With Mother Mary in theaters now from A24, writer-director David Lowery shares ten films that influenced his latest feature. Read the notes for Lowery’s words on each selection. McQueen I love Alexander McQueen, and I love this movie. With Mother Mary, I wanted to make something that made me feel the way so many of McQueen’s dresses make me feel; this documentary helped me understand why. Autumn Sonata This is the Ingmar Bergman film I find myself returning to the most often. I watched it over and over as we prepared for Mother Mary, and then we screened it for the cast and crew in Germany. My movie is far more sentimental than this one, and I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to face pain as unflinchingly as Bergman, but I felt like we were at the very least glancing in a similar direction for a second or two. The making-of documentary, which is twice as long as the film itself, is also mandatory viewing. Personal Shopper Fashion and ghosts! This movie speaks with a vocabulary I understand deeply. The shape of this film is eternally beguiling. It is always shifting, every time I watch it, impossible to fully grasp. One of the great movies of this young century. Hedwig and the Angry Inch A very important movie in my life, especially in my relationship with my own mother. Anne Hathaway and I talked a lot about Midnight Radio when we were trying to come up with Mother Mary’s sound. Would Mother Mary have played at the Menses Fair in her youth? Absolutely, and that one goth kid would have loved her. The Baby of Mâcon Maybe my favorite Greenaway film? Certainly the most unpleasant and difficult to watch, but the scale and choreography is staggering, and its message is bitter and evergreen. I am not a cynical person but I appreciate Greenaway’s scorn. I screened The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover for the cast and crew of Mother Mary—it did not go over well! Thank goodness I didn’t show them this one! But I definitely watched it on my own and tried to figure out how he and Sacha Vierney moved the camera the way they did. Marry Me This movie opened right as Mother Mary started to come together, and I was determined to see every movie that involved pop music performances for research. This was the perfect way to start! We need more movies like this in movie theaters. Portrait of a Lady on Fire Another one of the greatest films of the century. I thought about this movie a lot when I was trying to convince myself not to move the camera for the first 30 minutes of Mother Mary. Céline Sciamma taught me a lot about restraint (a lesson I didn’t necessarily heed). Pina Here is where we talk about dance, and this incredible testament to the work of Pina Bausch, which I looked at when I was trying to figure out how to capture the dance scenes in our film. It felt very close to home, too, once we decided to shoot in Germany (Cologne, to be exact, where Bausch won her first major prize in 1969). I wish I could have seen this movie in 3D. The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant I think it’s on the Grand Budapest Hotel commentary track that Wes Anderson quizzes Roman Coppola and Kent Jones on the greatest fashion film of all time. The answer, of course, is this film, which also features one of the best sets of all time, and one of the best tertiary characters in Irm Hermann’s Marlene. A key jumping-off text for Mother Mary. Peter Pan & Wendy It is perhaps uncouth to put one of my own movies on this list, but Mother Mary wouldn’t exist without this film. Making Peter Pan & Wendy was one of the most meaningful experiences of my life. No one else will ever feel about it the way I do, nor should they, but I have to acknowledge its import. My memories of making it contain exhilarating highs and devastating lows, but in the years since we finished it, all of those feelings have settled down and I’m left with great affection for it, and what it represents to me personally. There are probably a lot of very direct parallels between this movie and Mother Mary that I haven’t even picked up on yet.
Read on letterboxd