Take a hanky to this film – you’ll laugh and you might well cry. Andrew Garfield and the director John Crowley talk about portraying grief on screen so it rings true

It’s no spoiler to say that We Live in Time is a tearjerker. It begins with the late-stage cancer diagnosis of its female lead, Almut (Florence Pugh), a rising star chef. The story then leaps back and forth through time to paint a picture of her relationship with Tobias, a cereal marketing executive (Andrew Garfield): the charming meet-cute (a car crash), their early courtship, the birth of their daughter in a service station loo. At the London premiere, one woman near me cried so much as the credits rolled that she felt compelled to apologise to everyone in the vicinity.

“I think that’s a shame,” says Garfield. “That someone would feel that they had to apologise. I think that speaks to a cultural thing that we have, particularly in the UK, where outward expressions of emotion are deemed somehow inappropriate or shameful.