I like to make movies in Texas because that's where I learned how to do it. I know the industry there, I know the people, I know the crews. But it's hard to make films in Texas.
— David Lowery
I guess you can't really turn a camera on outside in Texas without getting Terrence Malick comparisons.
With the transcendent or supernatural, they help us contextualize our own lives while we are here on this earth. On a narrative level, as a storyteller, they are a wonderful tool and technique by which to explore those hopes, those fears, those existential dilemmas that we all face from time to time.
I want to live a very positive and optimistic life that has a wonderful outlook on the future and the impact that I will have on the world and the people around me.
We build our legacy piece by piece, and maybe the whole world will remember you or maybe just a couple of people, but you do what you can to make sure you're still around after you're gone.
I learned to not separate writing, shooting, and editing, it's all sort of one big mess of creative output.
I was raised in a deeply Catholic family. There was a sense that everything we were doing was to prepare ourselves for an afterlife in heaven. In my teenage years, that became less important to me. Eventually, that turned into agnosticism, which became atheism.
When you cut from a long shot to a close shot, you're doing it for a reason, or if you let something stay in long shot for a long take. On the short films, I was teaching myself how to express something personal cinematically, how to use the language of film the best I could.
I love animals and their behavior. I watch cat videos all the time.
I certainly did not envisage making a Disney movie. The most I hoped for was to be able to pay my bills. I was not a go-getter. I was very type-B.
I know I have trouble watching my own films.
I'm not searching for the meaning of life, but I'm looking for a meaning within my life.
I don't think I'm the best screenwriter in the world. It's just important to me to write my movies so I'm personally invested in them.
If your financiers care about the movie, they will be involved in a very constructive fashion, but it can get out of hand very quickly, and that is something to be aware of in any type of filmmaking.
I love dialogue, but I'm also terrified of it. In all my movies, I've done my best to cut out as much dialogue as possible. I love the spaces in those silences. Even in 'Pete's Dragon,' I was so happy that the first twenty minutes have about five or six lines of dialogue.
I'm happy to keep making Disney movies.
I find everything in life a little bit sad, but I also find a great deal of hope everywhere I look.
There is a palpable sense of history in the homes that I choose to occupy. I think that's one of the reasons I gravitate towards old homes: I really like that sense of history and that sense that I am one step in a very long process that trails out in both directions around me - before me and ahead of me.
I try to live my life with grace and through grace even though I don't particularly believe in the divine - and that's a direct result of my having been raised Catholic.
The image of a bedsheet ghost standing all alone in an empty house was something I was obsessed with. I really wanted to make a film about that image, and I was waiting for the right story to come along. When it did, I did my best to honor that image.
I never rejected religion, but it just ceased to be an overriding concern in my life.
'Ain't Them Bodies Saints' wound up becoming a love story even though it was not initially meant to be one.
I can't watch my movies at their premieres - I learned that lesson the hard way.
I'm a deeply romantic person, nostalgic to a fault.
The films I love are very precise, and every shot means something; every shot should convey something new.
One of my biggest regrets is that I didn't finish college.
In my darkest moments, I have not eaten an entire pie, but I have turned to other baked goods to find solace.
I have a longstanding, unapologetic love for Ke$ha.
Obviously 'Pete's Dragon' is more commercial than 'A Ghost Story,' but when making them, I'm just trying to tell a story that matters to me, that ultimately would satisfy me as a moviegoer. Because watching movies is my favorite thing to do. I watch a lot of them.
'Peter Pan' is a beloved property. It's a property that was brought to the screen many, many times before, so one has to not only justify the reasons why one might make a 'Peter Pan' movie in 2018, 2019 or whatever, but you also have to do justice to the source material.
With 'Pete's Dragon,' Disney was very excited about the movie I wanted to make; they were very supportive of it, and it was a smooth process. I was really surprised by that.
I realized that filmmaking is an eminently scalable act. No matter how big or how small, there's joys and stresses that will all scale themselves magnificently to fit the production.
I have so many aspirations and interests that would not fit within the Disney brand. I need to make sure I'm engaging those proclivities as well.
I have a very short attention span, which is funny. I mean, you'd watch me and think that I don't, but I actually do.
I often conflate the domestic and the cosmic on a daily basis.
A great sense of morality was instilled in me through my upbringing in the Catholic faith - particularly because my father is a moral theologian. And morality is something I believe exists separate from faith, as an intrinsic human quality that one should aspire to understand and participate in.
I make movies to be watched the way I want to watch them, and I want to watch them in movie theatres.
It's something that you pick up at a history class in college, the idea that history and time is something to which we can't even hold a candle to. We, as human beings, are just a small element in the overarching sweep of narrative history. That really had a profound effect on me, that realization.
I have a repository of titles I like in my head, and I am always looking for a movie that I can put one on.
Grief reveals itself in the most mundane activities, like eating. It's never when you're looking at old pictures.
I love films that are more random and chaotic, finding moments and capturing them.
When I was a kid, Santa, the Tooth Fairy, my stuffed animals - they were real. There is the tremendous suspension of disbelief that you have as a child. It's harder as an adult.
I grew up in a deeply Catholic home. Our parents always encouraged us to march to our own drums, though, so some of us are still Catholic and some are not. That's always going to be a part of me though; little bits of it trickle into my work. Whether it's an embrace or a rejection, I'm not always sure, but I can't avoid it.
At the end of the day on 'Pete's Dragon,' if we didn't nail something, we could come back and pick it up later. I always knew there was a safety net built in that Disney would not let the movie fail. But in this case, with 'A Ghost Story,' it was all on the line.
I'm an atheist. I don't believe in the afterlife, but I do believe in ghosts.
If I can't finish a screenplay, if I can't get to the last page as a writer, it probably means it's not a good movie for me to make.
Time goes by so slowly when you're a child, and then, as an adult, it goes by in the blink of an eye.
I like being able to go to the cinema and sit and spend time observing something without thinking about plot or what one character is saying. I feel like I'm able to connect on a much more profound level.
The only part of 'A Ghost Story' that was reactionary was a temporal one. I had spent so much time making 'Pete's Dragon' that I was really impatient and excited to make something new. When this project presented itself, I was ready to jump right into it. I started shooting two days after 'Pete's Dragon.'
I never put a premium on making a living. It was never one of those things that was important to me.
