ZEST GOOD GRiEF FILM
Texas filmmaker David Lowery’s haunting ‘Ghost Story’ offers meditative look at the passing of time
When David Lowery was a kid, he wanted to be an astronaut, as kids often do. The filmmaker brings up this abandoned aspiration to underscore a point about the passage of time. “That was my goal; it’s all I thought about,” he says. “And maybe a year ago, I realized that’s one thing that I’ll never do. I’m going to die without ever going into space. And I’m OK with that. “But it applies to other things in my life, too. I have stacks of books on the bedside table and on bookshelves. There’s music I want to listen to. And I have to be OK with the fact that I’ll never experience all those things. There are movies I’ll never revisit. This collection at home, two-thirds of which I’ll never see again. I’ll die before I put them in the DVD player.”
He laughs. “It’s funny to find this fatalism in my motionpicture collection. But at the same time, it’s a revelation. And I’ve made peace with that.”
Lowery’s new film, “A Ghost Story,” which opens Friday, concerns itself wholly with such big questions about the passage of time: life, death, things left undone, things left behind. The urgency and the mundane nature of it all, which is both undercut and underscored by the fact that nearly every scene features an Academy Award-winning actor playing a ghost hidden beneath a minimalist bedsheet with two eye holes cut out.
The visual is at times comical with its callback to “It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown,” and other times it’s almost unbearably sad: The humor of Charles Schulz’s “I got a rock” becomes something else. That rock becomes “It’s the Great Burden, Charlie Brown.”
Lowery made an audacious decision to place Casey Afflect under a sheet for nearly the entirety of his film. The most basic summation I can offer for “A Ghost Story” is that it investigates the passing of time from the viewpoint of a passive observer. A man dies, and his ghost chooses to stake out his former home rather than head to the light. There’s a lot more to it, but the less said the better.
The resulting “A Ghost Story” isn’t like any other cinematic experience I can recall. In the spectrum of deeply thoughtful films, it’s among the most immersive and interactive I’ve seen.
On at least two occasions, Lowery lets shots linger more than a minute. The resulting feeling can be unnerving, but both times he’s attempting to convey feelings of grief and emptiness after the death of a loved one.
“A Ghost Story” is not a horror film by any measure, yet it’s the kind of cinematic experience that will raise the hairs on your arms. But more than that, the film haunts long after it has run its fairly short course.
Lowery’s movie might make you think about childhood aspirations that faded. More likely, it will make you think about the unread books on the bedside table.
When Lowery was a college student, he sat in history class, as students do.
Rather than sit shellshocked by the onslaught of names and dates that needed to be committed to memory, he was instead struck by the compression of time in his texts.
“You’d brush through these huge swatches of time in a 45-minute class,” he says. “It felt like we were doing a disservice to the people who lived through that period of time. Lifetimes would get covered in five minutes. It emphasizes how insignificant life can be. The cumulative value of life is great; it allows us to talk about history in this sweeping way. It’s troubling and exciting and has led to many existential crises over the years.
“I wanted to tap into a little of that with this movie. This idea of finding value in the insignificant.”
Not surprisingly, Lowery is the son of a theology professor, who moved his family from Wisconsin to the Dallas area for work when Lowery was young. Lowery graduated from Irving High School and started to transform his deep affinity for cinema into practice. He made a film called “Lullaby” at 19, a learning experience that he’d prefer people not see. Though much of Texas’ filmmaking industry is centered in Austin, Lowery found some like-minded enthusiasts and built a community in the Dallas area who would work on each others’ shorts and features. He made the feature “St. Nick,” about two young runaways, in 2008 for less than $15,000.
And then in 2013, he released “Ain’t Them Bodies Saints,” which starred Affleck and Rooney Mara (also central in “A Ghost Story”) as young lovers and outlaws. The film drew strong notices out of the Sundance Film Festival for its striking visual identity and a narrative that sidestepped outlaw-film archetypes and plot cliché. His was a moody, spacious, thoughtful film. Every frame was infused with purpose, and the sound was notable for its absence. Lowery worked beautifully with silences.
He followed that film with “Pete’s Dragon” last year, which on cursory glance looked to be a bigbudget fantasy rebooting the ’70s live action/ animated hybrid. And though there was a central green dragon in Lowery’s film, it’s amber tone and odd but sweet tale of an unlikely companionship had less in common with typical family films than it did the work of Robert Altman.
He signed on to work on a reimagined “Peter Pan,” which is in development. But before starting to shoot the heist film “Old Man and the Gun” with Robert Redford, Lowery wanted to do a little cinematic exercise on the theme of time. He wasn’t sure it was a feature film, but early on he imagined a sad and funny ghost at its center.
When Lowery, who is 36, hit his mid-30s, he thought about the fleeting quality of youth, as people in their 30s do. He’d proved bankable with “Pete’s Dragon,” which had a worldwide box office more than double its budget. He had a little time and decided to chase a creative whim, albeit a dense, philosophical one.
Lowery was so unsure of the idea for “A Ghost Story” that he, Affleck and Mara left their agents out of the process at the outset. They started shooting “A Ghost Story” in East Texas, without the expectations that come with a production being announced in the film trades. For a project designed to take a couple of weeks at the most, “A Ghost Story” proved logistically complex, even its simplest aspects, like the ghost.
“It’s a full-time job to get it to drape properly,” Lowery says of the ghost’s sheet. “You can’t just put a sheet over his head. It won’t work. That looks like a sheet over the head. And you don’t have that suspension of disbelief that comes with a child’s Halloween costume. A sheet won’t cover you entirely; it’s not big enough. There’s no elusive quality, so it doesn’t work as an illusion.”
So Lowery and his costuming staff experimented with different fabrics. Early on, they tried sheets, with different thread counts and dyes.
“But to get that lovely, haunting trail, we had to build something,” he says.
So a helmet was constructed, which Lowery says was fairly uncomfortable. And a series of petticoats was added to help give the ghost additional form. Specific undergarments were used so the color was just right.
“The end result is a ghost that was communicative,” he says. “The folds contain emotion. We were able to convey a great deal with very little.”
Lowery’s films prior to “A Ghost Story” have all been musical in different ways. A haunting Leonard Cohen song accents a scene in “Pete’s Dragon,” and rhythmic hand claps built tension in “Ain’t Them Bodies Saints.”
When I asked Lowery about the musicality of “A Ghost Story,” he at first balked, asserting it was the least he’d ever thought about music during the making of one of his films. But the film’s meditative silences, punctuated by things like utensils on a pie dish became its rhythm. I heard minimalists, for lack of a better word, from Thomas Tallis to Erik Satie to Arvo Part in the film.
“The musical quality of those guys that you mentioned is 100 percent apropos to this film,” Lowery acknowledges. “I think it does have these Arvo Part-ish not-quiter-hythms to it. There are probably allusions to John Cage in there. They might not have been things I was thinking about, but I do think the movie participates in the tradition those musicians — traditions if they didn’t create, they pushed forward.
“As unrhythmic as the movie seems at times, it’s designed to emulate the way in which we experience time as human beings. And composers are trying to do the same thing, use their own musical chronometer to characterize the passage of time.”
“Old Man and the Gun” should be in theaters next year, so Lowery has an eye on what comes next. He’s been attached to an update on the “Peter Pan” story, though he’s not sure if he’ll just write the film or also direct. “Pan” may be the closest he’ll come to realizing the childhood dream of being an astronaut.
But at 36, he’s doing strong work dealing with those more modest aspirations that don’t always get realized. He admits “A Ghost Story” is a piece of art he couldn’t have made years earlier.
“It’s reflective of and expressive of things and feelings in my life now,” he says. “Things that are more prevailing in my 30s than in my 20s. I didn’t think about the future as much then as I do now. I believe we cross this threshold in life, and you can see these inevitabilities ahead of you that you couldn’t in your youth. It’s troubling and sad, but there’s also a warmth there. You find this balance that allows you to embrace insignificance and live more fully.”