David Lowery is a different kind of dude. He's making the jump from small independent films like Ain't Them Bodies Saints to a reimagining of Pete's Dragon for Disney. It opens Friday. He's become a friend and frequent collaborator of Hollywood legend Robert Redford. Perhaps most striking, he still lives in East Dallas, and plans to stick around. Lowery has resisted the the hipster siren song of Austin, which beckons so many young Dallas filmmakers.
We caught up with Lowery last week to discuss his new dragon buddy, the secret indie he just shot in Irving and other salient matters.
What's it like making the leap to to a big Disney movie? It's actually small for a Disney movie. It still feels intimate. I'm very proud of it. Making a movie that's designed to make people feel good ended up feeling really good.
You directed Robert Redford in Pete's Dragon, and you'll direct him again in the upcoming Texas bank robber story The Old Man and the Gun. Is it intimidating to direct such an accomplished actor and director? He has a way of disarming you when he walks into a room. But he's still Robert Redford, and you still look at him as a legend. Sometimes I would ask him to do another take, and he'd squint and say, 'Didn't I just do that?' I'd go back and look, and sometimes he was right. But other times I'd have to tell him I'm looking for something else specific.
What did you learn about yourself making this film? I learned that if I don't follow my gut instinct I get into trouble. If I don't listen to that little voice in me that says I need to do another take, or that something isn't working, I get into trouble. I learn that on every film I make, and I'll probably keep learning it on every film I'll ever make.
What kinds of movies made you want to become a filmmaker? Star Wars is responsible for me becoming a filmmaker, but I loved anything from the Lucas/Spielberg camp. I'm a huge Willow fan. E.T was the second movie I saw in a movie theater. Pinocchio was the first.
What can you tell us about this little film you just shot on the sly in the Dallas area? I can say that I made a film in Irving, with a lot of my old friends, and it's one of the strangest things I've done. It might be a feature, and it might be a short. It might be a three-hour short. It might never see the light of day. But it was really important for me to make it after making Pete's Dragon.
For more on Lowery, read our 2013 story on Ain't Them Bodies Saints, below.
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The prolific 32-year-old Irving High School graduate David Lowery has leapt onto the national stage. His latest feature, the Texas outlaw romance Ain't Them Bodies Saints (starring Casey Affleck and Rooney Mara), played Sundance and Cannes. He's now at work on a reimagining of the Disney favorite Pete's Dragon and the Robert Redford project The Old Man and the Gun, based on a New Yorker article about a septuagenarian bank robber. Redford will star and produce; Lowery will write and direct.
Lowery's plate is fuller than a buffet platter. He uses a different dining analogy to describe his work habits.
"I've always taken a kind of Lazy Susan approach," Lowery says. "You get to a good point on one project, and then you do some work on the next one, and then later in the day you work on the next one. There's actually plenty of time if you just utilize it well." He pauses. "Which I'm terrible at doing."
With his thick facial hair and old-soul bearing, Lowery looks like he could have stepped out of a Civil War photograph. He's soft-spoken and slightly overwhelmed, though it's not as if he came out of nowhere.
Lowery is known around Texas as a do-everything guy quick to take work on other people's projects. He was all over this year's Sundance catalog: In addition to writing and directing Saints, he co-edited Shane Carruth's Upstream Color and co-wrote Yen Tan's Pit Stop, which won the Dallas International Film Festival's Texas Filmmaker Award. "My intent was always just to help out on films that I like and help out friends who were making films," he says.
Now his creative karma and focus are paying major dividends.
"He's skyrocketing right now," says Aviation Cinemas' Adam Donaghey, the executive producer of Lowery's 2009 feature St. Nick and a high school friend from Irving. "It all stems from his relentless execution of his own style. He just did, and kept doing it, and somebody finally saw it."
That style, much like Lowery, is quiet, patient and soulful; it makes sense that he counts the dream-like Robert Altman Western McCabe & Mrs. Miller as a favorite movie, and that Saints has drawn comparisons to the work of Terrence Malick.
Lowery simply isn't very Hollywood. But unlike other locally raised filmmakers, including Yen Tan and David Gordon Green, he hasn't decamped for the higher-profile Austin scene. He calls East Dallas home and sounds as if he will for a while.
"I like that Dallas is off the beaten path, as far as the entertainment industry goes, but is still culturally ahead of the curve," he says. "I get everything I want out of a big city while also managing to remain somewhat invisible. It has plenty of art house theaters, great vegan food and great coffee. And lots of friends."
