Andrew Garfield: ‘The Kardashian effect is sick-inducing’
Andrew Garfield: ‘The Kardashian effect is sick-inducing’
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The star of ‘The Amazing Spider-Man’ sits down with Patrick Smith to discuss his controversial new film ‘Under the Silver Lake’, society’s obsession with fame, and how he’s ‘not an easy ride’. I don’t like the word cool but it felt cool in a way that I could get behind,” says Andrew Garfield, legs flung over the side of an armchair, copy of EE Cummings’ The Enormous Room by his side. “I thought it was The Goonies but with a 35-year-old.”.
The star of The Amazing Spider-Man and The Social Network is describing what he thought when he read the script for his new film Under the Silver Lake. David Robert Mitchell’s follow-up to his meta-horror It Follows is a hypnotic neo-noir that heads down a rabbit hole of cryptic Los Angeles lore and pop-culture reverence, spliff in hand.
Not everyone thinks it’s cool, though. One scathing review called it “a pre-Time’s Up sort of a film”, referring to the fact its female characters are mostly beautiful, unclothed ciphers. Garfield admits that the presentation of women in Under the Silver Lake is “very reductive”, but prefers the theory that the film is actually a critique of the male gaze. “It’s holding the main character, and men generally, under a very unforgiving microscope,” he explains. His protagonist is a slacker cinephile and part-time Peeping Tom who tries to track down a missing girl. “You’re supposed to feel ambivalent towards him and the perspective he has on the world, the perspective he has on women, how he is with women,” he says.
