Texan David Lowery talks ‘Mother Mary,’ Anne Hathaway and ghosts

From the outside, David Lowery doesn’t seem like the kind of guy who would care too much for contemporary arena pop.

After all, the 45-year-old director, who divides his time between Dallas and London, grew up in North Texas as a self-styled “pretentious and goth” kid who would go on to become a filmmaker who toggled between crafting off-kilter indie films (“A Ghost Story,” “The Green Knight”) and making family friendly Disney fare (“Peter Pan & Wendy,” the remake of “Pete’s Dragon”).

But, as it turns out, appearances can be deceiving.

“I loved going to see stadium pop concerts. I discovered the joy of standing, getting floor seats for someone like Lorde or Dua Lipa at American Airlines Center in Dallas,” he said in a recent Zoom call from London. “It became a real passion of mine.”

That passion provided the spark for his latest film, the unnerving and visually stunning “Mother Mary” (opening Friday), starring Anne Hathaway as a Lady Gaga or Beyonce-like mega-star who, under the guise of needing a new, show-stopping outfit for an upcoming concert, reconnects with her brilliant but embittered former designer, played Michaela Coel (“I May Destroy You”). The resulting emotional volcano teeters on the fine line between psychological thriller and unsettling horror, and it’s all set to a chart-ready soundtrack by FKA Twigs (who also co-stars), Charli xcx and Jack Antonoff.

“I wanted to make a movie that synthesized the way that pop music made me feel, and the way in which a really great pop song can be about something devastating and yet still make 100,000 people want to dance in unison,” Lowery explained.

He didn’t have Hathaway in mind when writing the screenplay but he knew he wanted the character to be someone who had reached some level of maturity.

“I wanted Mother Mary to be a character who had been in the public eye for some time. And that was partially because I was writing this
movie on the verge of turning 40…I could see the way in which I changed over time and the way in which I’d grown,” he said.

So, when Hathaway’s name came up, he was all for it.

“I knew she could sing because she had sung in films prior to that, but her performance in ‘Les Miz’ is incredible,” he said. “She deserved that Academy Award. And it is, in my mind, one of the great musical performances in cinema.”

But singing was just part of it. She also had to dance.

“I also knew that singing pop music is very different from singing Broadway. And I knew that she had a work ethic just from our first conversation that she would do whatever it took to get to the point where she could be a pop star. And in my mind, that was primarily learning how to sing that
way, but she looked at the script and realized “I also have to learn how to dance’,” he recalled. “She knew that that was going to be the lion’s share, or maybe not the lion’s share, but just as much as not more work than learning how to sing.”

Hathaway spent four months in what Lowery calls a “pop-star bootcamp training upwards of eight hours a day to be able to perform the way she does in the film.” 

As for Charli xcx, Antonoff and FKA Twigs, Lowery didn’t have them in mind either when writing the script. But A24, the studio behind “Mother Mary,” suggested them. “I knew the music that I liked, but I didn’t understand what went into making it. And so (A24) connected me to Jack and Charli…I knew who they were, of course. I was huge fans of both of theirs, but they already had connections at A24, and they introduced me to them …And really it opened my eyes…I knew that writing a pop song couldn’t be easy, like a great one. But watching the way in which these songs evolved and watching Jack and Charli work, it was incredibly eye-opening just how good you have to be to craft something that will break through in the way that their music does.”

“Mother Mary” is a ghost story of sorts and, as such, it recalls Lowery’s 2017 film “A Ghost Story.” Lowery admits that ghosts, and the act of haunting, are something that have always appealed to him. (IMDB.com even lists an upcoming TV project of his called “City of Ghosts” though he says that is not now happening.)

“Ghosts are my favorite thing because they can be, at a very basic level, they can just be something that is really frightening, but they also function on a level that is a metaphorical level that is evergreen,” he says. “You can pull so much out of the study of hauntology, and it is something that I am sure I will just keep returning to because it’s both a comfort zone, but also something that I can just keep digging into that continues to yield new ideas and new ways of expression, and that’s something that really matters to me.”

Though David Lowery, who has made such Texas-set movies as “The Old Man & the Gun” and “Ain’t Them Bodies Saints,” makes films all over the world these days — “Mother Mary” was shot in Germany while New Zealand played host to “Pete’s Dragon” — he still calls the Dallas area home, at least for part of the year. (His wife, Augustine Frizzell, is also a director. She made the 2018 Texas-set comedy “Never Goin’ Back” about two North Texas teenage girls’ ill-fated plans for a beach getaway to Galveston.)

“We love our house in Dallas and we have family here, so I think we’ll always have roots here,” he says. “And it’s a really nice, especially as I get older, it’s nice to have that sense of home…I’ve been here on and off since I was eight years old. That’s really meaningful.”

But the world is a big place.

“I also have been lucky enough to get to make movies all over the world. And so getting to do that, you get to try out a lot of places…A year filming in New Zealand, we spent a year filming in Canada, and in those years, you get to just experience what it’s like to live in all these different places. So it says something that I keep coming back home to Dallas, but at the same time, there’s so many other places that are starting to feel like home.”