, and what is it that God actually wants of you? Not what the church tells you, not what the doctrine tells you, but when you're really in the thick of the anarchy and messiness of life. When the doors of perception drop away, what is it you're meant to do? How are you meant to act? Of course, these questions are unanswerable," as the priest's assurances are attacked through physical and psychological abuse.
His psyche falling apart, Rodrigues enters what Garfield called "a shamanic realm," where Eastern ideas meet and merge with his Western Christian values.
"Suddenly he's in chaos, the reality of our very conflicted, very confusing world. The ideas of giving up the small self in order to serve the divine were really interesting ideas to me."
He called "Silence," where he performed for minimal professional scale, "a work of blood, sweat and patience that's paid off in a spectacular way."
His decision to work in two similarly themed films arrived at a time when he "wanted to disassemble, to work in a deeper way," an exploration that he termed "frightening." Likening it to South American hallucinogenic ceremonies to create a sense of transformation in the person undergoing them, he said, "I think there was something in me that was longing for that.
"It is hard to get a film like this made in the current climate, a film with deep and weighty themes. You knew that everyone who signed on did so for the right reasons. We weren't there for the money," he said. "To try to create something that was profound."
Exploring those issues through a pair of metaphysical films was a journey Garfield undertook to understand himself better on multiple levels. "The hope is that you're talking about your true self every single moment, whether you're talking about personal relationships or professional ones."
His discussions with Scorsese included spiritual matters as much as the craft of moviemaking.
"All of the conversations that me and Marty had were about the themes of the story. How do you live a good life, how do you live a life you can be proud of at the end of it? Marty's whole life is involved with that," building even violent gangster films with a subtext of morality and virtue.
"I'm talking with him and thinking, 'Gosh, I'm looking at a man who's devoted his life to a spiritual longing and an artistic longing and how those two things commingle and coexist. If I can live a life that rich, that fulfilling, that adventurous, that's the life I'll live.'" Making such films affects his view of the world and of his life, he said.
Garfield described the film as "not a message movie," but rather "a meditation" that poses questions for viewers to explore, just as making it has done.
"Whoever watches it will get what they need out of it, whether they like it or not. I hope I'm learning and gleaning things I otherwise wouldn't have known. By hanging out with great material and great aims and great themes, they do something to you. I definitely feel changed by the experience."
