Watching David Lowery’s Mother Mary made me think, in some unexpected way, of a scene early in Todd Field’s Tár, in which Lydia Tár dresses down a Juilliard student for his proud indifference to the Western canon. Field has said that Tár was having an argument with a younger version of herself: two people, two generations, two different relationships to the same vocation—in some sense, the same person.
Lowery takes this situation and runs it out across 80 minutes, putting two women in a series of rooms—all of them charged with the dark intimacy of late-night confession—and leaving them to battle it out. One is Mary (Anne Hathaway), a pop star of near-mythic stature, emotionally besieged, contending with what it means to go on having and wanting enormous success. The other is Sam Ansel (Michaela Coel), a designer of serious accomplishment recruited by Mary to make a dress for her next concert.
It’s not a coincidence, I think, that Lowery hired Bina Daigeler, who designed the costumes for Tár, to dress his own film. Both movies understand that getting dressed is no simple matter—that what one wears, and how, and for whom, carries dramatic, often invisible consequences for one’s relationship to others and to the world.
Mother Mary is possibly Lowery’s most accomplished film to date, one that demanded much of its maker. We spoke about these demands and their peculiar resonances in the conversation that follows.
The Film Stage: David, congratulations on the film. How are you feeling about it?
David Lowery: Thank you. I’m feeling at peace.
That’s different from the way you usually feel after you’ve finished a film?
Sometimes I feel great, sometimes I feel relief. This one, I feel cautiously optimistic and I’m excited. But it’s been such a long process that even the fact that I can’t keep working on it, because it’s coming out, is a weight off my shoulders.
You’ve spoken about how the movie opened a dialogue between two aspects of yourself, and that made me wonder if the peace you say you’ve found has less to do with reconciling those two parts than with learning something about yourself as a filmmaker. Is that fair?
It’s very fair, and I feel almost bashful about the fact that I don’t know how to put into words what it is that I’ve learned. Maybe by the end of this movie’s cycle in the culture, I’ll have a better sense of that, but I suspect it’ll take a little longer. I think I was able to reconcile the two halves of me quite quickly, and I realize that while there can be tension between the two spheres of my brain that pull me in different directions, that was a momentary panic I was able to put to rest.
As I was writing this movie, I realized that the deep reflection I was embarking upon was honest and okay. It’s okay to feel conflicted about what you’re doing. It’s okay to have fears about where you’re headed, about what you’ve done, about what lies ahead—as a filmmaker, as a storyteller, as an artist, as a human being. So I was able to reconcile that quite quickly, which was useful because then I was able to take that initial spark of discontent and dig deeper. I didn’t have to just keep trampling those themes into the ground. I could use it as a jumping-off point that carried me into something deeper and, on a personal level, more obtuse.
That is where I’m still figuring out what I’ve learned from this movie, because I did dig quite deeply. I went as far as I could into this material, and at a certain point I couldn’t put into words what it was I was trying to do. I couldn’t let the characters put into words what I was trying to do, either. There’s a point in the movie where what had been a very dialogue-heavy two-hander becomes something with a lot more space between the words. I’m still trying to figure that out, but I know I don’t need to rush it. When I say it’s a relief, it’s because I can start to take a step back and let those realizations begin to reveal themselves to me in a way they haven’t been able to.
That inability to articulate reminds me of Mary early in the film. When Sam asks what she’s trying to do with the dress, all she can do is gesture.
All she can do is hand gestures.
You mentioned a personal spark of discontent. When did you first recognize it, and when did you realize it had a spark—that you could actually put it to use?
I was on the set of The Green Knight in Ireland, getting to make a medieval fantasy movie—a very esoteric medieval fantasy movie that hit every single button for things I’m interested in. And it was hard in the way all movies are hard, but I found myself unhappy. Part of that was because I got very ill during the shoot, and that played into a sense of: is my body telling me something about what I’m doing right now? Something’s wrong. I was very aware that I should have been on cloud nine making that movie, and I wasn’t, and I knew I had to figure out how to fix that.
I was also about to embark upon my second Disney film. We were gearing up for Peter Pan & Wendy—it was going to go immediately afterwards. I’ve always said that all my films are personal and autobiographical, and I hold that to be true. And yet, in that moment, I remember very specifically coming home from a hard day on set feeling like I didn’t get what I was after, and taking a call with our producers at Disney about the screenplay. I was just at a loss. “I don’t know if I can do this. I don’t know if I can go on and make this next movie…”
I had a sort of Irish apothecary at my disposal—all these herbal remedies that were not helping me get the rest I needed but maybe helped put my brain in a position to turn this sense of discontent into something. In any case, I had a lot of time at night because I couldn’t sleep. One night, after that hard day on set and that phone call, I just decided to start writing, to turn everything I was turning over in my head into a dialogue. And that dialogue very quickly became the opening tête-à-tête between Mother Mary and Sam Ansel. I think I wrote ten to twenty pages that night. And by the end of The Green Knight’s production, I was telling people about it. I called it my goth movie.
And was Mary a pop star at that point?
Almost instantly, I think. I had been wanting to make a movie about a pop star for quite some time. I didn’t know what movie that would be or where it would fit, but as a fan of pop music, it was a character that was hanging around in the periphery, just waiting to find a home in a screenplay. When I knew I was going to be writing something that, due to its source, would be about artistic expression, I knew I didn’t want to make a movie about a filmmaker. But I could transpose all of my own concerns about self-expression onto a pop star, and treat myself to the joy of creating a pop icon. Who would I want to listen to? I say “joy” with quotation marks because it wound up being incredibly difficult. But it’s joyous again, at this point.
When we see Mary on stage, the audience is almost entirely withheld: you show us black mass with specks of light. She’s remarkably free of handlers. And the one time we see a photo camera is during the séance scene. It’s an ambivalent picture of what it means to be a pop star.
All of those aspects of pop stardom are fascinating to me. The engagement with the audience, the moments where Beyoncé walks through the crowd and hands the mic to a fan to sing—those are such beautiful things. I certainly wrote drafts of the script where all of that was in there. But one of the things I found most striking in the more modern pop star documentaries, where these artists are playing in stadiums that feel like universes unto themselves, is that they walk out on stage and very often all you see are lights. And you know that every single one of those lights is a person who is having a personal connection with you—with the artist—and the artist has to make that connection profound for someone they cannot see, someone they have to trust exists behind that speck of light.
The really great pop stars—the ones who can fill stadiums with a hundred thousand people—know how to do that. They know how to have an intimate connection with someone who is, for all intents and purposes, on the other side of the galaxy. It’s distant light traveling across the galaxy, reaching that pop star. They will never, in their lifetime, actually see that person’s face, but they are going to have a connection that is profound—I’ve gone to those shows and felt it—and knowing there are people who have that innate sense of how to make that communication possible is really powerful to me. So when we were figuring out how to shoot the concert scenes, I wanted to explore that.
The audience remained largely anonymous. There are a few close-ups here and there, but for the most part it is a congregation—a faceless congregation that has come to attend her service. And the film kept removing people from Mother Mary’s periphery as we were making it, even though I kept trying to cram them in. In the documentaries, you see this sea of people surrounding a celebrity. But we were always finding ourselves stepping past them and getting right up into her periphery.
It’s like a process of subtraction as the movie goes on. There are shots in the film that looked like Super 8 or analog video, but they show up only sporadically. Can you speak to those?
While I was making The Green Knight, I watched Beyoncé’s Homecoming documentary, and Super 8 is all through that. So when we were filming the concert scenes, I asked my friend Sean Bannon—a filmmaker who’s on all my sets shooting behind-the-scenes material—to bring his Super 8 cameras. He was shooting a lot while we were in production, and we didn’t have a design for it at that point.
I love a multimedia aesthetic, but I didn’t know if it would fit this film. We had one shot in the early edit that was Super 8, and it came at a very impactful moment. Seeing that change in format had a profound effect—not just on me, but on the people we showed the film to. That shift in grain structure, resolution, and color palette was very useful as a narrative tool. And so there was a part of the movie where we didn’t have enough time on set, as is always the case, and a lot of pieces were missing. I had to build a sequence out of the materials we had at hand. What I wound up doing was taking footage that plays on the jumbotrons—which we had recorded—and transferring that to Super 8. It’s not exactly the movie footage; it’s a different resolution already, and it’s all long lens. But once I transferred it, I loved the way it looked so much that I started picking other scenes that were still in their amoeba state and transferring those too.
The Alexa footage when it got transferred to Super 8 looked just like good 16mm. And the reason it mattered wasn’t only visual; we needed to recontextualize what you’re seeing. At one point in the movie we’re seeing concert scenes we’ve seen before, but because you’re now seeing them through the lens of a Super 8 camera, you process them differently. You file this information away as an audience member in a different way. It was a real breakthrough moment in the edit when I realized that was a tool we had at our disposal, because we’d had that camera on set.
When that footage appeared, it was like adding a ghost’s point of view into the movie.
That’s exactly where it comes in. Those jumbotron images are all very long lens, very objective—they’re just following the action. It becomes this outside perspective that we’ve never seen before, showing us things we’ve already seen in another form.
I wanted to ask about what you might call the possession scene—when Mary is demonstrating the dance she’s going to perform, and there’s no music, because Sam tells her not to play any. How do you cut something like that?
Despite the lack of music, there was still a rhythm that the dance followed in rehearsal. Sometimes Annie would listen to music to get an emotional sense of what she was trying to convey, just to tap into something. Other times it would be a click track, so you’d have that beat. There was always a rhythm to work from. But there was a certain point in that dance where—I hesitate to use this word—it becomes freestyle.
Our choreographer Dani Vitale told Annie, “Just do whatever comes to you. Follow your own instincts.” And because we had spent so much time in rehearsal, we knew that would be just as effective as the movements that were choreographed to a tee. It was important for me to let her cut loose within that scene. So most of it you can imagine being performed at the VMAs; you can imagine her dancing on stage to a song. But then, at a certain point, the fact that she’s not hearing any music falls away entirely, and she is just following something inside of herself. I say that both about the character and about Anne Hathaway.
Do you think your sense of who you are as a filmmaker has changed at all?
Ironically, Peter Pan & Wendy was the one where I felt that most profoundly—where I felt a transition within myself from where I had been as a filmmaker to where I was at that time, and I had a clear sense of where I was going. And that allowed me to embark upon Mother Mary with a courage and conviction I might not have otherwise had. Now I’m coming out of this film feeling emboldened, but also very cautious because I know what it took out of me. I would happily have that experience again, but it has to be for the right project. The time this one needed was the time it took.
I am an impatient filmmaker. I have many movies I want to make, and some of them will require this amount of everything. I’m getting ready to make something right now that is just as personal as Mother Mary, if not more so; in some ways even more so. It’ll be even more difficult. But I know it doesn’t need what this movie needed, on a very practical level. And that’s an okay thing. Movies will always ask everything of you when you’re in the moment, but you should end in a place of joy, feeling like you’ve done a good job, every day, in the best scenarios.
With this film, I removed every piece of armor. I took off all barriers, and there’s a recovery process that comes with that. The movies I know I want to make next have a little more built-in protection, and that’s a healthy thing to have sometimes as I prepare for whatever it is in the future that will leave me wrung dry once again.
Mother Mary opens in theaters on Friday, April 17.