“Mother Mary” is a psychological drama-thriller film written and directed by David Lowery. It stars Anne Hathaway as the iconic pop star, Mother Mary, who reunites with her estranged best friend and former costume designer (played by Michaela Coel) on the eve of her comeback performance as long-buried wounds between the two rise to the surface and a more sinister presence emerges. The film also stars Hunter Schafer, FKA Twigs, Atheena Frizzell, Kaia Gerber, Jessica Brown Findlay, Isaura Barbé-Brown, Sian Clifford, and Alba Baptista. Lowery was kind enough to spend some time speaking with me, while promoting the film in between screenings, about his work and experience making the film, which you can read or listen to below. Please be sure to check out the film, now playing in limited release from A24 and expanding nationwide on April 24th. Thank you, and enjoy!
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*The following interview has been slightly edited for clarity purposes*
Hello everyone, and welcome to the Next Best Picture Podcast. I’m being joined right now by the filmmaker, the creative mind, the genius himself, David Lowery, talking about “Mother Mary.” David, thank you so much for your time here. I really appreciate it, man.
My pleasure. Thank you for the kind words.
Well, I mean, you’ve done so much for all of us cinephiles out there. You’ve given us so many movies that we all deeply cherish, love, and adore. “Mother Mary” is yet another one that has so far, from what I’ve seen, brought about great conversation, challenged us, and has, I think, inspired many young and upcoming filmmakers to think of cinema differently and how you tell a story. I’m curious, when you have a project like this that originated purely from you, it’s not based on any preexisting IP or anything—what was the impulse for the idea? Where did the idea to tell the story initially come from for you?
Maybe because I’d been spending too much time dealing with IP, I think I was definitely thinking about that. I was on the verge of making my second film for Disney, and the idea was a movie that was very personal to me, and it remains one of the great movie-making experiences in my life. But the idea of recognizing that I was spending so much time working with IP and not developing the muscles of telling stories that were intrinsically my own—I just felt for a moment there, just for one moment, I lost track of who I was. And in that moment of doubt, the idea for this movie was born. To lay bare the origin story of the film, it was me trying to figure out how to define myself within a world in which I was making movies using preexisting IP. I wasn’t planning to use the word IP in this interview, but it’s very true. I was trying to figure out how to make personal movies in a world where a lot of the opportunities to make things at the scale I wanted required me to engage with properties that could be described that way. And that was something—while making “The Green Knight” and anticipating making “Peter Pan and Wendy“—I was trying to thread that needle, and part of that process eventually manifested as the screenplay.
You mentioned that this is a personal story. Last I checked, you’re not a pop star on a grand stage, but you know what it’s like to be in the spotlight. You know what it’s like to be scrutinized by people, to have your art put out into the world—and once it’s given over to us, it’s no longer yours, what that can that do to you. At the same time, it’s part of the marketing for the film—this is all told through female characters, not a single line in the movie spoken by a male character. Was that a conscious decision on your part or something that just so happened while you were writing?
Well, Sam and Mother Mary were always female characters, and there was no agenda behind that. It was just that way. Those chromosomes felt right for this story. And there aren’t that many characters in the movie. There are very few, and at one point, there were more. There was a doctor character, and whatever it says about my perceptions of gender, the doctor was going to be a man. That was originally there, but all of those characters fell away. Again, there was no agenda behind it. The movie ultimately reduced itself to what it needed to be. And the characters that are in this movie were women. And I love that. I loved spending time with these actors and seeing how they illuminated something I wrote. I’ve certainly written this movie from a very personal place, but the experiences that I have and that they have are very different. They move through the world in a different way than I do, just surely because I’m a dude and they’re women, and they were able to illuminate and enrich this text in a way that I never could have. That was an incredible experience for me—an incredible gift they gave me: they were going to take my words, transmute them through their own experiences, and make it personal to them.
Yeah. And I think both Anne Hathaway and Michaela Coel do a phenomenal job not just of bringing the text to life, but of really embodying these characters and their unique personalities in a way that makes them identifiable and human. Whether you want to view it as maybe there was once a romantic aspect to their relationship, maybe not—maybe it’s purely just friendship. I’ve heard different readings from different people. Do you appreciate that there are different readings of their relationship, or did you have a concrete idea of what it was.
No, I love any movie that invites interrogation and different perspectives. That’s really exciting to me. But also, the important thing to acknowledge is that had it been important to define their relationship, we would have. That doesn’t mean it’s not valuable to discuss it, to wonder what their relationship was, or to try to define it for ourselves as audience members. But for myself, for Anne, and for Michaela, we all understood that the important thing was where they’re headed. And where they’ve come from could be left unsaid. We talked about it amongst ourselves just so that we would have a common place, a jumping-off point, but that wasn’t necessary for the text of the movie. The relationship we were focused on is ultimately a creative collaboration. And a creative relationship is as intimate as any marriage. It’s as passionate as any great love story, and it is as fraught and as tense as any antagonistic relationship could possibly be. All of those are true of creative relationships, and much like in a romantic relationship, they can yield a third party. There is a child born of their relationship, and that is the artwork that they’re creating together. And the movie ultimately needed to be about that.
Yeah. It’s really interesting too, because you did “A Ghost Story,” which is one of my favorite films of all time. This has been marketed as “a different kind of ghost story.” I’m curious: when you’re telling a story like this, was there a conscious sense of revisiting ghosts? Were there any notes from A24 like, “Hey David, you’re doing another ghost story again, you realize this, right?”
No. If anything, it was like, “Can you put more ghosts in the movie?” and have them show up sooner.
Haha
I really appreciate it when artists revisit specific wells over and over again because you can tell that they’re working through something. And for me, on a very surface level, I love ghost stories. I love haunted houses. I love the horror genre, and I suspect this will not be my last movie that uses ghosts. Both as a literal presence in the movie, but also as a metaphor for whatever the movie is actually about. Because they’re an incredible and evergreen metaphor to draw from, while also being incredibly cinematic.
So, as we get to the end here, one question we always like to ask our guests is: What do you have coming up next? You’re always working. Is there something you’re working on that you’re allowed to tell us about?
It’s true, I’m always working. I’m a very impatient filmmaker, so I am always writing scripts. I always think I know what I’m making next, and then something like “Mother Mary” will come along and surprise me. I hope there are no surprises for me in the future, but if there are, I welcome them. The one thing I can say is that this movie took an incredibly long period of time to make, and I really hope that the next one will happen in a much more expeditious fashion—and then the one after that as well. So hopefully we have an opportunity to talk again in the very near future.
Yeah, I hope so. And the final question before we go: what is the next film on your watch list? It can be for work, pleasure, or both.
Well, I feel very lucky. My movie “Mother Mary” exists between “The Christophers” and “The Devil Wears Prada 2.” I haven’t had a chance to see either of them yet, and I think next week I will do a double feature of the two.
I love that. Well, David, thank you so much once again for your time here. I really do appreciate it, and I hope that more people seek out “Mother Mary” for the conversation, the artistry, and those banger songs, too.
It’s my pleasure. Thanks so much.
“Mother Mary” is now playing in select theaters from A24 and will expand nationwide on April 24th
You can follow Matt and hear more of his thoughts on the Oscars and Film on X @NextBestPicture
