Andrew Garfield On ’99 Homes,’ & Laura Dern [EXCLUSIVE VIDEO]

He is on the precipice between survival and some form of giving up, and that’s the precipice where I found a lot of the families and the men that I met in Florida when I was researching. There was this sense of ‘have to keep going’ and yet there’s no light. That’s even kind of pulling me further towards it; I’ve lost sight of the light. How you continue to be a functioning human being when there’s no space or opportunity to give yourself to your society, to give yourself to your community, that’s where he is.

Laura Dern was a big help. She’s such an actress you know. She’s such a brilliant, genius actress, so we managed, especially in that first eviction scene, it was really a team. Bobby Bukowski helped a lot with his camera and his sensitivity. Also, it’s not hard to put yourself in that position somehow, it’s not hard to imaginatively enter that feeling of being exiled, being discarded as trash. Everyone knows that to some degree, so that was really that entry point, that feeling of exile.

They were all pretty contentious and kind of nasty. The energy that was created was pretty nasty, as it should have been I guess. The character of Rick is not a man you easily get close to; he doesn’t really care about you as a human. That was my experience in the scenes with him. I was always excited for the family scenes. When I saw on the schedule where we had just days of me and Rick Carver I was just like, ‘Ugh,’ which is what Dennis feels. Dennis is in that same situation. He’s like, ‘I’ve gotta do this in order to take my son to an arcade, I’ve gotta do this in order to bring my son a happy meal at the end of the day.’ So it all worked in that respect.

It was more the emotional impact of that specific, precise, personal emotional impact that was effected upon the families and the individuals that went through it. My brain doesn’t work in the way that an economist brain does. I’m not very good at that kinda stuff. So my way in, my job is to inhabit the emotional life of that experience. Thankfully, I didn’t have to know the ins and outs of why, and the wherefores. But, you know, what’s evident in the film obviously and what was evident in my research and Ramin’s research is that the system is kind of corrupt on the deepest level. It’s almost accepted, well it is accepted, that kind of corruption on all tears has become systematic or systemic. See, I can’t even talk properly about this kind of stuff. My job was to go to the emotional core of it and that’s what I tried to do.