Trailers for director David Lowery’s “Mother Mary” have cheekily referred to it as “Not a ghost story,” likely a reference to the director’s 2017 film of the same name. Make no mistake, though: this is very much an exorcism story, one that also focuses on a spirit that refuses to leave its chosen place of habitation.
Lowery nestles this story within the rapturous extravaganza of a pop concert, his film focusing on Mother Mary (Anne Hathaway), a pop star preparing for her comeback concert in the aftermath of an onstage accident. Unsatisfied with the outfits presented to her, she returns to the English countryside to speak with Sam Anselm (Michaela Coel), her former friend and costume designer. Here, the verbal unspoken conflicts between them take on an almost physical form. Lowery is aware that we can wear our demons like clothing and grip our prayers like knives, and the simple conversations between those two end up expanding into larger, divine questions centered around friendship, love, and performance.
For Lowery, his work as a filmmaker is, in some ways, an exorcism of the intangible within himself, giving it flesh and blood through moviemaking. “I suppose that’s what I’ve always wanted to do and have been doing: I’ve been trying to take a feeling and give it form,” he shared.
Lowery spoke with RogerEbert.com about the journey of light that anchors the film, how he sees his work as a filmmaker as a work of transubstantiation, and the surprising and poignant influences of “Terminator 2: Judgment Day” and “Barry Lyndon.”
This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Roger was famous for saying that movies are machines that generate empathy. Before we properly begin, I wanted to share that your film was very much an empathy-machine movie for me, even if I can’t say my feuds with friends have ever physically manifested as a spectral red cloth.
David Lowery: Roger Ebert is one of the reasons I love movies so much. He taught me how to love movies. You guys are continuing his tradition in such a wonderful fashion. His empathy machine quote is one that’s written in stone and in all of my art. I’ve spoken before about how I grew up without a television, but I had his Movie Home Companion, and my film school education was just reading his reviews. To this day, I can quote some of them because they were just emblazoned in my head at such an early age.
I’m struck by the lighting in the film, the way you contrast the congregational lights of the concert to the dimly lit sequences of those barn sequences that are lit naturally. Can you talk about working with Production Designer Francesca Di Mottola, including how you wanted to depict light and what you see as the character arc of light throughout the film?
It really was a collaboration between Francesca, me, and the cinematographers, Andrew Droz Palermo and Rina Yang. We wanted this movie to be incredibly visual because when you read this script from Mother Mary, it’s all dialogue. We could have just rested on the shoulders of that dialogue and let it–quite literally–do all of the talking, but I also wanted this to be an incredible visual experience. Finding the right space for these characters to inhabit was important. I’d written that the movie is set in a vaguely gothic medieval barn, and we knew there would be stadium concert sequences. There were parameters we had to work around, but figuring out exactly how to make the movie cohesive was a real Herculean effort on all our parts.
I have to tip my hat to Francesca, Andrew, and Rina because I can write it and I can describe it, but they have to figure out how to execute it. I had always described it–from when I was with Andrew on the set of “The Green Knight”–that I wanted this to be my goth movie. So baked into the very concept was the idea that it would be a very dark film, a movie set in a world of shadows. I envisioned the film would have a moody disposition, but we hadn’t quite defined what that was yet. It wasn’t until we found that barn in Cologne, Germany, that we really understood the space in which this movie would exist.
I remember when we were looking at location photos, just clicking through a slideshow, and all of a sudden, a photo of that barn popped up, and I stopped in my tracks and said, “I think we have to shoot the movie there.” The barn looked very different, of course, from how we portrayed it in the film, but its bones were built in the 1300s. It had an ancient, timeless quality similar to “The Green Knight,” which also had much of its action take place in a barn.
The existing windows largely informed how light was used. They became multiple centers around which we set the action, so we could move in and out of shadow. We put lamps here and there to change the feeling of the scene, and so that way, for some sequences, Michaela could reach and turn a lamp on, and all of a sudden, the blue daylight would get infused with the golden tungsten of a desk lamp. We really were just trying to lean into the mood of that space, which was immense, cavernous, and ultimately strange. Even just walking into the barn for the first time, it felt like a strange liminal space that didn’t really exist, and it could transform in so many different ways because it was so big.
It felt like a cathedral, which served as some inspiration for those concert sequences. One of the only lighting references we had, because we tried not to look at too many other movies, was the duel at the end of “Barry Lyndon.” That scene in particular was a key text for us, and we wanted to do that on a much larger scale purely because the barn was so massive. The way that sequence was defined, the characters could move in and out of light, was something that guided me. Likewise, we wanted to let location lead the way.
Another key point was that the sun would set at a certain time. We can go from the daylight version of the barn to the nighttime version, at which point the shadows deepen, and the walls, which were sometimes hard to see in the daylight because they were lost in shadow, at times fall away altogether. By shifting to night, the lines between past and present, reality and surreality, became a little more fluid, and we were able to start using that to poke through the fabric of reality and let the movie enter its unique register and zone.
That interplay between the symbolic and the embodied dovetails with my next question, because my favorite line in the film is when Sam says, “The transubstantiation of feeling … that’s what we’re doing here,” with regard to her work as a dressmaker. That Catholic idea–of the bread and wine becoming the literal body and blood of Christ–seems like such a rich metaphor for being an artist, so I’m curious if you view yourself as a “transubstantiator” and what that means to you as a creative person.
It’s so interesting being raised in the Catholic church, and having communion be an everyday occurrence. They may tell you that you’re eating the literal blood and body of Christ, but you–or at least I– never really thought about it in physiological terms. The second that you do, it becomes very strange, but that’s where the term transubstantiation comes from, which is, of course, a key tenet of Catholicism and is the only thing that allows the act of communion to not be incredibly disturbing.
I love that term, though. Of all I took away from my Catholic upbringing, that concept is incredibly meaningful to me. I suppose I do think of myself in those terms. I haven’t thought about it in terms of my other movies, but with this film, when Sam says that, she is describing what the movie’s doing, what the characters are going to be doing over the course of the movie, but she’s literally, for all intents and purposes, giving the logline of the movie to the audience.
We never hear the lyrics or the full song of “Spooky Action,” but I could see what Sam says as a line of that song.
Exactly. When we make movies, we take a screenplay, which is one object, and turn it into a movie, which is another. I often look at that as an act of translation. It’s like translating poetry where you are finding a new form for something, and yet it still needs to embody what it originally was. Transsubstantiation is probably an even better term. We are taking these texts, these words on a page, and turning them into images that need to have sound and emotion to them that would never exist in textual form, yet we’re always there implicitly within the screenplay.
When I think about my own movies, the stories and narrative structure are always important. But more important than anything else are the feelings. Often when I’m making a movie, especially a movie like “A Ghost Story”, “ Mother Mary,” or “Ain’t Them Bodies Saints,” the story is less important to me than the feelings that they evoke. With the latter film, I literally did not care about the story at all. What I cared about was the emotional undercurrent and the feelings I wanted the story to evoke. I suppose that’s what I’ve always wanted to do and have been doing: I’ve been trying to take a feeling and give it form. That is an act of transubstantiation.
I wish I could say I was turning that feeling into celluloid, when in reality, I’m just turning it into a file on a computer. But maybe we’ll have a 35mm print, and the metaphor will work fully.
You have a vinyl coming out with the Mother Mary songs, so maybe that’s a good start. A24 put out a facetious video about the fact that there isn’t a single line at all for a man in the film. I’m curious how intentional that was on your part. It’s interesting to note that, given how you’ve also said this is probably your most personal film to date.
There was no agenda behind it, other than that when I wrote Sam and Mother Mary, they were female characters. There was never any sort of decision; that’s just how they emerged from my subconscious. So those chromosomes were leading the way when I started writing the script, and initially, it was just the two of them. Then Hilda entered the picture, and for Hilda, I wrote her role specifically for Hunter Schafer. She always had to be who he was, and apart from those characters, there aren’t many other people in this movie. It was never a sense of, like, “I’m going to operate in this specific lane”; it was more that two very specific characters took that form.
We can talk about the feminine divine. We can talk about how gender modes operate in art–specifically, pop music and fashion–and how those sometimes feel very gendered, even though they’re inclusive of everyone. It’s funny now to see it documented in that way. It made me think, “There are no men who speak in this movie.” There’s a photograph of me in this movie, so it’s not 100% man free. When Michaela’s looking at fitting photos on a phone, I’m in one of them.
That’s the director’s privilege.
Amongst the entourage, of course, there were men there, but you don’t feel them in the movie. I don’t want to take credit for the level because it certainly wasn’t intentional, but on a subconscious level, it excluded anyone who didn’t need to be part of it.
I know that you’ve previously cited how the way the T-1000 was flailing and dying at the end of “Terminator 2: Judgment Day” was an influence for the movement of the Red Woman. It’s made me wonder about the influence that film–and sci-fi films in general–have had on you as an artist. I love the idea of these heavy science movies merging with your spiritual provocations.
I mean, first of all, “Terminator 2: Judgment Day” is one of the greatest movies of all time. That sequence really stuck with me as a child. I watched the movie when it was first released on VHS, and it was fun and exciting. There’s something about that scene where the T-1000 is dying that was very moving to me. Watching it try to hold on to some form of integrity was beautiful and sad, and, honestly, more emotionally moving than Arnold Schwarzenegger with the thumbs-up.
Finally, some justice for the antagonist.
I mean, we could sidebar on this, but I’ve always been interested in empathy for the antagonist. T-1000 is a character who, by design, you are not allowed to have empathy for because there’s no emotion. But in that moment, in that scene, all of a sudden, there’s desperation and emotion from this previously unemotive character who, in those few seconds, suddenly you feel an odd amount of empathy for. When I was trying to explain to people that the Red Woman needed to be an intangible character seeking her true form, it was not only the reference I could think of, but also the perfect one.
“Mother Mary” is in theaters via A24.