David Lowery and Casey Affleck, the director and star of 2017’s strangest film, explain why they favoured a bedsheet over a CGI ghost
AFTER two weeks trying to tell a profound story of love and loss by filming a soon-to-be Oscar winner walking around with a white sheet over his head, David Lowery started to wonder if his new film had been such a good idea.
The 36-year-old Texan had just sewn up his remake of Pete’s Dragon for Walt Disney Pictures, and in the spare two months before the promotional tour, he’d zipped home to Dallas to test drive an idea that would become one of the strangest, most soul-shaking cinematic experiences of this year – a chance to stare into infinity through two crudely cut eyeholes.
A Ghost Story began with an image that had, aptly enough, been haunting the director since childhood.
At the age of seven, growing up in the suburbs of Dallas, Lowery had shot his own version of the 1982 horror film Poltergeist with the family camcorder, after his parents forbade him from renting the real thing from their local video shop.
The title role was played by his younger brother wrapped in a blanket, but what back then had been a cost-effective alternative to special effects had, as he’d aged, taken on the air of a challenge.
Was it possible to make a serious film about a supernatural being that visibly had a thread count?
“Wherever I looked, I kept seeing sheet-ghost imagery and responding to it,” Lowery tells me on the phone from Dallas.
In his teenage years he’d loved the “funny and terrifying” image in John Carpenter’s Halloween of Michael Myers, the serial killer, blundering around in a sheet and glasses, and the sequence in Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice in which Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis’s newlydeads drape themselves in bed linen to spook the new owners of their house.
As an adult, he’d thrilled at the phantasmagorical menageries of Hayao Miyazaki, the Japanese animator, the Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and the Canadian cult artist Marcel Dzama.
“You can trace it back to Halloween, E.T. and Charlie Brown, but it goes so far beyond its childlike roots,” he says. “So the image was hanging around my subconscious. I knew it would wind up in my work somehow.”
All his ghost needed was motivation, and Pete’s Dragon helped with that. While working on the blockbuster – his third feature, after St Nick (2009), a micro-budgeted tale of two young runaways, and Ain’t Them Bodies Saints (2013), a lyrical western melodrama – Lowery and his wife, the actress Augustine Frizzell, had to move house twice, first to New Zealand’s South Island for the four-month shoot, and then to Los Angeles for a year to oversee the editing and visual effects.
He and Frizzell had argued bitterly after it became clear they’d have to give up their Dallas home in order to make Pete’s Dragon. “I was very upset to leave it behind,” he says.
Lowery is a Dallasite to his bones, and as a youngster was inspired by Wes Anderson and Owen Wilson, who shot their first feature, Bottle Rocket, in the city in 1994, when Lowery was 14.
Bottle Rocket showed Lowery he could succeed while staying true to his roots. So when Pete’s Dragon took him far from home, he responded in the way a brilliant filmmaker would: by dashing off a 10page, semi-autobiographical script about a man so spiritually anchored to his place of residence, even death couldn’t turf him out.
“It’s not that making Pete’s Dragon made this film possible, so much as that it left me in a place in my life where I needed to make it,” is how he puts it.
With a little work, and teasing-out of its more cosmic themes, that ghost story became A Ghost Story – and the reason that Casey Affleck, eight months shy of his Oscar-night victory, found himself in a bungalow in the Dallas suburbs almost exactly like the one Lowery had abandoned 18 months before, draped in a bed sheet.
“I mean it when I say I would do anything with David,” Affleck says.
“We always have a great time and he’s immensely talented.” The actor had already starred alongside Rooney Mara as the outlaw lovers in Ain’t Them Bodies Saints, so when casting the nameless central couple for A Ghost Story, Lowery turned to them again.
At the start of the film their characters are alive and in love, but after around 15 minutes Affleck’s dies in a car accident, after which point he appears under the sheet.
Of course the sheet wasn’t just a sheet, but a costume designed by Annell Brodeur to obscure its wearer entirely while maintaining a plaintive empty-eyed expression, and billowing in all the right places.
Lowery says he cast Affleck thinking of the gig as an “extraordinary opportunity” for him to “use his physicality to express himself through this costume”.
The actor, for his part, was ready to rise to the challenge.
The role ruled out the kind of frowny introspection with which Affleck made his name, in films such as Manchester by the Sea. Instead, for him, the part felt more like masked theatre – and reminded him of John Hurt peering through his sackcloth cowl in The Elephant Man, a film he recalls seeing when he was five or six years old (“way too young“) on a television in his father’s kitchen.
“The first time we shot Casey walking around it was very clearly him,” Lowery recalls.
“I didn’t know Casey had a distinctive walk until he had a bed sheet over his head. I didn’t know he slouched a certain way until he was slouching with that costume on. It was very clear we had put a big hunk of fabric on top of an actor. It did not feel like an apparition whatsoever.”
Lowery and his producers had stumped up the £110 000 (R1.9-million) budget for A Ghost Story themselves, and shot it without making any kind of official announcement, precisely because a measure of secrecy would allow them to fail on their own terms.
“If we’d been working with outside expectations, we’d have been subconsciously trying to meet them,” Lowery says.
But after two weeks, almost everything they shot looked like Affleck ambling around under some bedclothes. With no idea how to move forward, Lowery stitched together every shot that worked, excised everything that didn’t, and studied the result.
The solution was to have the ghost barely move at all: “The tiniest gesture would say so much, but underneath the sheet it would feel like you were barely flexing your shoulders,” says Lowery, describing what Affleck ended up doing as “less like conventional acting than a combination of puppetry and mechanical engineering”.
From that point on, “we would look through the camera and see the ghost we had in our minds in front of us”, Lowery continues. “It was one of those wonderful moments when you finally feel your movie might work.”
On screen, the ghost is eerie, funny, sympathetic – and much like a figure from masked theatre, whose empty expression draws you in and eases down your guard during the film’s many long takes, opening a clear path for it to strike at your heart.
In one early scene that became a talking point immediately after Ghost Story’s world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival, in Utah, Mara’s grieving character bingeeats an entire chocolate tart in a single sitting: Affleck’s ghost watches the whole nine-minute-long scene unfold, as do we, while time passes tick by agonising tick, until her loneliness is almost deafening.
Cinemagoers in America, who have gone into A Ghost Story expecting a horror film, have been walking out, many of them at this point (although, for me, the scene is the perfect prelude to the film’s later contemplations of time and impermanence, about which it’s best to know as little as possible in advance).
“That’s OK,” Affleck audibly shrugs, when I raise the issue of walk-outs. “I mean, when people go to a museum or gallery, some stuff is going to disappoint or confuse or enrage them, and I don’t see why the same shouldn’t be true for movies. And I’ve made movies that have definitely disappointed, confused and pissed off way more people than A Ghost Story,” he cheerfully notes. “Remember Gus Van Sant’s Gerry?”
Lowery is likewise philosophical: he says he’d half-expected an exodus from the Sundance premiere, and knows that leaving room for an audience’s minds to wander is a risky tactic.
“If I thought I was going to see a normal horror film and was given [this], I’d be thrown off-guard,” he says.
“But this is for all the cinemagoers who are delighted to be thrown off-guard.” — The Daily Telegraph
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