David Lowery Turned a Creative Crisis and Late-Night Doubt Into ‘Mother Mary,’ His Most Complex Movie Yet

David Lowery was pulling double duty. While in Ireland prepping his then-upcoming Disney film “Peter Pan & Wendy,” he still had to finish his wildly ambitious A24 film “The Green Knight.” He was location-scouting during the day, returning to his old (and, according to Lowery, very possibly haunted) Dublin hotel to edit at night.

“I just had one of those moments, this happens on every movie where you ask yourself, ‘What am I doing creatively?’” said Lowery, while a guest on this week’s episode of the Filmmaker Toolkit Podcast. “You’re like, ‘This is an insane thing to be doing right now, what have I gotten myself into? What am I about to get myself into? Have I made the right choices, not only in my career, but in life?’ Those moments come and go, they ebb and flow, and they pass, but this one lingered just long enough, on a sleepless night, that I started to write a script about it.”

Initially, the conversation between pop star Mother Mary (Anne Hathaway) and her former best friend and fashion designer Sam Anselm (Michaela Coel) was an extension of Lowery’s conversation with himself at the time. Lowery could relate to the sleepless Mary when she shows up on Sam’s doorstep, desperate to shed the cumulative weight of her pop-star persona’s evolution — and the complexity of who she has become as an artist.

“Mother Mary is a character wanting to get back to her roots, and to do that, she goes and finds the person that she began her career with,” said Lowery.

That same motivation drove Lowery to start writing “Mother Mary,” except, as he explained, it wasn’t a former friend or collaborator he reached for. “I think back to my favorite film of mine that I’ve made, ‘Pioneer,’ a short film that we made in two days, and it was the happiest — it’s not the happiest I’ve ever been making a movie, but it was the first, and maybe only movie where everything was exactly what I wanted it to be.”

The thousands of logistics involved with productions like “The Green Knight” and “Peter Pan” mean Lowery must constantly adjust — due to loss of a location, weather, technical considerations, etc. But as he explained, “With ‘Pioneer’ everything was in a bedroom with two actors, so it turned out exactly the way I wanted it.”

Lowery longed to return to this mode of filmmaking, which he was reminded of on a “Green Knight” day where he was only shooting one or two actors in a room. “It was just so much fun, and I thought, ‘Why limit it to one or two days? Let’s make the entire movie [like] this.”

Lowery laughed, thinking back on the initial motivation behind “Mother Mary” — arguably his most logistically complex film — to return to the “Pioneer”-like simplicity of two actors in one room.

“There was the original conception and then very quickly the idea of getting to treat myself to the luxury of creating a pop star, and putting on a pop show, that seemed like fun. So instantly my maximalist tendencies started to creep in,” Lowery said.

On the podcast, Lowery reflected that his conversations about writing Mother Mary’s songs with Charli XCX and Jack Antonoff started four years ago, and only last month were they still re-recording and re-mixing those tracks. That extended process was partially driven by star Hathaway’s perfectionism; she spent years in hands-on collaboration with the “Mother Mary” team to create the movement, stagework, singing, persona, costumes, and songs that culminated in a fully fleshed-out fictional pop icon.

‘Mother Mary’Frederic Batier

Yet creating the film’s centerpiece musical performance was just one of those added layers. “Mother Mary” required a shoot split into two halves to allow the necessary time to prep, rehearse, and build the concert scenes.

“I got to a scene in the screenplay that’s in the movie where I could have just stopped the movie,” said Lowery. “This happened on ‘A Ghost Story’ too, where I was like, ‘I think we’re at the end now, but I don’t feel the movie’s over, where do we go from here?’”

As Lowery explained, “Mother Mary” was not the first time the filmmaker set out to make something as simple as “Pioneer,” before his “maximalist tendencies” kicked in. When he dug deeper into “A Ghost Story,” that two-actor, one-room concept culminated with time and space falling away, as Lowery’s Ghost (Casey Affleck) traverses a completely different cinematic landscape in the third act. With “Mother Mary,” when Lowery dug deeper, the connection between the two main characters takes on a supernatural form — an unexplained, red fabric ghost that, when it appears, radically alters the film’s form and visual language.

“I could talk all day about phenomenology and the idea that both characters say at a certain point, ‘I know what I saw wasn’t real, but I also know that I saw it,'” said Lowery. “I like the idea of taking the [intense] energy between two people and rendering it tangible. And for me, that naturally just took the form of a ghost.”

As the supernatural takes hold, the film’s central location, Sam’s barn/work studio, transforms from the container of their conversations into their portal across time, space, and different dimensions of their creative energy and connection. This is not the two-actor, one-room concept of “Pioneer.” Lowery expects his aim for simplicity to fail again on the next project.

Lowery said, joking, “The movie that I’m making next, I think, is also ridiculously simple. It’s so small, and I’m like, ‘Wait a second, what am I not looking at right now? Have I accidentally turned the character into a pop star without realizing it?’”

“Mother Mary” opens today, April 17, 2026

To hear David Lowery’s full interview, subscribe to the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast platform. You can also watch the full interview at the top of this page.