SHEET HAPPENS
Pete’s Dragon director David Lowery is conjuring up some old-fashioned chills
Spooks get back to basics in new horror movie A Ghost Story.
IT’S INSPIRED BY REAL LIFE
Starring Casey Affleck as a ghost who haunts the home he lived in with his former wife (Rooney Mara), David Lowery’s new film is inspired by a disagreement that he had with his own other half about relocating to Hollywood from their native Texas. “You don’t get to see it all in the movie but Casey and Rooney’s argument is a literal transcription of the argument my wife and I had,” says Lowery. “I was hanging onto something that I didn’t need to, as I should have been more open to moving on, and we did move on and it was fine. But it was enough of an emotional experience that I felt I should make a movie out of it.”
IT’S A BIT TIMEY-WIMEY
With the narrative taking some unexpected twists and turns, A Ghost Story is really about the passing of time. “I’m obsessed with time, and I probably spend too much time thinking about time,” laughs Lowery. “It’s something I’ve dealt with in all my films, as I’m interested in how it affects us, how we deal with the passage of time and maybe there’s a possibility of transcending it? There probably isn’t, but if we accept on a scientific level that time is a physical dimension then maybe there’s a way to get beyond it.”
THE SPOOKS ARE LOW-KEY
Lowery chose to take a more subtle approach to the supernatural elements. “I wanted to pace the movie in such a way that it felt downplayed, as I didn’t want to lean into the mythology of ghosts and spirits too much,” he explains. “There was a lot more material that was based on folklore and classic ideas about ghosts, but ultimately the movie felt like it didn’t need that stuff so we cut it out, as I didn’t want it to feel like we were participating in the genre all the way.”
THERE ARE NO CGI SPECTRES
Evoking old animated series like Scooby-Doo and Casper The Friendly Ghost, the spook takes the well-worn form of an actor in a bed sheet. “I’ve always been fascinated by that image and long before this movie presented itself, I had this idea of making a traditional horror film like Poltergeist with a ghost that was a guy in a sheet,” recalls Lowery. “I wanted to take this goofy concept, and treat it with some degree of seriousness to see if I could find an emotional truth in that symbolism. It’s like a child’s Halloween costume, but at the same time its like a shorthand all around the world for a haunted soul that’s stuck on Earth.”
THERE WERE PLENTY OF COSTUME DRAMAS
With Lowery describing it as “a nightmare”, portraying a bed-sheetshaped ghost on screen wasn’t as easy as it initially appeared. “When I first came up with the idea, I thought that all we’d have to do is put a bed sheet over Casey’s head. But it just looked like a person with a sheet over their head, and didn’t convey the image of a ghost that I wanted. There was a lot more to it to get the shape right and the eyes and face correct, so we had to construct a whole costume that had all sorts of layers and a helmet.”
A Ghost Story is out on 11 August.