‘The Old Man & the Gun’ Director David Lowery on The Hidden Gems in His Filmography

In the upcoming film The Old Man & the Gun, Robert Redford plays an aging bank robber, Forrest Tucker, whose thrill in pulling off an elegant job — nobody gets hurt, nobody shouts, the witnesses after the fact marvel at what a gentleman this thief was — fuels a lifetime of crime and living one step ahead of the law. That is, when he’s not getting caught and having to break out of prison. This gentleman bandit eventually finds a kindred spirit in a woman played by Sissy Spacek. It’s a light near-fable of a tale, of a world that maybe only ever exists in the movies, where the thrill of cobs-and-robbers can be had without any harm coming to anyone. Redford and Spacey are fantastic, and presiding over the entire vision is director David Lowery, the young and incredibly accomplished young cinematic mind who’s already made a heck of a stamp on the world of cinema.

In 2013, Lowery hit Sundance — the film festival started by one Robert Redford, named after one of his most famous characters, no less — like a storm with the lyrical Ain’t Them Bodies Saints. The film paired Casey Affleck and Rooney Mara as lover-outlaws who end up separated and living with the dark consequences of their violent actions. (Pretty much the mirror opposite of The Old Man & the Gun, actually.) Pete’s Dragon was next, a departure in tone, subject matter, and overhead costs (Lowery jumped from a $4 million indie budget on Saints to $65 million Walt Disney dollars for Pete), remaking the 1977 original about a boy and the magical dragon he befriends. In 2017, A Ghost Story returned him to the indie realm, and to Mara and Affleck, whose quiet story of love and loss opens up into something more existential, like a Terrence Malick movie was bursting froth beneath the cracks and crevices of a talky indie bummer.

Through it all, Lowery’s films have been singular, emotionally literate creations that suggest a filmmaker who’s only beginning to show what he can do on screen. Decider got a chance to talk to him about The Old Man & the Gun and also got him to look back at his filmography and pick out the moments, characters, or even the single shots that he thinks best sum up his work.

Decider.com: [The Old Man & the Gun] is such a charismatic movie with Robert Redford at the center of it. Do you feel like, with an actor like Redford that, you’re free to do more with the character who … you know, he’s a bank robber but the audience is obviously gonna wanna be on his side. 

David Lowery: Completely. You just know that he will be beloved. It’s really hard to get those edges any rougher because he just has this innate ability to charm someone. Even when he’s playing a scoundrel, or, my favorite Redford movie is Downhill Racer, where he’s an outright misogynist, and yet you still love him because there something inevitable about him that makes him a movie star, and that’s why he’s a movie star because you can’t help but love him.

The vibe between Forrest Tucker and Detective Hunt (Casey Affleck) in the movie is such a cool cat-and-mouse, but there’s obviously a lot of respect there, something you see in other movies to some degree. Were there movies that you had in mind that shared that same vibe?

I feel like, especially for someone of my generation, you start with Heat. That’s like the first great crime film you see that involves that cat and mouse chase. Then there are so many others but the thing that i felt about this was in almost every instance, the cat ultimately catches the mouse. There’s that bittersweet sense of inevitability to that and you always kinda wish the robber gets away. At the end of Heat, you kinda wish that Neil McCauley (Robert De Niro) somehow managed to get on that plane with Amy Brenneman. I just thought, “Well, if I’m making one of these movies, maybe I’ll make the movie where he does get away.” And then to add to that, maybe the detective can be the avatar for me, the audience member who doesn’t want him to get caught, and have him actually be the one who lets him go. And that just was delightful to me.

Going back into your other films, were there things from these movies — moments, or characters — that you feel like you want people to be able to go back and revisit? That may not have gotten the attention that you would’ve hoped they would the first time?

It’s tough. I haven’t seen Ain’t Them Bodies Saints in over five years at this point. Thinking back, what would I want people to go back and discover in that movie?

Is there anything that sticks out at you, maybe just a scene?

Well, the thing about every movie I make, I feel like I can distill down to one image that is at the core of the film, and the rest of the movie is there to give that image a reason for being. Or else that image gives the movie a reason for being, but all the other scenes are there just to get [that central image] out there and get it made. And for Ain’t Them Bodies Saints it really came down to that shot of Casey [Affleck] and Rooney [Mara] being escorted down the hill and being pulled apart. I mean, that was the movie for me. Nothing else in the movie is as important as that moment. The entire story is in that scene and in their performances.

And so every movie I’ve made has that one image like that. In that case, it’s that one, but the other scene in that movie that really still resonates with me, when I think about it: there’s a scene in the film towards the end where Casey is trying to make his way back to Rooney and he hijacks a car, driven by a young man played by Rami Malek, and that scene really captures everything I wanted to do with the film in a narrative sense. It’s about someone trying to self mythologize and failing. I love watching characters fail. There’s something beautifully tragic to it, and that scene is all about a guy who is bought into his own legend, and in that scene he realizes that he didn’t quite nail it. It didn’t quite work out the way he thought it was gonna work out. And I can poke holes in that movie all day long, because it’s my right as a director, but I feel like that scene is the one scene in the film — in addition to that one shot — that we nailed it. That scene is the movie for me.

Is there a moment in Pete’s Dragon that feels that way for you?

Pete’s Dragon is funny. I had to go back to the movie recently because it’s gonna be airing on television and they asked me if I wanted to supervise the TV edit, where we had to cut ten minutes out of it. And I looked at that as an interesting exercise in seeing if maybe cutting ten minutes out of the movie would make it better, and I didn’t wanna cut anything. I was looking through and I was like “This is a pretty good movie.I’m pretty happy with it.” There’s a couple of things, we did have to cut ten minutes out of it so we artfully did that, but I was really pleased with it.

The whole sequence in the beginning of the film with Pete and Elliot in the woods where there’s no dialogue, it’s just a boy and his pet dragon just having fun in the woods. That really was like my thesis for the beginning of the film. I really wanted to go in there and just present that idealized version of what it’s like when you’re a kid just playing in the woods all day long with your friends. And it’s got a very Calvin & Hobbes vibe, and I feel like most of my childhood feels like the way I remember Calvin & Hobbes being, like that’s how I remember things. It’s a memory of what those long summer childhood days were like. And I just love that we were able to make a Disney movie that captured that and that had such a long period of time with no dialogue. It’s an almost silent film for a good 10-15 minute stretch there before Pete runs into the humans. And I’m incredibly proud that we managed to stick to our guns and make that happen and that Disney supported us in doing that because the structure of that movie is very strange, normally it would instantly have him meeting humans and you’d have that conflict., but just to have that idyllic period and have it last as long as it does, have these long takes of him climbing the tree, or in the cave with Elliot, that was really special to me. It really meant a lot and the fact that we pulled that off is just great.

In A Ghost Story, was there some satisfaction to the idea that you’re drawing an audience in with one concept, even down to the title of the film, and then it becomes such a different thing?

It was a real tightrope walk with that movie, because it’s so high concept. From the very beginning I knew at the very least, this movie will have a great poster. It has a great image to get people in. And the challenge we set before ourselves was: can we make a movie that exceeds that conceit? That takes that conceit and not only does justice to it but takes it in a place audiences couldn’t have foreseen? Because otherwise it would’ve just been a stunt. It would’ve been so easy to just ride on the sheet-tails, I suppose, of that costume, but we really wanted to push it as far as we possibly could. And there were moments on set constantly where I wasn’t sure we’d be able to pull it off, where that costume on set just felt like it was sucking up all the air in the room and I wasn’t convinced that movie could sustain itself for more than 15 minutes. But we took our time with it, we really spent a lot of time just making sure we weren’t wasting the opportunity in the storytelling. And then trusting the script. Trusting there was something in the script we all loved. That even though we were all constantly faced with this incredibly overpowering dominant image of this bedsheet ghost, that there was a story around him that would ultimately make him recede in in conceit. He’s always there, but you stop thinking about him as a guy in a sheet after 15 minutes or so.

Did you have any anticipation that the scene with Rooney’s character and the pie was gonna become such a thing?

There was a point once we had it in the edit where I realized this would inevitably become a meme on the Internet and I knew there’d be GIFs of it floating around. It’s probably the scene I’m the most proud of in my directorial career because it was so tempting to get in there and mess with it, to make it a dolly shot or to even add an edit to it or close up, but to just get the camera back and let her carry it and sustain it for as long as she felt she needed to. It was magical watching that happen on set. And so as I was watching it I knew it’d be a scene that would define the film. I didn’t know to what extent, I halfway thought that it would define the film where people would walk out in the middle of the scene, but the fact that it worked on an emotional level for the vast majority of the audiences was very meaningful to me and I embraced the meme-ification of it, even though I try not to pay attention to it.

It’s one of those shots that you don’t realize is happening until halfway through—

Exactly. Because it’s so simple. We don’t make a big deal about it, we don’t announce it’s about to happen, and even now immediately out of sundance it became the movie where Rooney Mara eats pie for five minutes and so people would go to the movie expecting that to happen and within a minute, it defeats all expectations. It conquers all expectations because it’s too simple. It’s not a grandstanding moment so there’s a lot of anticipation for that scene in the movie, it instantly overcomes those anticipations and you just have to go with it and watch it and hopefully feel the feelings that are naturally evoked by watching Rooney Mara eat pie for five minutes.

Where to stream Ain't Them Bodies Saints

Where to stream Pete's Dragon

Where to stream A Ghost Story