Andrew Garfield discusses his role in a mind-bending LA noir
“Delicious, sexy, ugly, messed-up, dark, twisted, shadowy and rich.” This is how Andrew Garfield describes his new film Under the Silver Lake, a Lynchian LA noir in which he plays Sam, an unemployed, underdeveloped thirty-something who embarks on a misguided odyssey of unearthing subliminal messages and cracking codes when his neighbour Sarah (Riley Keough) goes missing. “It’s one of those remarkable films that’s rare to get made because it is so odd-shaped and so unique and specific,” says the actor. “It is very easy to be lost as a human being nowadays, especially in the place where dreams go to get made or die. The LA you see in Under the Silver Lake is the anti-La La Land.”
The movie is sprawling in its scale and ambition. As Sam becomes further enveloped in an unknowable underworld of balloon-bedecked dancers and Jesus-impersonating songwriters, he calls into question society’s face-value acceptance of the pop culture we’re spoon-fed. Could there be a covert meaning in an advertising billboard or a cereal box?
It was Under the Silver Lake’s investigations of this contemporary paranoia that drew Garfield to the project. “I’ve had this subterranean anxiety about being in the world,” he says. “How am I being influenced without me knowing? How am I being conditioned into incredibly negative behaviours by people who just want my money and want me to have low self-worth? One of the reasons this film appealed to me was it seemed to be addressing that anxiety of ‘is my life mine?’ And, if it’s not, how do I make it mine, is there such a thing as free will?”
The writer-director David Robert Mitchell seems to delight in interrogating these philosophical questions without providing answers, forcing the viewer to emulate Sam and hunt for significance. “The film is springing from the deep wells of his [Robert Mitchell’s] unconscious,” says Garfield, who shies away from offering his personal interpretations on Silver Lake. “There may be an explanation and there may be things that connect, or it may be just chaos, or maybe the chaos connects somehow.”
Of all the Easter eggs scattered in the script – including a Spider-Man joke that the actor, who previously portrayed the web-slinger, found “cheeky” – the satirical jibes targeting cinema’s pervasive, fetishising male gaze are the most thought-provoking. “It’s a very regressed, male, childhood man-boy fantasy,” says Garfield, referring to his gormless, misogynistic character, who wanders through LA in a slack-jawed daze lusting over its Hitchcockian blondes. “He thinks he’s a hero, he thinks he’s going to save womankind from the clutches of patriarchal toxic-masculine Hollywood. He believes himself to be the Travis Bickle of the West Coast. He’s deluded. There’s a part of him that thinks it’s his destiny to uncover the corruption at the root of this city that he so loves and hates.”
For all its deep-diving into its protagonist’s addled psyche, Under the Silver Lake is funny, trippy, gory and, ultimately, undefinable. “I don’t have any answers,” Sam tells his friend after days of tailing cars and tracking coyotes to lead him towards an intangible truth. “Nobody does,” he responds, summing up both Sam and our constant disorientation in this ever-changing world.
‘Under the Silver Lake’ is out now in cinemas and streaming on Mubi.
