Hi, I'm David Lowery and. I'm Anne Hathaway.
And this is the A 24 podcast and I've been doing a lot of
podcasts lately and and wondering what it's like to be
in the moderator's seat. And I realize now that I don't
like it. Is it?
Does it feel different than being a director?
I feel I can get away with just you.
You've experienced this onset when I just unleash a slew of
words that don't necessarily make sense but hopefully convey
the emotion of what I'm trying to ask for.
And I feel like I can't get away with that behind the microphone
right now. Well, one of the things that
I've experienced when I'm, I'm, I find that I'm in like my
favorite kind of deep, deep collaboration with the director
is we, we kind of get to a place where you don't have to say
anything. You just, I can feel when I'm
acting how they feel about a take.
And then they'll come out from behind the monitor and just kind
of give me a look and I like raise my hand or, or they'll
come over and, you know, put their head against my head and I
feel like I'm downloaded. And anyway, all this is to say
that doesn't work in a podcast. It doesn't work.
In a podcast. You and I just touch heads for
a. Half an hour.
And everyone's like, well. Yeah, it sounds like an
experience. I but I felt that I felt that
that was kind of our our thing on this one.
I felt like you and Michaela connected over the power of the
words you both being writers and I felt that you know, given and
we've talked about this given that Mother Mary is an
emotionally inarticulate person. I actually found that it really
Hanford my ability to communicate while I was her and
I felt like it kind of mother Mary is an expression of the
part of you that sometimes finds it find it difficult to find
your words. So between the two of us, we had
no choice but to trust the wavelength completely.
I require those wavelengths to help me through life.
I wish I could speak the way Sam does.
And in writing that part, and then witnessing the way Michaela
played it, I was living a fantasy life in which I could
say exactly the right thing and exactly the right moment.
But you can write the things. I can write it and if I was able
to type this podcast out, it would be far more eloquent.
I would have a lot of fun typing a podcast out with you.
It would be a different format. Wouldn't that be neat to just
sit here and just type and with the text could play out and
again, we'd be channelling an interesting wavelength That
would be, you know, what is interesting is I have been going
back through old drafts of the script.
I was looking for the very first one from 2019.
I found when I started writing during COVID and for some reason
in this version, it was because I was going to the Faroe Islands
for a different project. But I was like, what if Sam's
house is in the Faroe Islands? I was very inspired by that
landscape, but I don't know if it was because we were all
wearing masks or it must have been.
But I decided that in this iteration of the screenplay,
Sam's house had a vow of silence and no one was allowed to speak.
And she had custom index cards or custom stationery.
And no, the only communication was through the written word.
And so it was all the same dialogue, but it had to flow
differently because it was all, you know, taking the time to
write it. The film also would have been 19
hours. Oh, that's why I stopped that
version. That version, that version made
it all the way up to the dance scene.
I. Do love that version in my head
in my head and I think I would like to see it in a museum.
It's 100% was a museum piece. See, and, and actually, I have
to say that just reminded me of something that I just treasure
about you. And it came up earlier in a
different conversation I was having with somebody else about
one of the reasons why you're so much fun to work with is that
you are so inspired by your surroundings and you have a
certain type of joy in inspiration.
Whereas, you know, in other experiences that I've been in,
people aren't really allowed to make suggestions on this one.
You were just down to play, you know, and I, I was, somebody was
talking about like they had an idea for a practical shot where
they didn't want to walk. And then 5 minutes later there
was a, there's an apple box with wheels on it.
And you just leaned into it. And then I told the story about
how we were, you know, trying. We had this like elaborate rig
for the red fabric and it just wasn't quite working.
And we thought we were going to have to, you know, use a
computer and we worked out that there would be a ring attached
to an under a, a hidden undergarment and that we would
thread it it through and it wound up working it.
Worked perfectly. It was.
There were so many. And you but you went you went
with it. I just remember you had just
such a like, I'll give it a go, yes.
And let's see where this leads us.
And you weren't, you know, bowed by the pressure of like the
shooting schedule. You were just so driven by this
beautiful honoring of the creative impulse.
I find you can't do this on every movie, but this was a
movie where I was always thinking any moment that we are
in is the most important moment and we have to see it through to
its fullest. And if someone comes with an
idea bolt of inspiration out of the blue, we need to honor that.
When you think about it from a production side of, you know,
you always pay for something, you know, like it's like, OK, if
we do this now, we're going to have to figure it out tomorrow.
What we, you know, if we're, if we're going to spend 2 days on
the scene, whatever we were supposed to shoot tomorrow is
going to have to change. But that's OK, we'll figure that
out tomorrow. That's a tomorrow problem.
Right now we are exploring together and trying to find this
ephemeral thing that we're after.
And sometimes that is, you know, how did they do things 100 years
ago in silent films? And other times, it's just
trying to find the emotional voice of these moments that we
were after. Really trying to give those
emotions the space they needed to really allow this movie in
particular to manifest the way that it did was really important
to me. I'm actually curious because now
I'm trying to imagine the Pharaoh Islands version and also
I remember I seem to remember A1 draft Sam lived in a trailer and
mother Mary and mother Mary like broken through a window.
It was Sam's house had burned down and she was living while it
was being rebuilt. She was living in a trailer
outside. And yes, Sam and Mother Mary
climbed in through the through the window.
So I was wondering about that because, you know, I've just
spoken about how you're, you're driven by this honoring of the
creative spirit. You've written countless drafts
of this from 2019 onward. Do you ever stop and think I'm
asking too much of the audience? Like does that impact your your
North Star or, or your vision for the movie?
Or do you, is it just you? Is it, you know what?
This isn't quite what I want to say.
It's me, almost always it's me. It's how can I achieve clarity?
How can I find, and I mean it goes to the audience as well,
'cause I'm thinking about how I would how I would receive this
movie if I were sitting in the dark, if I were not the one
writing it, if I were an audience member, how would these
things that I'm conceiving of arrive in my periphery?
How would I take them in? How would I see it?
And as roundabout as I may be in getting the point, I always want
to make sure that I'm clear and lucid and that if someone is
willing to see the answer right in front of them, that it is
available to them. We are never trying to hide the
ball with this film or with any of my films.
We are always trying to express something, maybe succinctly
isn't quite the word, but it's true in spirit In spirit.
That hasn't been my experience of the word but no, no, but to
but I love what you said about clarity keeps coming up and to
and I think to express something undeniable.
Yeah, you know, and that's that's one of the things that
scared me the most Once I kind of charted my course for how I
was going to play this character was I knew I was making a choice
that not everybody would understand.
And that was to play Mother Mary as so broke and she didn't have
any fight left in her. And I thought, I can't I can't
believe I'm I know this is technically wrong, like this is
a wrong film choice to make. Like this is a 2 hander.
I've got to I've got to have more bounce, more fight more
spit, more vinegar, more all these things.
But it felt like such a betrayal of where the characters actually
at. And it was so.
It was so scary to trust that the audience was going to have
to wait over an hour into the movie before they understood
what was really going on with her and that what they have seen
will actually drop to another level and it will be earned.
But it was really hard believing that the audience would grace
her what they needed to grace her.
And I just knew that I would be asking the audience to watch
Mother Mary kind of just get annihilated by Sam for the 1st
45 minutes of the movie. And thank goodness for Michaela
Cole, who made it so entertaining.
It's entertaining. But that, that, that, that is
actually is a pleasure watching a pop star get humiliated like
that. I think I'm a big believer that
in the idea that all of the implicit elements of the movie
are there from frame 1. And so even if the audience
doesn't know the actual events that led to Mother Mary's state,
when we meet her, there is a sense of, well, there's I think
a great deal of empathy for her because because we've seen we've
seen where she came from and we see where she is when she gets
to Sam's house. And in the ellipsis between
those two moments, we are invited to wonder what may have
happened. And I, as an audience member,
naturally approached that with great empathy.
Like, how could this have happened?
And I think that you were so you were so I loved.
I remember watching you walk up the stairs in the barn the first
time and realize like I realized how that was going to play once
we understood why what happened, but also just seeing that by
itself was heartbreaking. Just seeing this person that we
again, I'm projecting on set right now, but like when I'm
there watching that happen, knowing that we'll have 20
minutes earlier seen you on stage an utter rock star.
I naturally gravitate towards, yes, questions, but also a
tremendous amount of just sorrow that she has found herself in
this place. And curiosity comes second.
Curiosity about what that actually was is secondary to the
empathy. I, I think that what I'm
connected to is, is just the, the fear of not making the easy
choice that would have sort of let some of the tension for the
audience and said like this is familiar.
Like, yes, you're watching, you're watching 2 people that
these two women engage in gamesmanship, but that would
have felt like a betrayal of the screenplay to me because you
didn't write a game. Mother Mary's not playing a
game. She's fighting for her life and
she's past the point of, of mounting any kind of defense or
offense. She's just kind of like she's
just so storm tossed, you know, And, and so I guess I guess what
I'm getting at is I had such faith in your artistry and like
your vision and that you were going to bring the whole thing
home that I was able to take that leap.
That felt very scary for me to to not like I said, to not make
the choice that I know would have put a lot of people or
right. I imagine a lot of audience
members at ease. We weren't making like a series
of like little moments. We were making a whole.
Film, yeah, I remember writing the writing the screenplay and
realizing like I could in the film at a certain point and that
would yield a movie that would be very enjoyable in which we
could engage in that ratatatat banter, that the potential is
there for that. But I wanted to push further and
I wanted the movie to dig deeper.
And and as a result, the potential for that is it's
always there, but that's not what the movie is about.
And the great joy of this movie was that we were able, we knew
that we were heading towards something deeper.
And every time that it felt like it might veer in that direction,
we could enjoy it when it did. There's some moments in the
movie where I just am in just utter heaven watching you and
Michaela go back and forth when the rhythm picks up.
But that's not this movie. That's not it's inclusive of
that, but it's going so much further than that.
And it was, I remember the moment very clearly when I was
writing it and just thinking like, I'm writing what could be
the ending of the movie right now.
And it, I don't want to spoil it for people who haven't seen it,
but Michaela sort of turned, I turned that into a monologue
that Michaela gives and, and realizing this is not the
ending. This is the midpoint.
I have a question because I've spoken to you about how I I've
felt transformed by this experience as a person, as a
performer, as a collaborator and an artist.
I'm sure you find yourself transformed by all the films
that you make, and so I'm curious, how precisely has
Mother Mary transformed you? I think I might be able to give
a better answer to that after I've made one more movie and
seen in the ways in which it's manifested.
But it's made me much more considerate, really.
Yeah, I think that. I mean, I've always been.
I've liked to think of myself as an empathetic director.
Yes, you're a Texas gentleman. And and yet I, I think there's a
point. Well, let me think of how to say
this. I've always hidden behind the
camera. I like to be close to my cast.
I like to be collaborating with them right up close, but I like
the camera to also be very close.
So we're usually all together and I'm my comfort zone is
behind the camera and I love picking out lenses.
I love designing shots. I love blocking choreography.
And with this movie, I wanted to share in the experience that you
and Michaela were having and participate in that and, and
learn from that. And I don't know what it was
like from your perspective, but I always felt like whether it
was a literal circle on the floor or a metaphorical one that
we were still cocooned within, I always felt like I was
participating in that exchange of energy on set and feeling it
and understanding your process, both of your processes, in a way
that I've never have on any other film before.
And that opened my eyes to, I mean, it sounds almost silly to
say this, this many films in, but it opened my eyes to what it
means to act. And I really believe I will
carry that forward on every movie I make.
And, and the process with which I engage with, with a cast and
with our collaboration on the text will be incredibly
transformed from the experience we had together on this film.
I have always been someone who I'm quick to discard dialogue
and going into this movie I wanted to put a priority on the
dialogue. It was written to be, you know,
there's a lot of dialogue in it and is there, you know, a decent
amount and I so I knew I was going to be respecting the text
more than I have in previous films from the get go.
I always think about pre production as the time where you
embed within yourself all of the answers that you're going to
need while you're shooting the movie.
Yes. Completely.
Totally. You, you just, you just ingrain
them all on yourself and you won't remember them, but when
you get to set you will know what to do.
Totally. One of the things that I I, I
try to explain to directors who don't know me is that I, I
interrogate everything in prep. Like everything, even lines that
I absolutely love. I just ask every single
question. I hold everything up to the
light. I poke holes in everything and I
think it, I know for a fact it's freaked some of them out.
And I've had to say to them, I do this because I'm not going to
ask a single question when we're on set.
Like when we're on set, I want to be your first Lieutenant.
I want to execute your vision. I just want to hit the ground
running and know exactly what we're doing and why we don't
have time for my questions then. So yeah.
So I agree with you about like finding the answers in in pre
production. It was.
I remember that as well. I remember like we went, even
though we knew we weren't changing anything, we went
through and talked about every single line we had.
Those incredible. Lines more than once.
Yes, exactly. We had some we we we did that
classic thing that you read about that I've never had the
luxury of doing before, which is you tape out the set in an empty
in an empty room and you have some stand in props and we
weren't in the actual space, but we're going to have a strange
photocopy of it. And we were able to just
investigate right that we. Were on that huge sound.
Stage, yeah, which is where we ultimately shot a lot of the
scenes from the movie that took place on a stage.
But at that point it was completely empty and and we had
a couple tables, a couple of mannequins, but it was we were
beginning to see the movie come to life in terms of how we might
block it. And we also, I think, spent a
lot of time just sitting around on that set listening to music,
which was a huge, a huge part of the rehearsal process.
I don't know about Michaela. I had a song that became my my
touchstone song, and this one did you.
I had like my Touchstone record, which was it came out while we
were in prep and I just listened to it nonstop, which was Ke$ha's
gag order, which was great. It was a she produced it with
Rick Rubin and I was reading Rick Rubin's book on creativity
at the same time, and that record really captured the
spirit of that, of that summer of that experience for me.
Beautiful. My my go to song was the
apocalypse song by Saint Vincent.
Oh yes, I I just that song will forever be fused with the with
the barn for me. And it became, I don't know, it
just became this, I learned it so well that I felt like I could
see it dimensionally, like I could see the topography of it.
And there would, and there's certain, you know, chord changes
in it that every time I think about it, like it lift, it would
lift me up and drop me off someplace else.
And it wound up becoming like my dance partner, the unseen dance
partner in, in so many of the scenes.
Speaking of dance partners, do you want to read the?
Descriptor or the I've been, I mentioned that I was going back
through old drafts of the script, but those were all the
old, old ones. And I was, we've been talking so
much about about the performances and in particular
the choreography in the barn. And I was just curious what how
it was described in the screenplay that we locked in
late April of 2023. Yes.
And so I've got it right here, and I will just narrate it, Sam
says. Because I don't want to break my
streak. Mother Mary says.
Of what Sam says of not listening to your music.
Mother Mary pauses, thinking about how much she's going to
let that sting, how much she's going to take the bait.
And then, without a word, she closes her eyes, collects
herself. She finds her starting position,
and she begins to dance. Her bare feet clap, then pound
against the wooden floor. As she goes through her paces,
she kicks up dust from the floor.
It shimmers in the air, giving volumes of the light around her.
Without any music, the dance seems like work.
The effort to move, the way she's moving, to lift off from
the floor to achieve that state of grace she's reaching for.
But she does achieve it. Those thundering footsteps, the
heavy breaths, they transform her.
Sam watches, at first bemused, then something else, transfixed.
Mother Mary leaps up, but then she lands too hard, stumbling.
Her knee goes in a weird direction, looks like it's about
to snap. She cries out in pain.
Sam rises and said, well, that's but Mother Mary holds up her
hand. I'm not done yet.
She catches her breath, pops her knee back into place, and then
rises and continues marking the choreography, slicing through
the air like a knife one moment in a hammer the next, her skill
and precision pulling the music out of the silence.
She leaves the stage behind, advancing through the space,
circling Sam as the as the performance builds to a peak.
And then she's finished. That's it.
How do you feel that compares to what Danny and I came up with?
I think that covers the first third of what you and Danny came
up with, and I love that. I love that we took what was on
the page and use that as a jumping off point.
And it's so it's so fun to go back and look at that and
realize, yeah, yes, that is a description of the scene in so
many words of what happens. But the spirit that comes
through that is hinted at in that text.
You and Danny really took that and and ran with it.
And I don't know, I mean, read, we read the script and knew that
that was going to be a centerpiece.
But if anyone else, I don't know if it would read that way.
And yet, when you watch the movie, that is the heart of the
film. I think this film has has many
hearts. I feel like that to to play a
character that struggles with words.
That dance became so important to hinting at what was going on
inside of her. And one of the lines that you
wrote, which is now in the the scream now in the final film, as
I can't eat, I can't heal. And I just remember thinking,
somebody who's been kind of tortured by this feeling for
years and is so decimated, who really can't in a way, trust her
own mouth. Like there's this.
She, she can't trust the words that come out of it.
She's afraid to speak. She's afraid of lying.
She's afraid of what the truth might be.
She, she's just, it's so bottled up.
The only release she has is, is is this dance?
And dance was her first love, but now even but the spirit
that's come to claim her is also claiming that, and that it's
this thing inside of her that takes over.
And that became so much of the thrust of what Danny and I were
working on was how Mother Mary can't.
And that's one part of the reason, I think, why everybody's
afraid of her singing her song and exposing her truth, because
it goes to this primal, ugly, brutal place that nobody
associates her with. That she knows she can't do
that. It's not allowed that it would
frighten people. It's dangerous.
Yeah, and it's not her. And people would reject it and
be, and she would alarm people. And since that, she's kind of
crafted her identity as a safe space for so many people.
That would be a violation. And she can't bear that thought.
So in a way, Sam's the first person who sees the dance and
isn't frightened by it. And it was, it was amazing
getting to create it with Danny all of those weeks and months in
the in the dance studio to learn all of those movements to kind
of first build an iconography and then tear it apart.
Yeah. And it was truly, I always
thought of it as like watching the two of you build a
vocabulary. And when you think about in
those terms, this is a movie, especially in that first half
where Sam gets a lot of monologues.
But that's Mother Mary's monologue.
Yeah, yeah. And then and then Mother Mary
finally does get a monologue at the end and you realize that she
is an absolutely bereft soul. And that's what you're watching.
And she's, like I said, she's she's not there to play games.
She's not there to have fun. There's no subterfuge.
No, she's she, She, she. The only thing she has is her is
her weeping, bleeding heart. I love weeping, bleeding hearts.
They make me feel they're your. Happy place they.
Make. You feel seen.
One last thing I have to say, because we are wrapping up, I
just have to give a shout out to the Nick Cave book, Faith, Hope
and Carnage, which became kind of a touchstone text for all of
us on this, on this film and informed, I know it informed
you. Is there anything you want to
say about that book? That book has brought, I'm not a
particularly religious person, but has brought spirituality
back into my life. And and I don't want to define
that. I don't, I don't want to put a
name to it, but it did introduce me or reintroduce me to a
concept that there is more to our universe than what we
behold. And it's something that I've
read and reread, but it certainly played a huge part in
in the digging deeper that this movie required of all of us.
When I was writing the script and reading that book, there was
an inquiry at the core of that conversation that Nick Cave is
having. And I wanted this movie to be
possessive of that same spirit of inquiry.
And it's one that I will, that I'm carrying with me as we, as
we walk out of the studio. It's something that I I, I will
never shake. So I guess I guess ending by
thanking Nick Cave is a pretty good way to.
It's a great way to go. Great way to leave the studio.