Over the weekend, director David Lowery teased the audience at the Melbourne International Film Festival with details about his much-anticipated film “Mother Mary.” The film, whose fourteen-month, multi-location production wrapped in Germany in July, explores the relationship between Anne Hathaway as a fictional pop star and Michaela Coel, the Emmy and BAFTA-winning star of “I Will Destroy You,” who plays a fashion designer engaged to design a dress for the star . Also starring are F.K.A. Twigs, Hunter Schafer, and Alba Baptista, with original music from Jack Antonoff and Charli XCX.
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Days after production closed, Hathaway described making “Mother Mary” as “one of the most extraordinary, transformative experiences I have ever had.” When asked about the feature, his eighth, Lowery sighed deeply and hesitantly described it as “a weird, weird film.”
“I wrote the first 20 pages when I was shooting ‘Peter Pan and Wendy’ and it’s been percolating ever since,” Lowery told the crowd at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image on Saturday. “That movie was huge, it was one of the greatest shoots of my life and one of the hardest edits of my life and it inspired a lot of soul searching. After that, I decided I’m just going to do something simple. I need to do a movie with just two actors in a room having a long heart to heart … a really gentle filmmaking experience.”
“But then I thought, ‘What if one of those characters is a pop star? And what if we started at a stadium?Then it got bigger,” he continued with a laugh, “And again, it wound up being the hardest thing I’ve ever done.”
The Wisconsin-born filmmaker also spoke about “Mother Mary” during an interview conducted by the discussion host Alexei Toliopoulos on Toliopoulos’ podcast The Last Video Store, in which Lowery said that the film is continuing to baffle and excite him, even as he continues to work on it.
“I’m in the edit right now and I have been wondering, ‘what is this movie?,'” Lowery said. “I know what I set out to make and that is indeed what I’ve made, but it is so wild. It is a movie I am sure will provoke a lot of strong feelings, in every possible direction. It feels very true to who I am, and very close to me, but it is also consistently surprising me in ways that I did not anticipate. What I’ve got on my computer now is probably pretty much what it’s going to be, it will just get cleaned up.”
During his Melbourne International Film Festival talk, Lowery spoke about his love of adaptations. Many of his most popular films, “The Old Man and the Gun,” “Pete’s Dragon,” “The Green Knight,” and “Peter Pan and Wendy” have been drawn from well-known source material. But as was the case with his 2017 film “A Ghost Story” — his first for “Mother Mary” distributors A24 — his forthcoming film sees him return to the triumvirate role of writer, director, and editor.
“I love adapting,” he said. “It’s a fun challenge, to take something from one medium and turn it into another. ‘Mother Mary’ is one of the few movies I’ve made that is completely original and I feel like I let that [screenwriting] muscle get a little lax. It’s not as well-exercised as it should be, so I really want to start working on more original stuff. I’m adapting a novel right now and I am having so much fun because it’s a great book that is very, very unadaptable. I know on some intrinsic level I can make it work, but I don’t know exactly how yet.”
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Lowery told the crowd that all his films begin with very simple and open ideas. “The Green Knight,” for instance, began with the idea of a man on horseback riding through Arthurian England. From there, he likes to play with cinematic archetypes and iconography. When he writes, he said, his characters are pared back to “silhouettes” and that genre, and horror in particular, offers a playground in which to deconstruct his characters back to their archetypal or iconic selves. He used “A Ghost Story” as an example.
“’A Ghost Story’ almost started off as a joke,” he said. “Like, what if we made a horror film, like a haunted house movie where the ghost was someone in a bed sheet. And from there, I thought, what if we got more sophisticated? That image of the kid in a bedsheet exists in so many forms, Michael Myers in ‘Halloween,’ E.T. … I’ve just always loved the idea that this iconography that is so simple and so naive and fun and childlike, has this connotation that is meant to evoke something far more existential.”
“’Peter Pan and Wendy’ has a lot of gothic horror in it,” he continued. “I wanted to treat Captain Hook like Dracula and Candyman combined, and Peter Pan’s lair was very much like a Gothic castle but it’s not, of course, a horror film. ‘Mother Mary’ is the same way. There’s a lot of horrific stuff in that movie, but it’s not a horror movie. Someday I will make an actual, honest to goodness horror movie, hopefully soon.” He smiled and deepened his voice with conviction: “I will.”
Lowery also mentioned that Francis Ford Coppola’s “Bram Stoker’s Dracula” has increasingly become a touchstone for his filmmaking due to its masterful combination of in-camera filmmaking techniques. During the production of “Mother Mary,” Lowery said that he played the film to the cast and crew and that “it blew everyone’s minds.”
“I love everything about it,” he said. “I don’t think I would ever go as analogue as that, but I would want to use all those techniques and combine them with digital effects or digital compositing. When I’m editing a movie, I love the fact that I can take a performance from one take and split-screen it with a performance from another to get the perfect take. David Fincher talks about how he never gets the perfect take on set; he builds it in post, and I do that as well. Perhaps not to the same degree that he does, but I love having the ability to do that.”
In a rare journey to the other side of the camera, Lowery will appear in Luca Guadagnino’s William S. Burroughs adaptation, “Queer,” which is set to be a drawcard at the Venice Film Festival. Though Lowery stresses the role is small, Guadagnino was very clear that he wanted Lowery for it.
“Luca sent me the script and asked if I’d play this part,” he said. “I was on set for one day and I am not as good an actor as Daniel Craig, but it was a joy to share the screen with him,” Lowery said with a laugh. “I’m wearing a wig, so you might not recognize me. I almost felt, after the day of shooting, I needed to apologize to Luca for wasting a day on set. I honestly thought they were going to cut all of that out, but it’s in the movie. I had so much fun doing it, but…” He raised his eyebrows and smiled: “I should definitely stay behind the camera.”
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