David Lowery Reveals the Two-Year Journey Behind 'Mother Mary' and Its Final Cut

David Lowery’s last conversation about Mother Mary took place in the fall of 2024. At the time, the director had just wrapped filming on the A24 drama, starring Anne Hathaway and Michaela Coel, but admitted he wasn’t entirely sure what the movie was about. “It was such a strange and elusive movie,” he said. “I felt like I had found a structure that made sense. I felt like I had it all clicked together.”

By December 2024, Lowery believed the film was complete. “I remember watching it right after Christmas and thinking that we were pretty much done. We had succeeded,” he recalled. However, the January 2025 test screenings revealed a different story. “The reaction suggested to me that I had not quite achieved the clarity that I was after,” Lowery admitted. What followed was another full year of editing, refining the film’s emotional core rather than making drastic structural changes.

Like many of his smaller-scale projects, Lowery edited Mother Mary himself. “It was focusing on the minutia, extracting the minutia in a way that illuminated what it was that we were after,” he explained. “It took a long time because so much of this movie—what we were after—was so hard to put into words.”

The challenge lay in capturing an intangible feeling. “For a movie that is full of language and almost nothing but words, we never could quite find the right words to describe what it was we were after. It was a feeling. It was an emotion. And achieving that emotion took a lot of trial and error.”

Music as a Narrative Tool

One of the key focuses during editing was the film’s music, which Lowery described as vital for “establishing the character and telling the story of how she got to where she is when we meet her.” The soundtrack features songs by Charli XCX, Jack Antonoff, and FKA Twigs, offering multiple creative possibilities.

Lowery and his team experimented with different approaches: one version transformed midway into a concert film, another placed all songs at the beginning to acclimate viewers to the world of Mother Mary (Hathaway) before her reunion with her ex-costume designer (Coel), and a third used only snippets of songs rather than full performances. Ultimately, the final cut settled on “a two-hander chamber piece that occasionally blossomed into full-blown pop concert sequences,” as Lowery described it.