Throughout his career, David Lowery has been juggling arthouse passion projects (“A Ghost Story,” “Ain’t Them Bodies A Saint,” “The Green Knight”) with high-priced Disney movies (“Pete’s Dragon,” “Pan and Wendy”). His latest film sounds very ambitious and sounds like it belongs with the former.
Lowery and A24’s “Mother Mary” wrapped production in July. It started filming in May 2023! Last month I was told by A24 that production had been broken up throughout these last 14 months due to Lowery’s need to film “specific scenes and venues.”
We’re not really sure what “Mother Mary” is supposed to be about, or how it’s structured, it just sounds really out there, and that’s more than enough to pique our interest. What we do know is that it is said to explore the relationship between a fictional pop star (Anne Hathaway) and her fashion designer (Michaela Coel).
On Saturday, Lowery teased the audience at the Melbourne International Film Festival with some details about “Mother Mary,” and he seems to be baffled by the film. When asked about his eighth feature, Lowery “sighed deeply” and hesitantly described it as “a weird, weird film”. (via IndieWire)
“I wrote the first 20 pages when I was shooting ‘Peter Pan and Wendy’ and it’s been percolating ever since,” Lowery told the crowd in attendance. “I decided I’m just going to do something simple. I need to do a movie with just two actors in a room having a long heart to heart … a really gentle filmmaking experience.”
“But then I thought, ‘What if one of those characters is a pop star? And what if we started at a stadium?Then it got bigger,” he continued with a laugh, “And, it wound up being the hardest thing I’ve ever done.”
These comments parallel what Lowery said during a recent interview on The Last Video Store podcast:
“I’m in the edit right now and I have been wondering, ‘what is this movie?,'” Lowery said. “I know what I set out to make and that is indeed what I’ve made, but it is so wild. It is a movie I am sure will provoke a lot of strong feelings, in every possible direction. It feels very true to who I am, and very close to me, but it is also consistently surprising me in ways that I did not anticipate. What I’ve got on my computer now is probably pretty much what it’s going to be, it will just get cleaned up.”
Anne Hathaway, Michaela Coel, Hunter Schafer, FKA twigs and Alba Baptista star in “Mother Mary” which has been described as a “pop musical” and an “epic melodrama.” The soundtrack was created by Jack Antonoff and Charli XCX. Expect it to hit a festival sometime in 2025.