Andrew Garfield on the greatest documentary of all time: “Impossibly incredible”
After starring in everything from Spider-Man to underrated Martin Scorsese epics, Andrew Garfield has undertaken almost every creative obstacle under the sun.
It’s an industry known for gruelling competition, brutal working hours and immense stress, putting an enormous amount of strain of yourself in pursuit of creative perfection and realising your wildest dreams. People who enter the entertainment business have high ambitions, often putting everything on the line for the chance to bring them to life, even if that might mean sacrificing your own sanity in the hopes it will one day pay off.
It’s a plight familiar to all artists, and something that Andrew Garfield recognised when discussing the wonderful madness of DA Pennebaker’s 1970 film, Original Cast Album: Company.
Garfield has taken his fair share of creative risks and challenges over the years, whether it be tackling the lead role in a Tick, Tick… Boom! Or his portrayal of a manic man on the brink of homelessness in Under The Silver Lake. However, many Hollywood productions are awarded the liberty of reasonable time to create, something that the cast of Original Cast Album: Company were not given.
The documentary follows the cast of Stephen Sondheim’s original musical, Company, after its opening night, tasked with recording the original album of the show. It’s one of the most infamous Broadway traditions around, with the team gathering in a studio and pulling the most intense all-nighter of all time by trying to record each song in just 19 hours. The documentary charts the ups and downs of this process, with each artist putting themselves under huge pressure to perfectly immortalise Sondheim’s masterpiece.
Each performer is desperate to do justice to the genius of the musical, despite the fact that they’re singing into the early hours of the morning and visibly frustrated by Sondheim’s crippling perfectionism. When discussing the film, Garfield highlighted it as one of his favourite films of all time, saying, “Company the Cast Album. One of the great documentaries, one of the great films about the creative process, the agony and the ecstasy”.
Adding: “It’s so wild, the access that you have. You feel like you’re there. And it’s all suggestive. There’s no real narrative. You’re just kind of with these artists, these like thoroughbred artists who are struggling to capture Sondheim’s impossibly incredible music. DA Pennebaker who’s operating the camera, is right in the souls of these people. It’s one of my favourite films of all time”.
For each and every person involved in the production it is the performance of a lifetime, giving it their all and trying to represent hours of struggle and sacrifice in one album. It’s a beautiful moment of human achievement that supersedes the crushing pain that each artist goes through to bring it to life, teetering towards the absurd in how extreme this task is. But towards the end, there’s a moment of quiet relief and triumph as they realise they’ve achieved the impossible – the album is now a permanent snapshot of their work, making every moment of doubt, pain and frustration worth it.
