We might all have domestic arguments that demand to be preserved on film for their drama, but few of them would ever live up to the intensity, eloquence and glamour of the barneys between American photographer Joel Meyerowitz and his English wife, novelist and artist Maggie Barrett.

The best (or worst) of those clashes comes toward the end of the extraordinary, intimate documentary of Joel and Maggie’s marriage, aptly entitled Two Strangers Trying Not to Kill Each Other (their own private update on “till death us do part”). In that final set-to, Maggie conjures all the frustrations of the 30 years they have been together – years in which Joel has become ever more world-famous and celebrated as a photographer, and she has seen her novels rejected by publishers and her paintings go unsold – and lets them go in a formidable rush.

The trigger had been Joel dismissively shushing her, turning his back while he takes a phone call. Joel Meyerowitz possesses a profound kind of centredness; he sits at her feet in the film and listens to her tirade, and just occasionally ventures an excuse for his perceived lapse of arrogance – at which point every man in the cinema audience is thinking: Joel, mate, just stop digging…

The row is affecting because it comes after many scenes between the couple of lightness and joy and love. Joel is 87, Maggie is 78, and for much of the film of their life you bear witness to their cool pleasure in animated connection and conversation; you watch them dance and cook and bathe together, which makes the occasional fights all the more credible. It’s a film that all couples should see – I went to the screening with Lisa, my wife – not least to remind them that any lasting relationship worth its shared highs also has its share of frustrations and conflict baked in.

It’s odd, having a few nights previously been so intimate with Joel and Maggie – having watched them lying on their hearth rug, surrounded by candles, documenting their lives before they met (Maggie had been married four times, had survived the loss of a still–born child, discovered she was adopted, had sobered up after drug addiction, had broke her neck in her 40s) – to suddenly be sitting with them on a sofa in their flat in north London. Not only because they feel a little like old friends – but also because the shared energy they present on film also shines through in life.

It was that energy that first inspired the project. Jacob Perlmutter, one of the directors of the film, a long-term fan of Joel’s photography, bumped into them on the street in London. “We stood and chatted for about 10 minutes,” Maggie recalls, “and then in September 2021 I got an email from Jacob, who had found my website and my blog, saying, you know, ‘I’ve never been able to get the two of you out of my mind. There was something about your aura: an older couple, creative, still in love, facing mortality, and I think you guys would be great for a documentary.’”

They liked the idea. As a photographer – Meyerowitz was the only photographer allowed to document the ruined site of the twin towers after 9/11, for example – Joel understood the impulse to preserve life on film. The plan was that Perlmutter and his partner, the film-maker and photographer Manon Ouimet, would stay for a few weeks with Joel and Maggie at their farmhouse in Tuscany. They arrived on Christmas Eve in 2021, just as the second pandemic lockdown hit. They ended up staying for a year, in Italy and New York and Cornwall.

“There was something about their earnestness, and their own search for artistic identity through the means of making a film, that gave us this sort of rainbow connection at both ends of life,” Joel says. The younger couple set up cameras in Maggie and Joel’s homes that they could operate remotely; and the pair were miked up every morning. Joel and Maggie were used to having cameras around, of course, and they claim to have forgotten they were there. Hundreds of hours of footage was edited down to 107 minutes.

The film seems to get to the essence of them as a couple – not least because in the course of the year Maggie has (another) bad accident, a fall that leaves her with a badly broken thigh bone – so the story shifts partly into one of care and rehabilitation. The accident also focuses their thoughts on giving up on their almost impossibly beautiful Tuscan home and cool Brooklyn studio and starting a new life in London.

“We had been living in Italy for 10 years,” Joel recalls. “We were thinking of downsizing, particularly after Maggie’s accident, because the hospital care wasn’t as good as it should be. And we were living an hour away from a hospital in the middle of the country.”

Maggie’s hospital pain and recuperation is presented in unflinching detail – it must have been harrowing for her to watch…

“The first time we saw it, I didn’t know before the screening that Joel had shot footage of me on the ground when the accident happened,” she says. “So when that came up on the screen, I actually had a very visceral reaction. It was like the accident happened all over again.”

Maggie sits angular and poised on the sofa. How is it now?

“I have daily pain and from my broken neck too,” she says. “But I’m quite indestructible.”

“I feel Maggie is very English this way,” Joel says, stroking her thigh. “We’re out for a long walk on the heath, and it’s great for the first mile-and-a-half or two. And then the pain kicks in, and she’ll say in this classic English way, ‘Oh, well, never mind’. I love her so much in those moments. It was just like that when she was in recovery, doing all that physiotherapy. She worked so hard, hours and hours every day because she would not let herself be crippled. It was really remarkable.”

His own fitness also seems quite remarkable.

“I was always physical and an athlete,” he says. “I played baseball; I used to swim long-distance, open water. These days I work out five mornings a week, usually for 40 minutes or so, just here, just for mobility and flexibility and strength. I want to stay agile and feel like myself.”

“We do a lot of squats!” Maggie says.

The other thing from the film that really stayed with me, I suggest, is their mutual account of the chance of their meeting, which they can’t help feeling was fate.

Maggie laughs. “Like many couples, it’s what we’ve kept in our back pocket all these years,” she says. “Because, you know, as in every marriage, there are moments when you look at each other and think, like, Jesus Christ, why am I bothering?”

How many times a day do you reckon that happens?

“We’re down to about three of those each a day,” she says. “Then it’s good to remind yourself of the beginning. We met at the end of September 1990 on Cape Cod. I had just been recently divorced, and I decided to go out and watch the sunset. And Joel [whose marriage had also ended], at the other end of the village, decided the same thing. What you don’t hear is that Joel came back for a cup of tea after that sunset to where I was staying. We lit some candles, and we just talked. We agreed to meet the next morning to go on a meditative walk. But that night, I dreamed that we were at a kitchen island preparing vegetables together. I remember waking up and thinking: what an interesting dream. For it not to be about sex or anything, but about feeding each other. But I also thought: I’m not going to tell him, right? Too weird. So we went off, we had our meditative walk, and then Joel said: ‘How about dinner tonight?’ He said: ‘I really would like to prepare a meal with you.’ And of course I ended up telling him about this dream and he had this strange look on his face. And when I finished he said: ‘Well, I had exactly the same dream that I was making dinner at the kitchen island.’”

It felt like life giving them a nudge?

“I think a lot about how fragile all of our lives are,” Joel says, “so full of missed opportunities, but what a good choice that was.”

* * *

Maggie has a daughter from her previous relationship and Joel has a son and a daughter. What did they make of the film?

“Kids don’t really want to know their parents have lives,” Maggie says. “But none of them had anything negative to say about it all. I wondered, particularly about the confrontational scene, how Joel’s daughter would react to that, because she’s very protective of her dad. But it turned out that the feminist in her was more important than the daughter. So she was like, ‘Yes!’”

And how has it changed their marriage?

“I think that the film has been an incredibly uplifting thing for Maggie in particular,” Joel says. “She is a very talented person as a writer, as a musician, as an artist. I mean, I started in 1962 making photographs, when photography was really flat, invisible. And so I got caught in the upswell of it all. I was carried along, and the work was substantial enough, so I had that kind of visibility.” (A display of Meyerowitz’s work at Tate Modern, for example, featuring his pioneering use of colour in street photography, has been running for the past 18 months).

“But the showing of the film,” he says, “has created the kind of parity between us in public that we have always felt in private.”

That imbalance is not unusual, Maggie says, particularly for women, but the film has helped her to feel seen. “Before I met Joel, I was actually a successful artist in a small way. I was clean and sober, looking after my daughter, and then when I broke my neck, all of that ended.”

She could no longer lift her arms to work on big canvases as she had been doing, so she signed up for an MFA in creative writing. “The irony is that was when I was in the programme, all the published writers who were the professors were convinced that I was going to go out and just sell loads of books. But then I had 30 years of rejection. In the days before the internet, I would be at the post office every week, sending off manuscripts with stamped addressed envelopes. Novels, short stories, the works. I used to get the higher echelon of rejection, like the Paris Review would say please send more work, but it was still rejection.”

And while all of that was happening to her, Joel’s career continued to soar. “People coming to him every day, wanting him to do a book, wanting to do a show. It wasn’t that I wasn’t happy for Joel, I was always happy for him, but I also resented it.”

The film has changed that. She is now collaborating on a play she has written with Jacob Perlmutter that is close to going into production. She and Joel have a joint show of her painting and his pictures opening at a commercial gallery in London the week after next.

“It’s funny,” she says. “When we were walking to a screening of the documentary in Denmark, we were 20 feet from the cinema and this guy comes running up to Joel, as they always do. And I’m just standing there, ignored. And he says to Joel: ‘I can’t wait to see your film!’ At the end of the screening, that same man came up to me in tears and apologised, because he could see what he had done earlier.”

Are they enjoying being in London? No regrets about leaving all that breathtaking beauty in Tuscany?

“None,” Maggie says. “On Tuesday we went to see the Pina Bausch thing at Sadler’s Wells. On Wednesday, we went to a screening of I Am Martin Parr. And on and on. I said to Joel, when I pulled out my calendar in Tuscany it was all blank.”

“This is Maggie’s country,” Joel says, “so she has a different connection to it. But I really love being here.”

And how about thoughts of what is to come – they begin the film with a conversation about which of them they would prefer to die first – would they rather go or be left alone “with no one to hold”?

Joel smiles. “When you are my age, you know, death is like your shadow. You’re walking along, and your shadow is coming closer and closer. At 87, how much time do I have left? You can’t be afraid of it. You have to welcome it, because it’s your end.”

“What do you mean?” Maggie says. “I don’t welcome it.”

“But the reality is,” Joel says, “it’s coming. In Tuscany, the openness of the space and the solitude was clarifying for that recognition. It was just me and nature. And so there was time to recognise that all of this beauty was going to be dissolved at one point by my passing. I was attracted to Buddhist practices when I was younger, but I don’t necessarily need them now. I think that my understanding of time and timeliness has been engraved in me by looking at the world as a photographer for so long.”

“I don’t have any interest in sitting on a cushion and being in my own head,” Maggie says of the idea of meditation. “There’s too much going on for that.”

It must sometimes seem like almost a gift to have somebody objectively scrutinising your marriage, as they have had, like very public joint therapy?

“Watching it, certainly. It was a chance to look at our individual behaviour,” Maggie says. “You’re like: ‘Oh, do I really want to be like that?’”

“It was very instructive and helpful,” Joel agrees. “It’s never too late to recognise and correct some of your own defects. I probably inherited some of my behaviour from watching my parents duke it out for years. So this reflection has been really profound.”

Do they still make time to dance – the film ends with their fabulous kind of spontaneous boogie on a Cornish clifftop?

“We’re playful that way,” Joel says, “and if we go to any event, we always hope there will be a chance to dance…”

And what about the big confrontation scene in the film – is it now a reference point in their arguments?

Maggie laughs. “We’ve had a couple of incidents since then,” she says. “But I’m able to say to Joel, you know that this is one of those moments – remember.”

“We probably process it all a lot faster now,” Joel says. “And then it’s done. Plus we also have a good giggle.”

• Two Strangers Trying Not to Kill Each Other is in UK and Irish cinemas on 21 March