For the past decade, David Lowery has seemingly made two types of film. There’s the experimental, arthouse auteur behind A Ghost Story and The Green Knight, and then there’s the big-budget filmmaker responsible for Pete’s Dragon and Peter Pan & Wendy. In 2019, even Lowery came to believe that there are at least two David Loweries: during the shoot of The Green Knight, a freewheeling, medieval fantasy for A24, he also had to take notes from Disney about his script for Peter Pan & Wendy.

So, after a particularly stressful day on The Green Knight, Lowery stayed up one night to write 20 pages of dialogue between the dual sides of his personality. Seven years later, that script has emerged as Mother Mary, a mostly two-hander about a musician, Mother Mary (Anne Hathaway), reuniting with her former friend, Sam Anselm (Michaela Coel), a fashion designer who must create a jaw-dropping dress for the pop star at short notice.

For much of the shape-shifting movie, the camera soars around the two actors as they verbally spar in a secluded fashion studio that feels more like a dream than a building. Hathaway allows the emotions to pour from her face, while Coel’s Anselm matches the intensity of Mother Mary’s speeches with hard stares and even harder truths about the dissolution of their relationship. Yet this story could never be a play: there’s ghosts, quantum physics, and Mother Mary performing hits on stage to worshipping fans.

Adding to the drama are songs written by Charli xcx, Jack Antonoff, and FKA Twigs (who has a cameo in the film itself), extravagant sets that match the intensity of the characters’ inner turmoil, and clothes designed by Bina Daigeler and Iris van Herpen. And yet, if you look beyond the references to Lady Gaga and Ingmar Bergman, it’s Lowery examining himself – or perhaps not.

A day before Mother Mary comes out in UK cinemas, I met Lowery in London to find out more about a film that’s still unravelling in his head.

In the way Anne’s character has her Mother Mary persona, do you have to be ‘David Lowery’ when you write and direct? Or even now, when you do an interview? Not that you’re lying…

David Lowery: With musicians, their art is represented through themselves. Whereas I can hide behind these movies. They’re very personal, but I’ve removed them from myself, and put them on a table for everyone to look at.

When it comes to my own persona, I’m a very shy person. I’ve trained myself to be able to function in public because my job requires a tremendous amount of communication. But my natural disposition would be sitting at home with my cats, and not talking – ever.

Do you write like a songwriter, where you pour your emotions onto the page?

David Lowery: When I’m trying to write more organically, I won’t write in Final Draft. It allows me to not think about it as a movie. I can just think about it as text or an idea. I can free myself of formatting – even though I usually still use the same formatting. I just hit tab a lot of times in Microsoft Word. After decades of screenwriting, when you open Final Draft, you’re thinking about sharing it. If I do it in a different piece of software, it’s closer to writing by hand.

Were you inspired by Lady Gaga and Laurieann Gibson, the creative director she parted ways with?

David Lowery: Well, I’ve always loved Alexander McQueen, and when Alexander McQueen died, I knew that he and Lady Gaga had collaborated, but then she said that “Born This Way” was a song about their relationship. I’d understood that he had dressed her, but I never thought about it in emotional terms before.

That then made me think about Madonna and Gaultier, and other pop stars who’ve had an intrinsic connection to fashion. It’s an intimate act to dress somebody. When you have an artist who is in part defined by their aesthetics, the connection they have with the person who’s creating those aesthetics must be incredibly intimate and charged, because that person is creating a work of art that the other person has to wear and will become part of their persona. And yet it’s still their creation. That symbiotic relationship was just fascinating to me.

I love that I work in a medium in which when people tell me that I made them cry, it’s a good thing

You have Charli xcx, Jack Antonoff and FKA Twigs doing music for you. Did you ask them about what it’s like to be a famous musician?

David Lowery: A little. But Charli had a documentary about what it’s like to be a pop star, and she did a wonderful interview with Dua Lipa on Dua’s podcast that was really instructive – not just in terms of communicating with her, but just how I perceived the life of a pop star.

What did you learn from Charli xcx about writing pop songs?

David Lowery: She and Jack and I had a text chain going. I was trying to make a song work for the structure of the scene, and so I was asking her, ‘Let’s repeat this verse. Let’s add a line here. Can we add a lift at this particular junction?’

She told me, ‘Yes, you can do all of these things, but that’s not how pop songs work.’ It reminded me: ‘I need to take a step back, and learn from the people who know how to do it well.’ I came perilously close to ruining a great Charli xcx song.

When you’re talking about the film now, are you still discovering it? I’m aware you started shooting the film in 2023.

David Lowery: We shot it in 2023 and 2024 and 2025 [laughs]. It was a very distended process. When you’re in the weeds of any movie, it’s very difficult to see the forest from the trees. When you’re in it for this long, the forest changes as you’re working on it.

Do you read reviews?

David Lowery: I love film criticism, so it’s a shame that I don’t let myself read reviews. I avoid the internet entirely when a movie of mine is coming out.

I sense people are approaching this film differently, because they’re unsure if it’s one your smaller, arty ones, or a big-budget, mainstream blockbuster. It seems to be a combination of both.

David Lowery: In terms of the practical scale, it’s the same size as The Green Knight. But making this movie felt more intense than anything else I’ve ever done, and it was emotionally epic.

What made it so emotionally intense?

David Lowery: It’s characters who are feeling big feelings, and talking about them. The actors manifested those feelings in a very palpable way. For the duration of the shoot, we were on that emotional journey with them. There was no escape hatch.

Do you still see the original therapeutical elements from that first draft, with the Green Knight conversing with the Peter Pan side of your personality? Because, since then, you’ve done lots of rewrites, and it’s been filtered through your cast and crew.

David Lowery: I definitely do. There’s deleted scenes that made it very clear, and it was almost too clear, so I had to take them out, because it made that subtext very overt.

So Michaela Coel is talking about her Disney film…

David Lowery: Quite literally, yes. There was a reference to Disney that I removed [laughs]. Maybe it’ll be on the Blu-Ray. I can see the version of me that started writing it in 2019. I see the version of me that finished it in 2026. And I see every version of me in between.

At the same time, it’s still too recent. I don’t have perspective on it yet. I feel like if we talked the next time I have a movie come out, I’ll have gained perspective on it. A year from now, talking about this movie will be a very different experience. I imagine I’ll feel very tender towards it.

When I spoke to you for A Ghost Story, I revealed that I’ve only ever cried in the cinema three times, and one of them was Pete’s Dragon. That’s still the case.

David Lowery: I love that I work in a medium in which when people tell me that I made them cry. it’s a good thing [laughs].

I don’t know if it’s a good thing. I had to think about why that film was opening up wounds.

David Lowery: Well, hopefully at the very least it was cathartic.

The Guardian had to add a correction to their review of Mother Mary because they claimed the budget was $100 million, not $20 million. Is it a compliment that your indie could be mistaken for a $100 million movie?

David Lowery: I’d heard about this [laughs]. I always aspire to make my movies look bigger than they were. Peter Pan and Wendy was definitely a $100 million movie, and I was like, ‘I want this to look like it cost $250 million. If I don’t succeed in that, I’ll be disappointed in myself.’ So I’ll take it as a compliment. I wanted this movie to feel huge. It’s a very intimate film, but I wanted it to have a scope that felt immense. I wanted the moments where it lapses into spectacle, to feel truly spectacular.

Even the scenes where it’s two characters in a very enclosed space together, I wanted the breadth of the intimacy to feel cinematic. The amount of work I put into the visual language with my cinematographers, Andrew and Rina, was just as important to me as the amount of work I put into the literal language when I was writing the dialogue. We spent a lot of time figuring out what aspect ratio to shoot in, and ultimately decided on 2.39 to make the movie feel epic, even though it is, at its core, about two people having a conversation.

I like how there’s so much space in the room, and you forget that there’s walls. Is that your way of making sure this isn’t like a play?

David Lowery: Exactly. There’s a tremendous intersection with theatre with this movie, but I wanted to make sure it always was a Movie with a capital ‘M’.

What made you want Iris Van Herpen to design the red dress for the finale?

David Lowery: Iris has always been one of my favourite fashion designers. The dress that Sam makes – the pretence for this movie’s very existence – needed to be a work of art that would justify the entire experience of watching the film.

In 2022, she read the script. I was starstruck. Just to speak to her on Zoom was incredible. And then in February 2023, before we started prep, Bina Daigeler – Bina is the costume designer – we went to Amsterdam to visit her atelier. We go into this incredible space where all of these incredible dresses are on mannequins around us. It’s all these dresses that I know very well as a fan of her work, and it turns out she was preparing for her museum exhibit. It felt like an out-of-body experience to see them in person.

And then we walked into this other room in her studio, and the walls are covered with the dress designs that she’d done for us. Almost instantly, Bina and I zeroed in on this one particular red dress, and that’s the one in the movie. The film was broken up across two years. Over the course of those two years, we knew that that dress was waiting for us. It’s at the end of the movie, but it was at the end of our production as well. And we couldn’t wait to finally put it on camera.

Would you ever publish the 2019 version of your Mother Mary screenplay?

David Lowery: The crazy thing is, I was recently going through a draft I wrote during COVID where I decided to have the characters not speak at all. I was like, ‘What if Sam’s house had a vow of silence, and she makes everyone communicate through written messages, and has stationery?’ So all the dialogue was removed. It’s the same movie. You see the characters communicating through notes they’re passing back and forth.

I’d love to see that made with a $100 million budget.

David Lowery: That version was also set on an island in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, so it would have cost a lot more to shoot.

Is there significance to the name Sam Anselm?

David Lowery: It’s a name that exists in one of my other movies. I will leave it for other audiences to discover.

Mother Mary is out in UK cinemas now.