David Lowery on Ain t em Bodies Saints and Making the Transition from Editing to Directing

We spoke to the Dallas-based filmmaker about blogging, the importance of knowing your cinematic history and why you shouldn't feel bad hating your movie at first.

After working steadily as an editor in the indie film scene for years, David Lowery is making waves with his second feature, Ain't Them Bodies Saints. Easily one of the most-talked about films of the 2013 Sundance Film Festival, this lyrical stunner follows the story of two outlaws in love, played by Casey Affleck and Rooney Mara, who are separated by a jail sentence and miles and miles of the American southwest landscape.

Clearly drawing inspiration from great auteurs like Terence Malick and Wim Wenders, Lowery has honed his skills by watching movies and editing indie hits like Upstream Color and Sun Don't Shine. We spoke to the Lowery about leaving room for happy accidents, why film school isn't necessary to becoming a filmmaker and working with cinematographer Bradford Young.

Tribeca: I spent an hour or so yesterday reading through all the Ain't Them Bodies Saints Frames series on your blog and was fascinated. What was the impetus for keeping this kind of diary after the fact?

DL: That blog existed before blogs were called blogs. I first started writing in 1999 right after I graduated high school. I just wanted to discuss my process of trying to become a filmmaker, and it was a great way to just sort of talk about it. The blog evolved over the years, but it has definitely been a part of my identity for a long time.

I was known as the guy who has this blog that would write about movies that I saw and do film criticism and write about all sorts of things. However, in the year spent making the Ain't Them Bodies Saints, I didn't really keep up with it at all. I didn't have time to do it, and I was focused on other things. But in the past few months, I just thought it'd be a good time to jump back in and just talk about things. There's no denying that I've been very open about everything I've done in the past and I wanted to be able to do that with this film too, because there's no reason not to.

It'd be easy to pretend that I'm someone like Thomas Pynchon who hides from public view and disappears or Stanley Kubrick and there's something admirable about that but it's never been a part of who I am. So I figured I'm just going to embrace it and start talking about the movie again.

Tribeca: From James Grey's Two Lovers to Hitchcock's Marnie to, of course, Terence Malick films, your blog and your ATSB Frames selection series are full of film references and cinematic moments that inspired you. How vital is it for aspiring filmmakers to have a working knowledge of cinema history? Can this be taught in film school?

DL: I think it helps a great deal. I didn't go to film school so I was really behind the curve and still am in terms of cinema history and knowing a lot about it. I still have not even started to scratch the surface of the works of any great filmmakers. I think you could make a great film without having seen that many movies, if you are an instinctive artist who just understands what you are doing.

I understand the value of working in a bubble and just seeing what happens, but as someone who loves movies, I think it's important to have a breadth of knowledge. It's not only fun to watch all these movies to learn and see how the medium has changed or stayed the same over the course of history, but also fun to see what other people have done and the methods other people have used.

If I were to have just seen Pulp Fiction without knowing that no one had done anything like that before, that'd be fine. However, I saw Pulp Fiction when I was 13. I was like, this is a movie that's never been done before.' It changed my world and led me to discover Jean Luc-Godard and the French New Wave.

It's so satisfying to trace that lineage back and see how one filmmaker has learned from another, and that helps inform how you can learn from them. It helps you to identify your own voice. It's really important for a filmmaker to have their own perspective and not just be regurgitating what someone else has done. I think that the way you do that is just to take in as much as you can process, set it aside, and understand where you're coming from and how your point of view is distinctly yours.

Tribeca: Since you didn't go to film school yourself, do you think just watching movies and making them is your best sort of school?

DL: I think it just depends on the personality. I was someone who always hated school. I never wanted to go to class, so it made sense for me not to go. You can certainly learn everything on your own time. You can work on movie sets as a P.A., you can buy a fully professional camera for a very little amount of money, and you can edit your own movies. All that stuff is at your disposal at this point. Plus, you have most of film history online. You can click and get an instant education. It depends on whether you need the context of an education to learn all that.

If I had gone to film school right after high school, I certainly would have gotten it a lot faster. I didn't start really delving into movies until a few years afterwards when I realized I needed to catch up on stuff. It depends on the person.

Tribeca: Before St. Nick and Ain't Them Bodies Saints, you were (and still are) an editor, working on films like Sun Don't Shine and Upstream Color. How did you make that transition to directing? Was it just a natural progression?

DL: I really always set out to be a director. I decided that's what I wanted to do and that's all I've ever wanted to pursue from when I was seven years old. Editing was a means to an end in that I needed to edit my own movies because no one

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