MOTHER MARY - with David Lowery

Team Deakins

Director David Lowery joins the Team Deakins podcast to discuss his latest film, Mother Mary, and his career trajectory. He reflects on movi

Key takeaways

• Lowery used the writing of Mother Mary as a form of 'self-therapy' to process insomnia experienced during The Green Knight.
• The film's 'ghost' was achieved through practical effects inspired by Daniel Wurzel's fabric sculptures that use wind and fans.

Main topics

• Career evolution
• Mother Mary production

Notable quotes

I decided pretty early on that making movies was really the only path for me.

Conclusion

The episode provides an intimate look at how personal emotional states

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:03) Hi, and welcome to Season 2 of the Team Deacons podcast, a collection of informal conversations between Roger and James Deacons and a guest. We never know where the conversation will take us, so listen in and see where it goes. Speaker 2 (0:21) This episode is sponsored by Aputure and its new Storm CS32. The industry's most powerful, gold-color, tunable LED point source light. Brighter than a 4K HMI with adjustable colors for golden sunsets, cool Speaker 3 (0:39) blue Speaker 2 (0:39) moonlight, or rich, accurate skin tones. With the flexibility of powering off a household outlet. The CS32 is the light that grows with you. Storm CS32, your light for every shoot, only from Aputure. Speaker 2 (1:01) Today, we're speaking with a director. His credits include Ain't Them Bodies Saints, Pete's Dragon, A Ghost Story, and Peter Pan and Wendy, all very different movies. We always look forward to seeing what his latest venture is. His most recent film, Mother Mary, is, true to form, unique. We're pleased to welcome David Lowery. David, thank you for doing this. Oh, Speaker 1 (1:27) it's such a pleasure to be back. Speaker 2 (1:28) Great, yeah. We'd love to start with our usual question, although we have asked this to you before, but just to get us going, how did you end up where you are today? Is this something you always knew you wanted to do, or did you find it along the way? What's your story? Speaker 1 (1:45) I decided pretty early on that making movies was really the only path for me. I was seven years old, and I was playing with my friend Jeff in his backyard. And I asked him, do you ever think you'll make a movie? And he was like, yeah, probably not. And I was like, I think I will. And that was it. I just decided I was going to. I'll back up just a little bit from that, though, which was that I was a big Star Wars fan. And I'd seen the movies by that point, but I sort of I grew up without a television and I was too young to see them in this theater. And so I had the books and I had the toys. And you're speaking to me right now. You can see my Star Wars toy collection behind me on the shelves. I still have a bunch of them. And I also was given a, my mother got me a book about how Star Wars was made. And I just was so hooked on the idea that someone could come up with this and that they could bring all of these people together to basically bring a dream to life. That just seemed extraordinary to me. I wouldn't have put in such poetic terms at the age of seven, but certainly the idea that someone could conceive of something like a lightsaber or the Millennium Falcon and then figure out a way to make that a reality. It just seemed like I couldn't imagine any other job I'd want to do. So jumping from seven to where I am now, now I'm 45. And so somewhere in between, I figured out how to actually do it. And really, I think that the key for me was... discovering what independent film was and that I didn't need to go and ask for permission. Somewhere around the time I was 12 or 13, my mom told me about the Sundance Film Festival and Robert Redford and the concept of independent film. This would have probably been around the time that Sex, Lies, and Videotape was making waves and that Sundance was really becoming a known entity for people like myself who are outside of the Hollywood system. Growing up in Texas, I didn't know anything about how movies are made, but all of a sudden I knew about Sundance. And that became a goal for me. The idea that I could make my own films my own way, tell my own stories, and find an audience for them was, that just seemed exactly like what I wanted to do. I'm a very stubborn person to this day, I still am. And I didn't want to go back to school again, especially after high school. And so I just thought, what if I just figure out a way to do it on my own? And I did that. I made shorts. I worked on crews. I was a PA. I was a boom op. I was pushed the dolly. I worked for a company that rented video equipment so that I could learn how to use all of the gear. And I kind of wore every single hat at one level of production or another. Like the bigger the movies were, the lower my job, my rung in the totem pole would be. I was a camera PA. I learned how to, you know, load film. I learned how to use a C-stand. I don't know if you'd call me a grip, but I definitely learned how to use all the stands and to put lights up. I learned the great joys of pushing a Fisher dolly. Like that's still to my day, to this day, one of the most soothing things a person can do. Like it's such a meditative, just feeling that perfect heavy piece of machinery. Do you ever do it? Do you ever take the chance as director and say, I want to push the dolly on your own Speaker 3 (5:04) movies? I've done it once. I've done Speaker 1 (5:06) it just once. But often when we're setting up, I'll treat myself to a little stint behind the wheels. Speaker 1 (5:19) And eventually I made a short film. I made a feature for like $12,000 that played at film festivals all over the world. And I thought, this is great. I'm making movies. I'm expressing myself. This movie in particular is well-received and it is screening at film festivals. I'm not making any money at it, but I'm getting the satisfaction of sharing something that I've made with an audience and that my collaborators and I have made. And that feature then led to a short, which eventually did get into Sundance, a short film called Pioneer, which I still think is my favorite thing I've ever made. And that short then led to what at the time was meant to be, you know, I went into Ain't Nobody's Saints thinking I'll make this for $50,000 or $100,000, you know, somewhere in that realm. And it spontaneously combusted into... a $3.1 million movie, which at the time to me was like, I could do anything. You know, you hear that number, you're like, we can do, this is incredible. I quickly learned that when you were making a movie in the proper way, that money gets allocated very quickly and you actually have less than you would expect you had. I had less on that movie than I did on that $12,000 movie just because we had rules to follow. Speaker 2 (6:37) That Speaker 1 (6:37) movie taught me how to work within. the designated framework of motion picture production. That was my film school was making that film. That movie somehow. led to a producer at Disney reaching out to see if I'd be interested in writing a remake of Pete's Dragon. And the remake, when the idea was presented to me, there were big quotation marks attached to it because Disney wanted to use the title, but didn't want to follow the original film at all. And to me, that felt like an incredible ticket to tell an original story for children, for families, and to make something that... ideally would stand the test of time. You know, I always, when I think about children's entertainment and movies for young audiences, you are making something that will be somebody's first movie. My first film ever was Pinocchio, followed by E.T. And those were movies that to this day are some of my favorite movies of all time. And they really kind of made, in many ways, E.T. made me who I am. I think about the way in which that movie set me up for life. And I know that if I make a movie for a younger audience, it's going to do that, or it has the opportunity to do that. And so with Pete's Dragon, I thought. This is about the furthest thing I thought I saw myself doing after Ain't Nobody Saints, but I can't imagine a better movie to make. And so I made that and it took a long time to make it. As we all know, when you're making a studio movie, they take a couple of years. And by the end of it, I wanted to make something quick and spontaneous again. And that was a ghost story. And that kind of established this pattern that was not, it wasn't premeditated, but where I would make something at a larger scale and then go make something small and make something for a studio, then make something independently. I've wound up almost entirely in the past, you know, 10 or 15 years vacillating back and forth between Disney and A24, which are the two biggest brands in studio filmmaking, but they represent the two polarities. of what you can put up on the big screen for an audience. And through it all, I've been sort of, I've been following my own whims. And I've been looking for the thing that, lately, I've been looking, you know, as I get older, I'm trying to reflect a little bit more and think, what are, what is the, what is the thread that ties all of these things together? Because when I'm making them, when I'm making the decision to go from one movie to the next, it's a very natural and organic thing. And I... I never feel like I'm being calculating or that I have an agenda that I want. It's always like I feel that each movie leads to the next in a very personal way. But now that I'm looking back at it, I'm trying to, you know, I've made enough films at this point to kind of have some perspective. And I see my own patterns start to emerge. Some of those patterns are, you know. Speaker 1 (9:41) almost like a defense mechanism where I've made one thing and I want to go as far in the other direction as possible. Other times, I want to dig deeper into a theme or an idea that I've been exploring. Certainly with when I made The Green Knight, I didn't know what that movie was about at first. I thought I knew what it was about, but it wasn't until we made it that I realized what it was truly about, which was my own relationship with my mother. And then with Peter Pan and Wendy, which was already in the works, I just was like, Let's just dig even deeper into that. That's a movie, that's a property that was already intrinsically about maternal relationships. And I just went all the way. And that was a conscious decision. And so I'm starting to sort of like see these things emerge. And it doesn't make, you know, the choices I make any more predictable. Or I'm trying, I'm also trying not to like think too deeply about it. But it's interesting having made, you know. seven or eight features at this point. enough to where I can't remember if it's seven or eight, you start to see those patterns emerge. Speaker 3 (10:47) Yeah, yeah. It seems, yeah. I mean, on the surface, it seems a big jump between Peter Pan and Wendy at Mother Mary. So can you talk about that? What drew you to Mother Mary? Speaker 1 (11:01) I had started writing Mother Mary while we were shooting The Green Knight. So in a way, it preceded that. And that's often how these movies work because I'll start writing the screenplays quite early. Peter Pan and Wendy was in the works before The Green Knight. And so they all overlap in the screenplays, in the screenwriting stage. While I was making The Green Knight, I was having, I had really bad insomnia. Speaker 1 (11:32) It had never happened to me before. Usually I sleep like a baby while I'm on set. I mean, I have trouble falling asleep. Once I fall asleep, I'm out cold. In this case, I could not. I was up for like days at a time and just trying, Speaker 2 (11:44) trying Speaker 1 (11:45) everything I could to get myself to fall asleep and I couldn't. And as a result, I had all these long, dark nights of the soul, the type which you should not have while you're making a film where you're just wondering like, Speaker 2 (11:55) am I? Speaker 1 (11:57) Did I, it ranged from like, did I put the camera in the right place all the way to like, have I made the right choice in careers? You know, like you just start, you start just second guessing everything late at night. And I was also knowing, I knew that we were heading into Peter Pan and Wendy. And so I was going from this, this movie that was. you know, a relatively low budget movie for what it was, but it was, it felt epic and all consuming and was incredibly challenging and difficult. And, you know, that movie was barely over 40 days and I'm staring down the barrel at a 112 day shoot with Peter Pan and Wendy, just thinking like, I don't know if I can do it. I really, I had a moment of self-doubt and I just was questioning everything. And so one of those nights while I was laying in bed, unable to sleep, I just thought, I need to turn this inner turmoil, and I use turmoil lightly because, of course, these are all wonderful problems to have, but what if I just start writing it down? I'm going to turn my therapy into a dialogue, my self-therapy. So I wrote this scene that is essentially the opening scene of Mother Mary, and it was really a conversation between one version of myself and another, the side of me that was... full of self-doubt and the side of me that was full of confidence, the side of me that was going to make a Disney movie and the side of me that was making The Green Knight. And I used this script to sort of put myself at ease, this scene. And I sort of worked my way over the course of, you know, it was the opening scene. And then I wrote a little bit further and kind of like got myself to a place where I was confident in what I was doing again. But then at the end of that, I had a third of a screenplay with these characters that I had become fascinated by, that no longer fully, they felt like they were on the verge of becoming separate from me. They began as parts of me, but they were becoming characters in their own right. And I really wanted to see them through, see their journey through. I will add on to that, that I was very, I'd wanted to make a movie involving pop music for a long time, because when I made Ain't Nobody's Saints, I was steeping myself in folk music. I love folk music. I love Americana. I love a lot of country music. And I wanted to make, with Ain't Nobody's Saints, I wanted to make a movie that felt like a folk song. Everything about that movie was designed to feel like a folk song feels. And even the structure of it is more musical than it is traditionally narrative. But while I was making it, I started listening to Taylor Swift and Kesha and all these other artists. And almost because I was so steeped in the folk world, I needed to turn to something else. And I really loved the way that music made me feel. It was a genre of music I'd never listened to before, but it was really thrilling and invigorating in a completely new way. And so I knew that I wanted to make something that captured that feeling, that took place in and around that world, and it may be involved a pop star. I didn't know what... that movie would be. But when I sat down that night to write this conversation piece, this piece of dialogue, I instantly thought, well, I'm going to make one of them a pop star. I'm not going to make it a filmmaker. I'm going to use another art form. And this will be my, this maybe will be my opportunity to make a pop star film. I know it says a lot about me that I can sit down and write something that's meant to be purely therapeutic. It's meant to help me get through some issue. and I'm already thinking about how to make it into a movie. I'm like, I'm thinking how we'll shoot it. And indeed, by the end of the shoot on the Green Knight, I was telling Andrew Palermo, my cinematographer, I was telling him about this movie and saying like, okay, at some point soon, we're going to make this movie involving a pop star and a fashion designer, and they're going to be in a barn talking about making a dress. And Speaker 3 (15:52) so Speaker 1 (15:53) that was in 2019. And here we are in 2026, and the movie has finally come to fruition. Speaker 3 (16:01) I read somewhere you said that a film like Ghost Story or Ain't Them Body Saints is about feelings. And you said a script can't always reflect fully those feelings. So the story in a way is less important. Can you expand on that? I mean, was the process of making Mother Mary different in that way from, say, a Peter Pan, which is more based Speaker 1 (16:25) on a hard written script? I think some of it has to do with... One of the things I love doing is dealing with archetypes and iconographic characters. In the case of Peter Pan, for example, I am counting on most of the audience having some familiarity with that story. And they go into it knowing where it's going to wind up. And I'm not interested in subverting that or being revisionist in my approach to classic material. I want to honor the material, but I also want to rest upon that familiarity so that I can color in around the edges and illuminate it from a new perspective. The Green Knight is the same way, being that it's an ancient poem. The movie is very close to the poem, but the way in which we tell the story is a different perspective on the existing text. And even going back to Ain't Nobody a Saint, which is about his traditional and outlaw tale. as you can imagine. And you could look at it as both, you know, a classic Bonnie and Clyde type tale or Badlands type tale, or you could look at it as the Odyssey. All of those things are true. And there's no surprises. Everything kind of ends up where you wouldn't, if you were to hear the synopsis of what the movie is, it ends up where you would expect it to end up. But that then allows me to do this thing that I've described as focusing on the feelings. And that is finding an emotional tenor. that the movie can exist in and a texture and a tone that is both aesthetic and emotional. I usually want those aesthetics to inform the emotion and vice versa. Speaker 2 (18:04) And Speaker 1 (18:04) that's always a process of exploration, trying to find that specific register and that feeling and that vibe. I'm a director who uses the term vibe quite a bit. And often what we're in search of is a very specific vibe. And sometimes it comes very quickly. Sometimes like with Ain't Them Body Saints, it came very, very quickly. We knew from the get-go how to find that vibe. And other times, like with the ghost story, it was a little more slippery. I think last time we spoke, I talked about how figuring out how that ghost was going to work and how it was going to function and what it would communicate was a constant work in progress because it could have been very funny. It could have been slapstick. And sometimes we were laughing so hard on set that we thought maybe that was the right approach. Speaker 3 (18:52) Watching Speaker 1 (18:53) Casey bumble around in a sheet was hilarious. You know, there's no denying that we were having a great day on set watching him, you know, bump into the door as he walked through. But it was ultimately like, that's not the right vibe for this movie. And we had to Speaker 2 (19:08) rinse Speaker 1 (19:09) and repeat to find the feeling that we were after. With Mother Mary, unlike most of my movies, the dialogue is exceedingly important. And that was a challenge I sort of set out for myself from the get-go because normally I'm a writer who loves to write dialogue and a director who loves to remove every bit of it. So I love, you know, telling an actor that a line is unnecessary in spite of the fact that they may think it's important. I love removing it in the edit. I try to remind myself to shoot silent versions of every take so that you always have an option of like saying more with less if you need it. It's often, I tell my assistant director to remind me to do it because I'll forget, but we try to do that. And with this movie, I was