Writer-director-editor-etc. David Lowery has been a part of the filmmaking world since 2000, but odds are you were never exposed to his work until the last year of so (unlesss you saw his previous feature, the moving drama ST. NICK from 2009). But in that time span, he has worked on countless shorts and made a name for himself editing others' films as well, including works by Dustin Guy Defa, Amy Seimetz, Kris Swanberg, Andrew Brotzman, and most impressively, Shane Caruth's UPSTREAM COLOR.
His breakthrough feature was 2013’s Sundance hit, the quiet, tense drama AIN’T THEM BODIES SAINTS, starring Casey Affleck and Rooney Mara. Even as that film was being release, he and his sometime writing partner Toby Halbrooks (also a production partner) were working on a new take of the slightly terrible and certainly not well regarded PETE’S DRAGON for Disney. The resulting film was a stunning, heartfelt work that landed on many critics’ best of the year lists in 2016, and is one of the great example of why it’s better to remake bad movies than good ones. Lowery and Halbrooks are now hard at work on a new adaptation of PETER PAN for Disney, so clearly the studio liked his approach, even if it didn’t connect with audiences in a big way (if you haven’t seen it, remedy that immediately).
Literally, the day after Lowery finished the color correction on PETE’S DRAGON, he began work on a long-gestating micro-budget film that he kept under wraps almost until it premiered at Sundance this year. A GHOST STORY reunites Affleck and Mara as a young couple living in an old house, when Affleck’s character dies and becomes a sheeted ghost lingering in the home they shared, watching his wife grieve and then continue on with her life. It’s not meant to be a scary movie, although it has its moments. It’s deliberately paced, surreal, and deeply moving, as a meditation on loss, the things we cling to even after death, and it’s even a little bit funny at times. And with 2016 halfway done, A GHOST STORY remains my favorite film of the year.
To prove to you what a workhorse Lowery is, in May he finished shooting OLD MAN AND THE GUN, another film with his PETE’S DRAGON star Robert Redford, which is said to be Redford’s final movie as an actor (it also starsr Affleck, Elisabeth Moss, Sissy Spacek and Danny Glover). I sat down with David Lowery (a former BNAT attendee and seat mate, circa 2005) last week in Chicago to discuss the intricacies of A GHOST STORY and a little bit about what he’s got coming up. Please enjoy…
Capone: When this film played at the Chicago Critics Film Festival, you were kind enough to send along a video introduction, in which you implored the audience to “forget everything you've heard or that you think you know about this movie.” Why do you think that's important with this film in particular? I think it's important for every film…
David Lowery: For every film, yeah.
Capone: It drives me crazy when someone's like, "This didn't meet my expectations," or, “This film is being marketed as something else." Neither of those things make it a bad movie.
DL: You know what's funny, I watched THE BEGUILED the other day and I loved it, but the trailer is selling a movie that is very, very different. And people are getting angry about it, and then they have with WHAT COMES AT NIGHT too. But that one I expected because I knew Trey [Edward Shults, the writer-director]. But with THE BEGUILED, I was shocked. I was like—spoiler alert—"Oh, so there's not poison apple pie?" The trailer is so brilliantly constructed to make you think it's doing one thing.
But with this movie, I felt that it was so simple that if you applied too much expectation or anticipation or foresight to it as an audience member, it might not meet those expectations, but at the same time there's not anything else there. I mean, there is, but it's such a simple movie that if you pre-define it for yourself as to what it might be or what it's going to be, it probably isn't going to reach those heights or hit that standard. That's not to say the movie is insufficient in any way, it's just that it is so supremely simple by design, and anticipation can work against that.
Capone: Horror films were my gateway drug into loving all films, and when I see a movie with a ghost, I start looking for rules of behavior. And I did the same way with IT COMES AT NIGHT. I start wondering “What are the rules here?” And as I've grown older, I've come to realize that the less I know, the more effective these things are. There are rules here to a certain degree, but was there a temptation to over explain what the ghost could do, what he couldn't do, if he could interact, if he couldn't, could he touch things? Was that ever part of this process?
DL: Absolutely. Well we shot it all and realized that we didn't need it. We have lots of footage of the ghost touching things that we shot with double exposure so his hand is moving through things. The first day of principal photography was entirely concerned with him coming through the front door of the house, going and trying to pick up the mail that had come since he died and realizing he couldn't touch things. There was an entire sequence in which he just runs around the house getting more and more frustrated as he realized he can run through walls, he can run through closet doors but he can't get outside of the house. It was all designed to suggest that he's stuck in this space.
What we realized was that it was 100 percent redundant. Just seeing the ghost in the house and never seeing him leave, that's all you need to know that he can't leave that space. In terms of what he can and can't do, in terms of picking things up and touching things, it is a little fluid in the movie, but I realized that we have 50, 60, 70 years of ghosts in cinema to explain the rules for us. Basically, you can watch GHOST with Patrick Swayze and apply all the rules in that movie to this one because they're all pretty much the same.
Capone: When I first saw the film, I thought it was about her grief keeping the ghost around, but when she leaves and he can't leave I'm realized, “He's attached to this place." Why do you think that would be, that a ghost would be tied to a place and not necessarily a person?
DL: I'm personally very obsessed with physical spaces. That's something that I keep making movies about to one extent or another. And this is perhaps the most focused, deep dive into that obsession that I've made yet. I find myself very attached to the homes that I've lived in. I move into a new home and I will put down roots right away and just get very emotionally invested in that space. I like knowing that I am participating in the history of that space. There are people who have come before and people who will come after me, and I'm part of that. But I also let that space define me to a certain extent.
The house that I was living in in Texas before we left to make PETE’S DRAGON was the first house that I lived in with my wife after we got married, and I really just made that house my home and I felt like I was a part of it and I loved letting that represent my identity to a certain extent. And when we moved out of that house to go make PETE’S DRAGON, I was really bummed. I was really devastated and felt like I wanted to hang onto it. And so making this movie was a way to explore the idea, explore those attachments, on a very therapeutic level.
Capone: I was going to say, it sounds like it was a cathartic thing for you. Do you think about the places that you lived once you're gone from them? Do you visit them?
DL: I go back to them. I drive by. I'm the creepy guy that drives by the house, my childhood homes. I'm from Waukesha outside of Milwaukee, and whenever I'm back there I just inevitably go drive by the house that I grew up in. One of these days, I'll take it to the next creepy step forward and knock on the door to see if I can go inside. I just like looking at a place and knowing that I once spent a very formative part of my life there and contemplating that sense of history. But I also recognize that that history is indeed history, and that it's gone and I can't reclaim that. There's a big part of this movie is about letting go of that attachment, letting go of that sentimental hold that a place might have on you, and that's something that I've recognized in my own life that I need to do, and I wanted that to be one of the themes of this movie as well.
Capone: You and Bruce Springsteen, just driving past your old houses. [laughs]
DL: Yeah, completely. I remember reading an interview with Warren Beatty that Roger Ebert did where he talked about doing the same thing, and he actually took the next step and went up and knocked on the door. I can just only imagine the residents of that house seeing Warren Beatty knocking on their door saying, "I grew up here." It must have felt very surreal.
Capone: You've worked on two movies with Rooney and now I think three with Casey Affleck, because Casey's in the film you just shot. You have these working relationships now with these people. What is essential about them? Why do you keep going back to them, and what do they bring that maybe other people that you work with don't necessarily?
DL: Well, they have an amazing chemistry together, and specifically tied to this movie, the answer is that they can give you a lot with very little screen time. We have very little time to spend with them as a couple in this film before Casey's character dies. I wanted to use that time well and to have two people who could convey love and the sense of history together and the sense of a relationship, because once he's gone, I wanted to make sure we felt like something had been lost. And I knew about the chemistry the two of them have together because they know each other and really do care for one another and get along well together. I knew that their chemistry was profound, and that it would really define those first 10 minutes of the movie. They would define that couple for us in the very limited amount of time we have to spend with them.
That was one of the main reasons I wanted them to be the leads of this film, but beyond that, there's a great value in working with people that you know. We see that with lots of filmmakers. Filmmakers keep coming back to the same actors and the same crew because there's a trust there. Once you have that trust established, it just makes the entire process easier. You can't always work with the same people and sometimes it's good to branch out and try new things, but when you can have that built-in understanding, it just makes the creative process so much more fluid, and there's so much more opportunity for discovery because you're not trying to get to know each other in the process of making something. I've worked with Casey three times and I've now worked with Redford twice, so I keep trying to expand that film family and bring more people into it and bring them all on from one film to the next. I love bringing new people into the fold and working with new folks, but it's always really helpful to have someone you know and trust there every day.
Capone: Like an anchor. “I know I don't have to worry about you.”
DL: Exactly. And also, you know you can put up with each other's bullshit. At this point I can just be like, we can talk for 20 minutes about the character, and I'll be like, "Great, great, great. Okay, let's start shooting. Let's stop talking now." And I don't have to feel precious about cutting those conversations off anymore, whereas on our first collaboration, I wanted to make sure I was engaging every step of the way because we were still just getting to know each other.
Capone: Talk about the process of coming up with the look of the ghost. On the surface, it seems like it's a dime-store Halloween costume. I can tell there's more going on under that sheet, but at the same time, it's a very basic look. Were you nervous about this being the look, because when he gets up from that slab in the morgue, there's a little bit of laughter from the audience.
DL: It is funny. The image made me laugh.
Capone: There are a few funny things in this movie, by the way. I don't mean to undercut that.
DL: Oh, for sure. It's an inherently funny image, and I embraced that. I found the concept of making a movie in which the protagonist is a ghost wearing a bed sheet inherently funny. But I also found it very sweet and sad at the same time. Just the image of this particular ghost standing in an empty house was very melancholy, and I wanted to see if I could sustain that feeling that I was finding in that single image for the entire running time of a movie, while also still allowing room for people to laugh because yes, it is funny.
My first thought was that we would just put a sheet over someone's head and cut the holes out and that would be it, but we did a couple tests with that and realized that what passes for a ghost on Halloween when you're five years old doesn't really work when you're an adult, much less an adult trying to play a character in a film. So my costume designer just started from scratch, basically. She built the costume 100 percent from scratch and did a lot of experimentation to figure out what thread count worked best, what type of fabric had the best qualities for the draping effect that the ghost has, which feels very much like a veil or a shroud. She was dyeing them, finding the right shade of white, because it can't just be white. It has to be the right shade of white.
The eye holes were consistent throughout the whole movie, but we tried out a lot of different sizes before we settled on this size. There wasn't anything scientific over that choice, we had to try out a lot of different versions of them until we found the one that felt right, like it had the right emotional quality. We definitely talked about whether maybe we would need to do some CG on the eyes, like DEADPOOL, where you'd see them change shape or you'd get these expressions. But it turns out that just the two circular holes were all it needed. The emotion came through loud and clear without any dynamic quality of the eyes.
Capone: When you take away all the tools that an actor has to rely on—facial expression, body language, his eyes, even gesturing to a certain degree—what were the directions you were giving Casey?
DL: Very mechanical.
Capone: You mean like “Move slower, move faster”?
DL: It was literally that. We didn't roll sound for a lot of this movie because a great portion of the movie I was just directing him while we were shooting. He can't really see very well in that mask. He can't hear almost at all because of this weird helmet underneath the sheet that gives the head its shape. I would just be shouting, "Turn your head very, very slowly to the left. Now hold, hold, hold. Now look back in the opposite direction very, very slowly." I would try to speak at the pace at which he needed to move to try to convey the mood of the scene. But it was 100 percent a mechanical process, and there wasn't anything emotional going on. But we needed to do that to achieve the emotional effect that the ghost has on film. And our initial attempts to just have him act under the sheet didn't work. It just felt like a human being wearing a sheet, and we needed the sheet to feel like a ghost, even though it was also a sheet. It took us a while to figure out the best approach was a purely mechanical one.
Capone: I love that the scariest scenes in the film are before the ghost even shows up. They're all in the beginning and you’re using noises. Did you want to play up the scarier elements of some of those early scenes?
DL: Definitely. I really wanted to use the language of horror films because I love horror films. I love haunted house movies. I go see all of them. I appreciate the language that has been developed over however many decades of horror films and I wanted to employ that language, so audiences know when you see a certain image or when a shot works a certain way, they know to expect something scary, and that sense of dread is a wonderful tool to have at your disposal as a filmmaker. I definitely set out to make the beginning of the film feel somewhat like a horror film.
Then I wanted to continue to use that language throughout. There are little bits here and there. There’s a built-in jump scare at the end of the movie that's not actually anything scary, but it is designed and shot and the sound design works in such a way that, if someone is familiar with the language of horror films, they'll totally see this jump scare coming. But a lot of people at that point have forgotten that the movie is using that type of technique, and so it still works. Even though this isn't a horror film per se, I wanted it to function in the tradition of horror films and to lean on that pre-established grammar that so many great filmmakers have established.
Capone: What has been the reaction from the faith-based community, the more spiritually oriented audience?
DL: It's been very strong in fact, and I really love that. I grew up in a very religious household and I am no longer religious, but that was a big part of my life, and the types of movies that get made for faith-based audiences, I frankly find somewhat insulting. You know what I mean?
Capone: I just find them bad.
DL: [laughs] And that too. I know that there are people who take their faiths very, very seriously who would love to see a movie that engages with their faith and is provocative. This movie obviously does not address religion in any way, nor does it address any specific ideas behind one faith or another, yet at the same time, the ideas in this movie are so central to so many faiths that it provokes wonderful questions and wonderful forms of discussion, and that is I think really exciting.
I've done screenings of this movie now that have been sponsored by Christian organizations, but also Buddhist organizations. It's been all across the board. The response has been really wonderful, and I really am glad that it's functioning on that level. Because again, even though I'm not a religious person, I want this movie to appeal to people who are asking those questions or who have an idea of their own personal faith or their own personal beliefs, but who engage with that faith on a very intellectual level. That's a beautiful thing.
Capone: If there is a thread that connects your most recent films, I can always count on them to be built of pure emotion. They can be very joyous; they can be very sad; and oftentimes they are both. Is that something you want to carry on doing? Did you do that in the film you just made with Redford? Can you do that with PETER PAN?
DL: I can't not do it. I'm going to be looking for it. Whether or not I pull it off is another question, but it's funny because I approach every movie on a very intellectual level and I really think about them a lot. With this movie when I wrote the script, it was not an emotional experience. It was a very heady experience, but once I start making the movie I stop using my head as much and I really start feeling my way through things and I'm a very emotional person. I'm a very sentimental person, and that heart just naturally comes out. Once I take things off the page and start executing them on set with the actors, with the camera, it becomes a purely emotional experience for me. As a result, the films are very emotional. Definitely for me and I'm glad that they're emotional for audiences as well. I can't not try to do that. Luckily so far, I've pretty much been able to succeed at making emotional movies that also I think are pretty good
This one I just finished is a really interesting thing because it's my first attempt at trying to make something light hearted and somewhat fun. PETE’S DRAGON, in spite of being a children's film, is a pretty sad children's film, and so with this movie THE OLD MAN AND THE GUN that we just finished shooting, I just wanted to have fun and smile a lot, and that's not in my wheelhouse [laughs]. I was definitely stepping outside of my comfort zone and I don't know what the results will be but I'm editing it right now, and it's very interesting to just be working on something that is meant to be fun. We'll see what happens. But at the same time, my version of fun might still be pretty sad [laughs]. We'll see what happens. I don't think that movie will make anyone cry unless they are just so in love with Redford that they cry when they see him because he does have that effect on people.
Capone: Is it still supposed to be his last movie?
DL: He says it is.
Capone: That might make them cry.
DL: Yeah, exactly. He also has said that he's retired from directing, but now he's about to direct another movie. I think he follows his own whims. But if it is his last movie, hopefully we sent him off well.
Capone: So what is your emotional in with PETER PAN? Have you figured that out yet?
DL: At my core, I am a very emotional, 12-year-old girl who doesn't want to grow up. I remember on PETE’S DRAGON telling my producer, "Get ready. I'm going to throw a fit because, at various times of the shoot, on an emotional level I'm just a teenage girl through and through." I think no one wants to grow up. That's a pretty universal feeling and that's always been a defining factor in my life is the fear of becoming an adult. Even now as an adult, my wife and I are about to buy a house for the first time, and that is terrifying to me because it feels so grown up, and I just don't feel ready for it. That's where I'm coming from with that.
It's hard, though, because there's been a lot of PETER PAN movies. The 2003 version is for my money a perfect PETER PAN movie, and so I of course would want to make a perfect PETER PAN movie, so I have so ask myself, "Is there room in the world for two perfect PETER PAN movies?" Yeah, sure, there totally is, but I've got to make sure my version of it is perfect in the right way. While talking about this movie, traveling around the country, I'm holding up in the hotel rooms at night and trying to answer those questions for myself.
