He used to sleep in his car. Now he’s judging Australia’s richest film prize
Hollywood director David Lowery knows what it’s like to struggle, which is why he loves the idea of giving away $140,000 to a young filmmaker at MIFF.
By Karl Quinn
David Lowery, director of Pete’s Dragon, A Ghost Story and The Green Knight, is in Melbourne to help judge the $140,000 Bright Horizons competition.Credit: Photograph by Chris Hopkins
David Lowery is an acclaimed writer-director of art house movies such as A Ghost Story, The Green Knight and Ain’t Them Bodies Saints, who also has a foot in the Hollywood mainstream with Pete’s Dragon and the forthcoming Star Wars series Skeleton Crew. But he remembers full well how it feels to be a novice filmmaker struggling to make ends meet, and the huge difference a film festival prize can make.
And that, he says, is why he snatched up the invitation to come to Australia and serve as a judge for the Melbourne International Film Festival’s (MIFF) Bright Horizons competition, which offers a cash prize of $140,000 – one of the richest on the planet – for the winning director.
“I was living in my car for a period in 2007, 2008 in Texas,” the 43-year-old recalls. “I was working on lots of other people’s movies, travelling around, helping friends out. But in between, I didn’t have my own place, and I would just sleep in my car near the airport.
Lowery’s time in Melbourne will be spent doing two things: watching movies and running. Credit: Chris Hopkins
“It was a rough period. And then I made my first feature, which was set in an abandoned house, so I would just live in that abandoned house while we were shooting. There was no heating and it was the middle of winter, but it was complete luxury by comparison.”
That film, St Nick, won him a handful of awards, and the cash that came with them was a lifesaver.
“It allowed me to persevere, not just as an artist, but as a human being,” he says.
Lowery and his fellow jurors – Ivan Sen (creator of the Mystery Road franchise), costume designer Deborah L. Scott (an Oscar winner for Titanic), Indonesian producer Yulia Evina Bhara, and actor Jillian Nguyen (The Clearing, Shayda) – will select a winner from 14 features by first- or second-time directors. The winner will be announced on Saturday night.
Oakes Fegley and the creature in Pete’s Dragon, Lowery’s 2016 enviro-family film for Disney.Credit: AP
Lowery has served on juries before, but “they have never come with a prize quite so substantial as this one”, he notes. “It feels like there’s a great amount of responsibility, but it’s not pressure. It’s a joyous responsibility.”
He arrived on Sunday with his filmmaker wife, Augustine Frizzell, and by Wednesday morning, when he spoke to this masthead, Lowery had seen all but one of the 14 competition films. He’d also squeezed in five others, including Steve (12 Years a Slave) McQueen’s 4½-hour documentary Occupied City, with more to come.
“I am a cinema addict,” he says. “Everyone was asking me, ‘What are you gonna do when you’re visiting Australia, what are you gonna go see?’ And I’m like, ‘I’m gonna see a lot of movies, and I’m gonna go running’, which is all I ever do.”
Lowery started running in high school to keep fit, but got serious about it in his late 20s. Now he runs between five and 10 kilometres every day, “and once a week I’ll go for a much longer run, anywhere from 20 to 30k”.
He’s done 14 marathons; he ran New York and Dallas last year, and Austin and Rome so far this year. “I’m not fast, so my best time is three hours 37 minutes, but I was happy with it.”
He’s more than happy with where his career has taken him lately, too. Filming a couple of episodes of a Star Wars show might seem a far remove from his usual terrain, but he insists it makes complete sense.
“The reason I got into making movies was because I was seven years old, I loved Star Wars, I read a book about how Star Wars was made, and I decided this is what I want to spend my life doing,” he says. “And so all these decades later, to go on set with Jawas and an X-Wing fighter was surreal, and the degree of circuitousness felt truly profound.”
And if things went the other way, and he found himself living in the back of his car again?
“I’ve never forgotten that, it looms large,” he says of his days of penury. “But it’s important for me to remember that in spite of the fact I was living in my car, I was still making movies.
“It didn’t stop me from doing what I love. And if I’m ever in that position again, I know it’s not going to stop me from expressing myself in the only way I know how.”
The Melbourne International Film Festival runs until Sunday, August 25. Details: miff.com.au
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