The Sto­ry of a Scene: David Low­ery on A Ghost Story

It’s always refresh­ing to see film­mak­ers try­ing new things or tak­ing a dif­fer­ent direc­tion, as is the case with David Low­ery and his odd, adorable and dev­as­tat­ing lat­est, A Ghost Sto­ry. Long takes and a boxy aspect ratio replace the more stan­dard Hol­ly­wood style of his most recent work, Ain’t Them Bod­ies Saints and Pete’s Drag­on, to tell the sto­ry of time. Here, Low­ery explains how he planned and shot a key scene in A Ghost Sto­ry, which encap­su­lates the whole film with del­i­cate and grip­ping immediacy.

“The pie scene is four-and-a-half min­utes, one shot, and the shot before that is about five min­utes, so between the two it’s almost a 10-min scene. It was script­ed: she comes home, she looks at the note, she looks at the pie, she does some dish­es, she throws the cof­fee fil­ter away, she looks at the cof­fee fil­ter in the trash, she sees the pie, she starts eat­ing it, and then she runs to the bath­room. That’s what the action was. We knew it would be one shot, and it’s meant to be an emo­tion­al scene. I want­ed her grief to be rep­re­sent­ed by some­thing that felt tan­gi­ble and gut­tur­al, and eat­ing is such a phys­i­cal act – it’s a very reveal­ing thing. And it seemed to me that it would be a very mean­ing­ful way to con­vey someone’s all con­sum­ing sense of loss, to watch them lit­er­al­ly con­sume some­thing to the point of excess.

“Rooney was wor­ried about it because she told me she’d nev­er eat­en pie before… I was like, ​‘I don’t believe you! What do you do on Thanks­giv­ing?!’ Maybe she was lying, maybe she wasn’t. Either way, I took it at face val­ue and she asked if she could eat mac­a­roni and cheese, because she loves mac­a­roni and cheese. I was like, ​‘No, that’d be dis­gust­ing!’ And she was like, ​‘Okay, can I eat choco­late chip cook­ies?’ and I said, ​‘No, that’d be too fun­ny, it’s got­ta be a pie and we’ll make you what­ev­er pie you want.’ My pro­duc­er James (M John­ston) is also a veg­an chef, and Rooney’s veg­an, so he made four dif­fer­ent types of pie for her so she could decide which one she want­ed. She end­ed up going for this gluten-free, almost sug­ar-free choco­late pie.

“So we did the first shot, which is of her com­ing home, and we rehearsed that very thor­ough­ly. The block­ing was very spe­cif­ic, the idea was that she would come from point A, to point B, to point C, to point D, and ulti­mate­ly wind up at the pie. She’s comes in sort of like a zom­bie, very reserved, and she has that moment where she’s look­ing into the trash can and you start to see some emo­tion on her face. We had two takes of that, then we took the cam­era and repo­si­tioned it, and basi­cal­ly once we had the com­po­si­tion cor­rect, we just let her eat the pie. I said to her to eat as much as she could, try to eat the whole thing, and when you’re done, we’re done – that’s it. So if it had tak­en 10 min­utes, it would’ve been a 10-minute scene. It took as long as it need­ed to, and we did one take.

“The day before we shot that scene, my cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er and I went into the house to try to fig­ure out the best way to shoot [the scene]. The instinct would be to maybe get clos­er, and we talked about doing a dol­ly shot and actu­al­ly push­ing in as she’s eat­ing. Some­thing about that just felt wrong, like it would become fun­ny, or gross, or obtru­sive. So we decid­ed it would just be a locked-off shot. We hadn’t fig­ured out where it would be yet, we knew that the pie was gonna be on the table, because we’d already shot the scene where the land­la­dy brings it over. But then when Rooney came in that day, I asked her ​‘What would you do in this scene? What would your nat­ur­al instinct be?’ and she said, ​‘I would sit down on the floor, prob­a­bly.’ So that’s what we end­ed up doing. It’s one of those things where we had a pret­ty clear idea of how to do it, but her input real­ly sealed the deal.

“I’m a big fan of sim­plic­i­ty, I don’t like com­pli­cat­ed plots. I would rather have one shot that lasts a while and tells you a lot of infor­ma­tion over a long peri­od of time, than have a lot of lit­tle pieces. Real­ly it’s about what­ev­er is right for the scene, but I do real­ly enjoy hav­ing a shot that you’re able to get lost in, where you can let your mind wan­der and go some place else, and come back and the shot is still going on. The thing I love about film as an art­form is that it’s entire­ly defined by time. It can be non-lin­ear, you can speed things up, slow things down, you can use time how­ev­er you like. But one of those usages is just let­ting time be its own thing, and when you hold on a sin­gle image for how­ev­er long, to let real time play out, it starts to define how we’re pro­cess­ing the infor­ma­tion, and I love let­ting that take precedence.

“There’s at least one scene in the movie where the ghost is just sit­ting down and we’re hold­ing on him for a sol­id minute, and noth­ing seems to be hap­pen­ing, but actu­al­ly a lot of things are hap­pen­ing. We’re wait­ing for some­thing to hap­pen, and that’s all impor­tant, that’s all part of the sto­ry. On a lot of movies, you don’t have that chance, you have to tell a more tra­di­tion­al sto­ry and you need to keep every­thing mov­ing along pret­ty quick­ly, but this was an oppor­tu­ni­ty to use time to its fullest extent.”

A Ghost Sto­ry is released 11 August. Read our review here.