Andrew Garfield says Martin Scorsese is a “funny dude and film nerd just like me”
Andrew Garfield has revealed his thoughts on Martin Scorsese. Before working with Scorsese on Silence, Garfield said he had been nervous about collaborating with a legendary Oscar-winning director. The film came out in 2016 and told the story of 17th Century Catholic priests in Japan, starring Adam Driver, Liam Neeson and Ciaran Hinds.
Garfield said, “You go in with everything you imagine you would go in with: total excitement, trepidation, pinching yourself, total awareness of how lucky you are that you are one of the handful of people who have gotten to work with the American master of cinema.”
He added on Scorsese, “He’s just fun. He’s like a funny dude who knows a lot about movie and history and culture and people and just loves being a person. He’s kind of the most Jewish Italian American that you have ever come across. So I went in with all of that, and it was just kind of dispelled with who he is, because he’s just so disarming and very ordinary with all of his extraordinariness.”
Garfield studied a method approach for the film under a Jesuit priest in New York. He said, “I just studied Catholicism, and a thing called the Saint Ignatius spiritual exercises. [I] actively meditated on the life of Christ and placed yourself into every single stage and scene and moment in the life of Christ.”
The spiritual exercises were part and parcel of the Stanislavski method acting technique. By placing oneself into circumstances as though you had actually lived them, then the actor is better able to perform them.
Garfield added, “You end up in a pretty deep space. [It’s a] transformational process. We’ve been brainwashed into thinking that money, fame, power, status, and all of those old desires will fill us up and make us feel whole. I wanted to explore that in myself – the stuff that I attempt not to be seduced by.”
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