Writer and director David Lowery’s
“A Ghost Story” is bound to be one of the more divisive films to be released
this year. It tells the melancholy tale of life and death, as experienced by a married
couple played by Casey Affleck and Rooney Mara. When Affleck’s character
unexpectedly passes away, he returns in the form of a ghost (complete with
white bedsheet and holes cut out for eyes) to silently observe his wife as she
grieves and attempts to move on.
Where the story goes from there is best left for the audience
to discover, but suffice it to say, things get existential. The film becomes a
sort of cinematic Rorschach test, with some seeing a profoundly moving
exploration of love, the afterlife, and the enormity of time itself. Others
will just see Casey Affleck standing around in a bed sheet for 90 minutes,
watching Rooney Mara look sad and eat a pie.
Those willing to open themselves up to the experience,
though, will find some of the most audacious filmmaking — and one of best
movies — to reach theaters this year. CITY spoke with David Lowery by phone for
a conversation that touched on how he went about bringing such an unusual story
to the screen, finding ways to straddle the line between independent features
and big-budget studio filmmaking, and what it takes to create a killer ghost
costume. An edited transcript of our chat is below.
CITY: “A Ghost Story” is such a different take on the
haunted house story. I’d read that the idea originated from an argument you had
with your wife. Can you elaborate on that?
David Lowery: I’ve lived in Texas most of my life. I
feel like it’s my home, and part of my identity. But at a certain point a couple
years ago it made sense to move to Los Angeles, and I really
didn’t want to go. It was an upsetting move to me, like I was leaving part of
myself behind. In particular I’d attached myself to the house we were living
in, and did not want to move out of that house. And once we did decide to move
out of it, I didn’t want to let anyone else move into it. I wanted it to be a
house we could return to in the future, because I felt so comfortable there. I
felt at home there.
That inclination I have to lay down roots and plant myself in
the homes that I’ve lived in is a longstanding tradition that I have. I
naturally make homes wherever I go and that one in particular felt like I
belonged there, and I didn’t want to leave it behind. So when I did leave and move
to LA with my wife, that led to — you know, it wasn’t like it led to a
gigantic, marriage-ending argument, but at a certain point I floated the idea
that we might move back to Texas. And my wife at that point was very happy in
LA, she liked it and she didn’t want to leave. So we got into an argument, and
that argument felt big for us because we never fight. I remember thinking it felt
like the scene from a movie. And more so than that, I recognized in that
argument some inherent flaws in my way of thinking, and my way of living. The
things that mattered to me — the values I had. I wanted to rectify those flaws
and also understand them more thoroughly. So part of the reason I made this
movie was to dig into those issues in my life and kind of come to terms with
them.
The film reunites your “Ain’t Them Bodies Saints” stars, Casey Affleck and
Rooney Mara. Did you deliberately cast actors you already had a working
relationship with? Were you writing with those two in mind specifically?
I did not write the movie with them in mind, but as soon as
the script was done and as soon as I decided that it was a movie I was going to
make, I reached out to both of them. Partially because we’re friends and it was
easy to just call them up personally and ask them if they’d be interested, but
also because they have amazing chemistry together. They really have a sense of
ease with one another that suggests a longstanding relationship.
Because the characters in this film get to spend very little
time together before one of them passes away, I wanted to make sure we were
able to get the most out of that time, and get a sense, very quickly and
efficiently that these are two people who love each other and care about each
other, and have a history with one another. Casey and Rooney were able to do
that. I knew they’d be able to do that from having worked with them before, so
it was a natural fit to reach out to them and see if they’d be interested.
The central image of Affleck walking around in a sheet is
incredibly striking, but I have to imagine seeing that on set was a different
experience entirely. At what point were you like,
“OK, I think this will actually work”?
It took a couple weeks of shooting. [Laughs] Or I guess a week
— 10 days or so. Our shoot was only 19 days initially. And by day 11 or 12 I
think we finally figured out how to make the ghost work. Preceding that moment
of realization, there were plenty of stressful mornings where it just felt like
the bed sheet was gonna be a disaster. And there was
a lot of, you know, hemming and hawing and a great amount of trial-and-error in
achieving the simplicity that we were really after.
What was the design process like for creating the ghost
costume?
My costume designer, Annell Brodeur, began by putting a bed sheet over someone’s head
and cutting holes in the eyes, and realizing that would never in a million
years work. [Laughs] You know, it’ll work for a 5-year-old on Halloween, but it
does not work for a movie.
So she created this costume that looks incredibly simple and
looks just like a bed sheet, but is in fact incredibly complex and has a lot of
moving parts under that exterior fabric. And that fabric in and of itself isn’t
a bed sheet at all but a custom-built piece of cloth that is a very specific
size and shape and weight. She dyed it a specific shade of white, and the
thread count really mattered because it had to drape in a very specific fashion
to get those wonderful folds that sort of define the character’s face. So all
of those things went into the design of the costume and there’s a whole lot of
pieces that went underneath the sheet.
But the real work then rested on Casey’s shoulders, and all
of our shoulders collectively, of having this costume that in a sense worked. We
had to figure out how to make that presence function on screen, in front of the
camera, with a person inside it. And that had its own set of challenges.
How was it directing an actor without any of the basic
tools an actor typically has to work with — you can’t see his eyes, his body is
covered. I have to imagine that made things challenging.
The only difficult thing was realizing how un-difficult it
needed to be. Once I realized it needed to be a very simple process, it was
easy. But initially, I approached it as if I were directing Casey without a
sheet. We talked about letting his instincts and body language define the
character in a very prominent way, but that just wasn’t working. When we looked
at that footage, it just didn’t quite work — it felt like an actor wearing a
bed sheet.
The solution turned out to be having him do very little. He
had to stand either very, very still or turn his head very slowly. Whatever he
had to do in a scene, we just had to remove the personality from it, remove the
instinct; to remove the “performance” from the actual performance. And that
became a series of mechanical movements that I could just literally call out on
set, where I could just tell him as we were rolling what I wanted him to do.
That’s when the ghost began to take on the qualities that we wanted. It just
required being very simple and direct, as opposed to getting all hung up on the
performance and the emotion, and all the normal things you’d work with if you
were directing an actor who had all those tools at their disposal.
You’ve worked previously with musician and composer Daniel
Hart. What conversations did you have about the sound of the film, since it
juggles between several tones and includes a song that plays a pretty
significant role?
One of the wonderful things about working with someone multiple
times is that over the course of your collaborations, you don’t need to have
conversations as much. So we actually had very few conversations about the
score for this film beyond some initial jumping-off points that I gave him. I’d
suggested that we move away from the folk-tinged soundtracks that we’ve
collaborated on in the past, and try something a little different. I suggested
the John Carpenter scores from the 80’s as a point of reference.
And of course there was that song he had written, which pre-existed.
That was a song he had written right as I was writing the script, and he played
it for me, and I loved it so much I wrote it into the script. That was a good
jumping-off as well. But I’m at a point now in my relationship with Daniel
where we don’t have to talk that much. He comes to the set, he looks at the
footage. I usually do an entire cut of the movie without any music at all, so I
can just make sure the movie’s working, and I give that cut to him and he goes
to town. Nine times out of 10 what he gives me is gonna
to be exactly what the movie needs.
One of the ideas the film explores is what we leave behind
when we’re gone. There’s a monologue at the center of the film about the legacy
of art on humanity. As a filmmaker, how much of those ideas do you apply to
your own work?
I definitely think about it a lot. And I’m also aware that I
shouldn’t think about it that much because it’s a perhaps unfair standard to
hold one’s own work to. But at the same time, you do want your movies to
matter. Or if you’re writing a book, you want those books to matter. If you’re
a musician you want your songs to mean something to somebody.
It helps for me to think about things not in terms of the
legacy I’m leaving behind, but the connection I’m building with the people who
engage with what I’m making. And that’s a legacy in its own right. It’s an
important one, but it’s helpful for me to break outside of the box of my own
ego. I don’t want to think about my body of work as an extension of my ego — even
though it sort of is — but I want to think about the way in which it’s able to
be appreciated by others. Because that’s the true test of time. That’s the
truest standard to which I can hold myself.
Hopefully people do engage with my work, and hopefully they
do like it and push it forward. But I can’t get too caught up thinking about
whether or not my movies will exist after I’m gone. Or whether the stories I’m
telling are gonna matter to anyone this time next
year. I just need to try to make something that will mean something to people
in the moment they watch them. And if they do, that’s its own form of
permanence.
You started work on this immediately after “Pete’s Dragon.”
Did you deliberately set out to make something on a smaller scale after
spending so much time with something that large?
It wasn’t deliberate that I made something small. I guess the
thing that was deliberate was I just wanted to make another movie. And to make
another movie quickly, that movie by design has to be small. I’d spent three
years at that point working on “Pete’s Dragon,” and that movie needed every one
of those three years — needed every day that we had to work on it. And needed
more time than we had to work on it. [Laughs] We had to stop at a certain
point, because that’s the type of movie it was. But after having spent all that
time making the movie, I was really excited to make something new and I wanted
to get something going quickly. And by default, if you’re going to do something
quickly, it can’t be huge. So the scale was sort of imposed on me by my own
desire to execute the film quickly.
“Pete’s Dragon” is obviously a big budget film, but it
maintained your specific sensibilities as a filmmaker. How did you make sure
that it ended up still feeling like a David Lowery film?
I just was very clear with the studio every step of the way
what my intentions were. It started off as a screenplay that I wasn’t gonna direct. It was just a screenplay I was hired to
write, but over the course of writing that screenplay it became very personal
to me — as any writing project does if you see it through to completion. And
the studio really liked what I was writing, so it was easy for me to make it
personal because they were responding very favorably.
When the time came to hire a director, and they asked me if I
wanted to do it, I realized that yes, I do want to make this film, but I want
to make sure that it’s still the personal story that I wrote. I wanted to make
sure that it didn’t change as we brought it to the screen. And so to ensure it
would maintain that integrity, I just was very clear with every single decision
I was making throughout the entire process, so that the studio would never be surprised
by anything they saw.
I give a great amount of credit to my producer, Jim Whitaker,
who helped facilitate that. He was very clear to me early on that the best way
to succeed is to just be transparent, so if at any point the studio had seen
something they didn’t like or were worried about my approach, they would have
let me know with enough time for me to either agree to disagree or for us to
part ways harmoniously. But luckily they liked everything I was doing, and
every step of the way they were engaged and they appreciated my intent, and
they wanted to make the movie I wanted to make. The important thing was I was
clear about that from day one, and never once tried to pull one over on them or
get something by them. It was a collaboration every step of the way, and that’s
why I was able to make the movie I wanted to make.
In addition to writing and directing your own films,
you’ve also taken on various roles for other filmmakers — either as producer,
or editor for “Upstream Color” and “Ciao,” as a writer on “Pit Stop.” How has
that influenced your process? Is that something you’re trying to continue?
I would like to do more of that in the future. I think being
a producer is easier than being an editor because I can sort of produce from
afar. Rather than be the “on the set, on the ground, in the weeds” producer, I
can take a step back and be one of those producers who just is there as the
filmmaker might need me. And I love doing that. I love being able to help my
friends and other filmmakers I admire get their stories out in the world. But
because I’ve always wanted to be a director — that’s been my goal all along — while
I have the opportunity to do so, I’m gonna keep
focusing on that.
But that’s not to diminish the immense amount that I’ve
learned working with other filmmakers when I was in the weeds with them, either
on set or in the edit suite. I’ve gained so much from the filmmakers I’ve
collaborated with, and just seeing stories through their eyes helped broaden my
own perspectives. As an editor, you get to see all of the mistakes that a
director has made and you learn from those — although they don’t prevent you
from making all the same mistakes yourself. But more valuable than that are the
perspectives that you gain. You get to really put your own instincts aside, and
subject yourself to someone else’s point of view. And that’s a really enriching,
healthy, and valuable thing for any artist to do. It has contributed enormously
to my own perspectives and helped me define what I want to do as a filmmaker
when I’m behind the camera.
You started on “A Ghost Story” immediately after finishing
up “Pete’s Dragon,” and I believe you’re already in the process of editing your
next film [“The Old Man and the Gun,” with Robert Redford]. Is that pretty
typical of how you work: immediately jumping from one project into the next?
It wasn’t intentional. It just kept working out that way. You
know, after “Pete’s
Dragon” was done, I could have taken a two-month vacation. But I looked at
those two months and thought, “Oh, I can make a movie in that time period.” [Laughs]
So now we have “A Ghost Story.” And right now I’m helping “A Ghost Story” get
out into the world, and I’m editing “Old Man and the Gun,” and I don’t have
anything immediately in my future to direct. That is both sort of nice, because
it allows me to focus on just one thing right now — or two things, as it were.
But also I’m starting to feel a little anxious. I feel like I need to get
another movie up and going.
I feel like I’m in a luxurious position where I’m able to
make movies for a living, and I don’t take that lightly. As long as I’m able to
do that, I want to take advantage of it and keep making those films. Hopefully
I’m able to continue doing so, and hopefully people will keep seeing them and
allowing me to make them. But at some point maybe I’ll try to take a vacation
instead of trying to make a movie in the period in which I have to take a
vacation. [Laughs] That would probably make my wife very happy.
This article appears in Jul 19-25, 2017.
