In David Lowery's Ain't Them Bodies Saints, an escaped convict,
played by Casey Affleck travels across Texas to be reunited with his wife
(Rooney Mara) and young daughter, but in his absence another man (Ben Foster)
has attempted to fill the void. It's a very straightforward and classical
narrative and there's something satisfying old-fashioned about David Lowery's
approach to telling this tale. This slow-burning romantic tragedy is heavily
indebted to the cinema of the 1970s, with the gorgeous cinematography,
imaginative score and elliptical editing ensuring that it looks, sounds and
feels like nothing else in cinemas right now. Ain't Them Bodies Saints is a
strikingly confident piece of filmmaking, and the kind of film that lingers in
the memory long after the closing credits have rolled. I met David Lowery when
he was in London recently to discuss it.
Looking at your IMDb page, you've got credits in almost every
possible department of filmmaking.
I know. It's sad but true. [laughs]
Even though you're looked at as a young director starting
out on his career, you've already amassed a lot of experience in a relatively
short space of time.
It feels like it wasn't a short space of time, but that's
because I started working on movies as soon as I graduated from high school,
doing whatever I could. I didn't go to film school so my method of learning was
to work on as many films as possible and wear as many different hats as
possible. IMDb started around the same time, so all of a sudden I started
getting all these credits. I look at them now and there's a million of them I'd
like to take off, but they're all there for posterity.
It's reminiscent of the old-school, Roger Corman way of
working, to serve your apprenticeship and learn your trade on as many
low-budget films as possible before stepping up.
Exactly, it's completely like an apprenticeship. The difference
is that technology is now so much easier to use, so instead of just focusing on
learning how to use the camera you can bounce from one thing to another, and on
one film you can end up doing lots of different things.
After you made your feature debut with St. Nick, what were
the key lessons you took from the experience that you could apply to Ain't Them
Bodies Saints?
The main lesson was just to listen to my gut instinct. If
something felt wrong it was probably wrong, and that was a film that was made
entirely on that basis. The script was 30 pages long and it was really a chance
to explore a complete story and a cinematic story without using a script as a
guideline, just to start each day and see what felt right. I had to keep the
entire movie as a whole in my head at all times, to see what each scene might
do to the one being shot immediately afterwards, and to not have a script to
fall back on. It worked out, the movie was a success, and even though Ain't
Them Bodies Saints was scripted I wanted to approach it in the same way.
Because it's bigger it's harder, you know, you don't have as much freedom when
you have a bigger budget, so we didn't get to do it as much on this film, but
it proved again that listening to my instinct is always best. The times where I
didn't listen to it are the times when I look at the film now and see mistakes,
and the times when I did listen to it are where I feel the film succeeds the
most.
I haven't seen St. Nick in its entirety but I've seen clips
of it online, and it seems to be a film that's very heavy on visual
storytelling and very light on dialogue. Is that an approach you're
particularly drawn to?
Absolutely. I love dialogue and I love listening to people
talk at great length, but I also love silence. I love the space between
sentences, when people might have just had a conversation and then they have
that quiet moment when they don't have anything to say, those are the moments
that I love. St. Nick probably has 5 or 10 lines of dialogue in the entire
running time; we shot more dialogue, but in the editing process it all just
fell away, and the silent scenes were the ones that spoke loudest. With Ain't
Them Bodies Saints there is more of a story, more of a plot and more dialogue,
but I still wanted to honour that, the silence I had grown to love so much. I
wanted the space between what people were saying to be something that we were
paying attention to.
I guess the fact that you have a very simple core narrative gives
you a solid foundation and allows you to experiment in that fashion.
That's exactly right. I didn't want to tell a story that was
going to reinvent the wheel. I wanted to tell a very simple, time-honoured
story that is predictable, because I don't think being predictable is a bad thing.
I think if it's the right kind of film then having a very simple and direct
narrative is a boon to the filmmaker, because you're actually able to focus on
other things. I wanted to make a film that was less about the story than the
texture, the tone, the feeling, the sense of montage, the rhythm – all those
things took precedence to me over the story. By choosing a story that is so
traditional I felt we had a good leg to stand on and we were able to dive into
all of that ephemera in a more effective way.
It's the kind of story where the characters have an
inescapable fate.
Yeah, there's an inevitability to it, and that's great. You
know how the movie's going to end. You might not know exactly what's going to
happen, but you're pretty sure it can only end one way, and that frees you up
from expecting plot twists and such. As a viewer I always appreciate that.
Given your background in editing, do you find you're editing
the film in your head as you shoot, or do you figure out how to put it all together
later?
It was definitely a case that I was editing it while I was
writing it, and then when we were on set I was editing it in my head while we
were shooting, absolutely. On the schedule that we were on, I kept having to
cut shots out and change things, so knowing how it might fit together was
incredibly helpful in finishing the movie on time. But once we got to the
editing room it still went in a different direction. We took a roundabout way
of cutting it where I threw the script away and started working intuitively, so
the film went through this process of becoming something completely different
before gradually returning to where we started. The finished film is very
similar to the script, but we tried out all sorts of things on the way there.
As an editor yourself, what was it like working with Craig
McKay and Jane Rizzo on this film and communicating your ideas to them?
I worked with Jane first, because she had cut a few of my
friends' films – Compliance and Great World of Sound – and she had also worked
with Robert Altman, and I just wanted to hear some stories about that! [laughs]
Craig McKay came on later when I just wanted new eyes on the movie. There's no
denying that it was difficult because editing is one of those things that I know
how to do, and it's just easier for me to actually grab the controls and do
something myself than it is to tell someone what to do. So what ended up
happening was that I just left the editing room because it was very difficult
for me to be in there while editing was being done. I would go off and work on
my own and we would work on different parts of the movie, and then I'd come
back and we'd compare ideas and see whose ideas felt the best. It definitely
was a challenge for me to let go and have someone else working on it, but as an
editor myself I've always loved the idea that I could contribute something to a
director's vision and I wanted to experience that as a director, so it was
important for me to work with people for the first time.
It's quite rare to see directors who also edit for other
directors, but I imagine it would be something that a lot of filmmakers could
benefit from, to see how other directors work. Have you found it an instructive
experience?
I think it takes a certain mindset to be an editor and
luckily I have that, and I've worked with plenty of directors who have no
interest in touching that software at all. But yeah, I've learned so much from
working with other directors and have expanded my own ideas about how to make
movies. Seeing other people make mistakes is certainly helpful, although by the
time I got to the set I forgot all of that because it's such a fast-paced
environment. [laughs] But hopefully you digest all of those things and
subconsciously think about the bad takes you've seen, think about why they're
bad, and hopefully they're buried in your head somewhere to help you when you
need to make a gut instinct choice. It has definitely been enormously
instrumental in how I approach being a director.
One of the key dramatic choices you make it to not show key
events, with things like the robbery or the prison break happening off screen. Was this
always your intention?
That was always the intention, none of those things are in
the script. In fact, the first draft of the script didn't even have that
shootout.
And then you thought, we've got to have some action...
We need to have something, we need an inciting
incident. It can't be all ellipses. [laughs] You know, I did try writing a prison escape
scene in the very first draft of the script, and it really just felt like we'd
seen it before. Any attempt of mine to do an exciting prison escape scene is
only going to pale in the shadow of the great ones we've seen.
It's very hard to think of an original way to break out of
prison now.
Exactly, and if it was original it would stand out and
detract from everything else I was doing, so I thought I'd just move on, get
past it, and assume that he has made it out somehow.
Another interesting choice was the three killers whose
motivation is unclear, which suggest the weight of a backstory without it ever
being discussed.
I always like the idea of characters talking to each other
in a way that suggests they've known each other their whole lives. When you do
know someone you're not going to talk about where you came from and how you
first met, and all those things. So when those guys walk into the shop, Keith
Carradine gives them a look, and you get the sense that he knows what they're
up to and what they're there for, and there are little hints in the dialogue of
where they came from and who hired them. But more than that, those characters
are symbols, and when you see three guys who look like that you know they're up
to know good and that's kind of all you need to know.
I think having an actor like Keith Carradine helps in that
regard, because he brings a real presence and sense of history when you
consider his own film career.
There's no denying that, in addition to being a magnificent
actor in his own right, when you can utilise a performer's history it can do wonders
for the movie. He is bringing all of the wonderful baggage that he has
accumulated over his career with him, and in some movies that might hurt the
movie, but in this case, with a character like this, it does a lot of the work
for you.
On the subject of the cast, the performance that really
stood out for me was Ben Foster. It's a much more subdued performance and a
different kind of energy than I've come to expect from him. How did that
casting choice come about?
He read the script and really liked it and wanted to meet,
so we sat down and talked. At that point I was already pretty set on Casey
playing Bob, he had said he'd wanted to do it and I was happy that he was the
right guy, but when I met with Ben he was such a gentleman. He always plays
these very wired, intense and often evil characters – and he does have an
intensity to him, there's no denying that – but he's also very old-fashioned in
his courteousness and how gentlemanly he was, and I immediately thought that
would be a wonderful thing to see on screen. I'd never seen him do that, and I
love the idea of taking a character who on the page was just a nice guy and
lending him that intensity to enrich the character. Luckily he said yes, and he
transformed himself so thoroughly for the film that when I saw him after we'd
wrapped, and he'd shaved that moustache off and stopped talking with his
accent, I was shocked! He went to Midland, Texas and lived with some sheriffs
for a few weeks, and he understood that world so thoroughly and brought so much
to it, and I think that character is the one true, sincere character. He's not
putting on a front, he's not putting on a show, he's just direct, and he is
also my voice coming through, the closest embodiment of me as a person.
This is the first time you've directed actors of this
calibre and experience. How did you find that process?
Each actor was different in what they wanted, so I had to
very quickly pick up on how to work with each one. There wasn't a sense of hierarchy,
there wasn't a sense of them saying, "Well, this is how I've done it in
the past" or "this is how I like to work with other directors."
It was more a case of everybody being in this process of making the movie
together and wanting what was best for it, so I never had to deal with the ego
or expectation or any of the things you might expect from quote-unquote
"movie stars." But they did each have their own preferred method of
working; for example, Ben liked to get together and really talk about the
character and know every detail in advance, versus someone like Casey who shows
up knowing his lines and his character, but who liked to do different things
from take to take, to shake it up. Rooney comes knowing exactly what to do but
it you want to change something you can just throw it at her and she'll
respond. So they all have different methods of working and my learning curve
was just figuring out how to work with all three simultaneously.
I've only got time for one more question and I'd like to ask
you something about Upstream Colour, which is opening in the UK this week. How
did you get involved in that project and what was the experience like?
Shane [Carruth] is from Dallas, which is where I live as
well, and we had a mutual friend who is a producer on that movie. I met Shane
as a friend and he shared the script with me, and I introduced him to Amy
Seimetz because I had worked quite a bit with her in the past, and at a certain
point I think the shoot became so intense he just couldn't edit it himself. He
was always planning to edit at night.
He's very much a one-man band.
Oh yeah, if he could play every part in the movie I think he would. It was just taking so long to get the movie made and it was such an intense shoot he needed someone else to start putting it together. I was nervous about doing that at first because I knew he had such a clear idea of what he wanted and it was so demanding, I was afraid that I would instantly disappoint him. I didn't want to jeapordise our friendship, so I just told him, "The moment I start making you unhappy, tell me and I'll stop. I'm happy to walk away, I don't want this to get in the way of us knowing each other." So I said I'd do it – the footage was so good I couldn't resist working on it – even though I was about to start shooting Ain't Them Bodies Saints, and luckily he liked what I was doing and didn't tell me to stop. In a very organic and natural way I picked up on the wavelength he was working on, and the movie came together very, very quickly, as complex as it appears. It was a very organic process and it was also one of the most satisfying creative collaborations I've ever had, and as an editor it was definitely the most fun I've ever had.
