David Lowery on Mother Mary, Beyoncé, and Transposing His Concerns Onto a Pop Icon

Interview: Director David Lowery on How ‘The Red Shoes,’ Taylor Swift, and Artistic Internal Struggles Were Forged to Conjure Up ‘Mother Mary’

Back in 2021 I proclaimed in my review of The Green Knight that writer-director David Lowery was “the great American director of his generation;” a statement that holds even stronger weight given the rising talent behind the camera in modern filmmaking. With his latest film, Mother Mary, Lowery gives this writer enough ammunition to back…

David Lowery on Mother Mary, Beyoncé, and Transposing His Concerns Onto a Pop Icon

Watching David Lowery’s Mother Mary made me think, in some unexpected way, of a scene early in Todd Field’s Tár, in which Lydia Tár dresses down a Juilliard student for his proud indifference to the Western canon. Field has said that Tár was having an argument with a younger version of herself: two people, two generations, two different relationships to the same vocation—in some sense, the same person. Lowery takes this situation and runs it out…