‘Mother Mary’ director David Lowery credits Dallas for the fairy-tale vibe of his films

David Lowery’s filmmaking has taken him all over the world. “The Green Knight” was shot in Ireland, “Pete’s Dragon” was in New Zealand, and his latest, “Mother Mary,” was filmed in Germany.

But he says he takes Texas wherever he goes.

“And I’m sure at some point, maybe in the near future, I’ll have a story that’s specifically Texan to tell again, but it’s always gonna be a part of me no matter what,” Lowery said.

Lowery spent his formative years in North Texas. In fact, he wore a light pink baseball hat with “Dallas” embroidered in white to our interview.

“Yeah, I flew in from Dallas this morning and needed a hat to protect myself from the Texas sunshine, so I just grabbed this one from the airport, but it’s pretty representative of me,” he said.

He’s originally from Wisconsin and says “cold weather is in my veins” — but it’s actually the winters in Dallas that he credits for the “fairy tale” aspect of his films.

“When everything feels a little bit grimmer and darker and grayer and icier,” he said. “The weird combination of the Texas landscape and the winter really kind of calcified in my bones and became part of my personality.”

‘Mother Mary’

Lowery’s newest film has dark, fairy-tale vibes. He credits some of that to a film his aunt and uncle showed him years ago.

“A lot of things that like I wasn’t allowed to see, I wound up seeing at their house and under the auspices of me saying ‘it’s totally fine, we can rent whatever my mom lets me,’” Lowery said.

They rented him “Bram Stoker’s Dracula.”

“Which is one of my all-time favorite movies, huge influence on ‘Mother Mary,’” Lowery said. “And I remember… Just like watching it three times in a row in their house while they were at work and having a great time.”

“Mother Mary” isn’t exactly a horror film. But it also isn’t not one.

“This one’s hard to put in a box. Yeah, it’s several boxes that you kind of nest within each other,” Lowery said.

He says all his films have a spirituality to them.

“Not to say they’re religious, but there’s a sense of something beyond the rational world,” he said.

Though he admits his Catholic upbringing “is rising to the surface in a big way in this one.”

“Mother Mary” is epic and arena-filling and yet a simple story about a relationship — a creative partnership.

“Creativity is one of those things that everyone understands, but no one knows how to talk about,” Lowery said. “This is a movie that is full of dialog. It’s about characters trying to explain things to one another, but the thing that they can’t quite get across is something that can’t be put into words. And that’s where the supernatural elements start to creep in around the edges because they’re trying to describe something that’s indescribable.”

Anne Hathaway and Michaela Coel

“Mother Mary” stars actresses with a lot of up-close screen time. Lowery says he chose them carefully.

“When you cast an actor, you can either run away from who they actually are or you can utilize that,” Lowery said.

For Anne Hathaway, he wanted to lean into her celebrity.

“I was at the airport this morning, walking through the duty-free section and there’s Anne Hathaway in a BVLGARI ad. She’s in a makeup, like she’s got all these brands in duty-free and I’m seeing her all around me,” Lowery said. “And that was something that I wanted audiences to be able to carry into the film with them when they meet Mother Mary. I want them to have a sense of her as a celebrity, as someone who has been in the public eye for decades.”

He said he also needed someone who could “hold their own in a two-hander for two hours.”

The other hand in this film is Michaela Coel.

“One of the most gifted writers, performers, directors… She is just a legend in the 10 years that I’ve been aware of her as an artist. And when I heard that she had read the script and wanted to meet — not even to talk about being it, just to talk the script — I was legitimately starstruck. She is a force of nature, she really is,” Lowery said.

A big screen movie

“We went out of our way to make it feel like a big screen movie,” Lowery said. “Not just with the pop concert sequences, but even in the scenes where the characters are in this one location, speaking at great length to one another, we wanted it to feel cinematic.”

He said he focused a lot on textures.

“We wanted every image to be rich, to be textured, to feel like you could reach out and touch it. The fashion aspect of it plays into that as well. This is a movie about the feel of fabric on skin, about creating a dress that you understand what it must feel like to wear that dress,” Lowery said.

Lowery controlled most aspects of that — as he is credited with not just writing and directing the film, but also producing and editing it.

“It’s not a problem, but it’s definitely something I’m working on. I am a little bit of a control freak,” Lowery said.

He says all of his films are autobiographical to some extent. But this one — about a creative relationship — may be a bit more so than some of his past work.

“It’s certainly drawing on relationships I’ve had, on conversations I’ve had both with others and with myself. And it’s also… It’s my attempt to capture the creative process on film. I really was trying to distill what it’s like to work with someone to make something,” Lowery said.

He says pop music became the perfect metaphor.

“Also, I just really love Taylor Swift and wanted to make a movie that sort of captured the feeling that I get when I listen to ‘Reputation,’” Lowery said.

Back to Dallas

While Austin may have the reputation as Texas’ film hub, Lowery says Dallas has also always been a place for filmmaking in his mind.

“I moved to Dallas when I was seven or eight years old,” he said. “And it was right at the, I would say the apex of Oliver Stone coming to Dallas to make movies… And as I got a little bit older, Wes Anderson was making ‘Bottle Rocket.’ There were movies being made, it was really exciting.”

He says his first time on a set was when he was in high school and he was an extra in Stone’s “Any Given Sunday.”

“And I always loved the idea of staying [in Dallas] and making films there,” Lowery said. “Now, not every movie that I make or that I want to make can be set there, but I loved the ideas of it being a place where films could get made, where you could just, rather than moving to New York or L.A., or even Austin.

I love Austin, no shade on Austin, but I like being somewhere familiar. I like being able to go home at the end of the day and sleep in my own bed and to make movies in the same landscape that inspired me when I was growing up.”

Lowery said he was budgeting a film to shoot in Dallas not long ago and there was no local crew available because of the work being done on Taylor Sheridan projects.

“Which is an incredible. That’s like so nice to have that be a problem for the first time in a long time,” he said.

The best Texas film

Texas Standard recently asked listeners to weigh in on the best Texas film.

Lowery’s top choice was one that was knocked out in early rounds.

“‘’Tender Mercies’ is coming to my mind right away,” Lowery said. “And I’m specifically choosing that one because it’s a North Texas movie. It was Waxahachie. And I love seeing North Texas represented on film because it’s where I grew up.”

He also mentioned one not on our list because it was not set in Texas: “Robocop.”

“But it is intrinsically Texan to me because it was shot in Dallas,” Lowery said. “And it’s currently sort of a hot-button subject because Dallas City Hall is probably about to get torn down, which is not only an architectural landmark, but also one of the key locations of ‘Robocop’ and that’s a great tragedy in my mind because that was where the climactic battle with ED-209 took place.”

Texas Standard’s championship came down to “Giant” and “No Country for Old Men,” with the latter eventually taking the top spot. Lowery agreed — though he said it was a really tough choice.

“I would probably say that ‘No Country For Old Men,’ in its way, is more representative of Texas, although ‘Office Space’ definitely represents parts of Dallas that I know very well. And I’m gonna go with ‘No Country for Old Men,’” Lowery said.

“‘Giant’ is incredible, ‘Giant’ is great. Something about ‘No Country for Old Men’ really captures the here and now of Texas, even though it’s set in the ’80s. So I will throw my ballot in its direction.”

Still, if he had his druthers, he said, “I think Tender Mercies is a quintessential Texas movie.”

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