“He’s kind of the most Jewish Italian American you’ve ever met,” Garfield said of his “Silence” director.
Andrew Garfield is breaking his silence on what it’s really like to work with Martin Scorsese.
On the “WTF with Marc Maron‘, the ‘Silence’ actor recalled how nervous he was working with the legendary Oscar-winning writer-director for the 2016 adaptation of Shūsaku Endō’s novel about 17th century Jesuit priests in Japan. Adam Driver, Liam Neeson and Ciaran Hinds also performed.
“You walk in with everything you imagine with: total excitement, trepidation, pinch, total awareness of how lucky you are to be one of the few people to have worked with the American master of cinema,” Garfield said. in Maroon.
As for what the seemingly elusive Scorsese looks like, Garfield couldn’t help but be honest.
“He’s just fun. He’s like a funny guy who knows a lot about movies, history, culture and people and loves being a person,” the ‘Spider-Man: No Way Home’ actor explained. is sort of the most Jewish Italian American you’ve ever met.”
He summed up, “So I came in with the whole thing, and it was just kind of dispelled with who he is, because he’s so disarming and very ordinary with all of his extraordinaryness.”
Yet Garfield’s Dedicated Method approach was far more serious: Garfield spent a year studying with an “incredible” Jesuit priest and spiritual director in New York. “I just studied Catholicism and a thing called the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius,” Garfield shared, citing a 31-day retreat where participants “actively meditated on the life of Christ and placed themselves in each step, scene and moment in the life of Christ.
The spiritual exercises were in fact the direct basis of the interpretation technique of the Stanislavski method. Garfield shared that Stanislavski was able to “create this method of acting by imaginatively stepping into circumstances so fully that you feel like you’ve experienced them cellularly”.
“You end up in a pretty deep space,” Garfield explained of the “process of transformation.”
The ‘Social Network’ actor told IndieWire exclusively in 2021 that he locked himself in a ‘monk-like’ apartment in Manhattan while preparing for the role, which led to him to star in Sofia Coppola’s “Mainstream” about the antithesis of spirituality: social media, to also help “balance” her “Spider-Man” franchise fame.
“We’ve been brainwashed into thinking that money, fame, power, status and all those old desires will fill us up and make us feel whole,” Garfield said at the time. “I wanted to explore that in myself – the things that I try not to be seduced by.”
Register: Stay up to date with the latest film and TV news! Sign up for our email newsletters here.
