David Lowery is a tease. On his laptop, which sits in plain sight, is an up-to-date spreadsheet of every film he’s seen, in what format, and where. (If it’s in bold, he saw it in a cinema.)

Lowery is a prime candidate for Letterboxd hip, and we tell him so when we meet at the Big Screen Symposium in New Zealand (organized by Script to Screen), where he is a guest speaker. He agrees (“Letterboxd would be my favorite site if I wasn’t a director”), but will continue to hold out. “I love film criticism, I think it’s a beautiful art-form. I make movies to be part of the conversation about movies.

“But it’s also a conversation that, once I’ve made the movie, I can’t partake in anymore. Some filmmakers can read about their own work and are fine with it. But for me, I get too caught up in it and it’s important for me to keep those blinders on and to not engage with the discussion about my movies because I’ve had my say. The movie is what I’ve had to say and after that I find it almost inappropriate for me to continue the discourse.”

So we tell Lowery that, ever since A Ghost Story was released in 2017, the film has made a nice home for itself at Letterboxd, with its fair share of fans and repeat viewers (“That’s amazing to hear!”). We wonder how he feels about the slow-burning reaction to the film?

“I’m doing a lot of press for The Old Man & the Gun right now and going to a lot of screenings, and the common refrain is ‘The Old Man & the Gun’s great but, man, A Ghost Story is something else!” And I’ve become aware that that might be the movie that defines me more than any other and that’s fine because it’s the movie I’m the most proud of. I certainly know that it has struck a chord.”

In your Big Screen Symposium keynote, you talked about how A Ghost Story came out of a sort of existential crisis in which you realized you might not become the world’s greatest filmmaker, or the best, so you were questioning why you made films at all. A Ghost Story came from wanting to make a small film about what a life means. An act of anti-legacy, if you will. But the film has become accidentally beloved, which means that, in fact, you’ve possibly created a legacy after all.
David Lowery: What a fascinating paradox. I mean the only thing I can say about that is that there’s no way to plan that. There’s no way for me to set out to make a film that will work the way A Ghost Story worked and it would be foolish to try to do so.

All I can do is make the movies the best that I can. I know that The Old Man & the Gun will be beloved by certain people but it won’t have the effect that A Ghost Story did. But I wouldn’t have known that two years ago. I wouldn’t have known that these two films would both function in such different ways. I would have probably assumed The Old Man & the Gun would be the more important one because of Robert Redford being in it. But A Ghost Story was the more important one for me to make, that’s certainly true, and maybe there’s something to be found in the fact that when you feel so compelled to do something it is because the subject matter at hand is more universal than you might understand in the moment.

Pete’s Dragon certainly is the most propulsive body of water that I have constructed so far in that the story moves along at a certain clip—and it needs to because it’s a certain type of movie. But A Ghost Story is a small pond that a rock got thrown into and that’s a type of experience that I really value when I go to the cinema.

It’s a very, like, wishy-washy metaphor but it really works for me, I really think about the way my movies move in of a natural flow and very often those flows calm down to just pure stasis and there’s great beauty in that.

You also made some really specific artistic decisions in the film. Was it shot in 4:3? [Lowery shakes his head firmly.] No?
It’s basically technically 1.33:1 but there’s a millimeter of difference between that and 4:3.

So how do those technical artistic decisions link in with the storytelling?
They were very intrinsic. I think the very first line, let me see. If I open up the script for A Ghost Story… [Lowery fires up his laptop.] I’ve been telling people this but I don’t actually know if it’s true or not… [Opens a draft of the script.] Yeah, so the first line of script says the whole movie will be shot and projected in a 1.33:1 aspect ratio. And that’s been there from the very beginning. So those things are very conscientious. Or, if I go down here, like, let’s see, yeah, like I’m getting very specific about “camera pans left”. “We hold for a long time.” I think there was a draft where I actually wrote that we hold for an entire minute. I get very technical.

Well then, we need to talk about pie.
Yes.

Four minutes of pie. What does it say in the script about that? Does it say “Rooney Mara eats pie for four minutes”?
I mean it’s pretty specific [reading aloud]: “She walks past the ghost, she enters all in black, she goes to the sink, sees a pour-over filter, takes out the coffee grounds, throws them out, turns on the sink, rinses out the ceramic filter, lets the sink run for too long. Then she grabs a fork and knife and returns to the table, cuts a piece of pie and hungrily eats it down and then she eats the rest of the pie straight out of the dish.”

When you’re getting that specific in your writing, what’s going on in your head? Are you seeing it?
Definitely I am seeing a version of it, I mean if you look at what’s written there it describes her sitting down at the table. But when we got it together to shoot the scene, Rooney wanted to sit on the floor and that made perfect sense, emotionally speaking, and so we refocused the scene to that, but even when she was sitting at the table, still the language and the grammar was going to be the same.

What is the process of developing the scene once you have your actors attached? Because once an actor is on board, they bring their own sense of their character to a scene. Once they read the script—no matter when filming starts—the work begins, doesn’t it?
It really does, it really does. I mean, A Ghost Story was so fast that there wasn’t much time between Rooney reading the script and her showing up to shoot that scene, like, it was very quick. A couple of weeks, I think.

In a way that’s even more extraordinary in of the way that that film is still growing and finding its audience.
I mean it was interesting looking at that page in the script [the pie scene] and seeing how thoroughly descriptive it was—and if you look at the whole screenplay the movie is very close to it. But at the same time we were just fumbling in the dark every single day and trying things out and just really looking to figure out how to make it, how to cut to the core of what we felt we were after. And we could never put a name on that. We never knew exactly what we were after, but we were collectively working towards it.

Intermission: David Lowery’s five favorite ghost films.

During your Big Screen Symposium keynote, you took time to talk through the first scenes of your new film, The Old Man & the Gun, and the long process of finding a strong opening, in which the relationship between Forrest (Robert Redford) and Jewel (Sissy Spacek) is established. You took a lot of inspiration for this from the diner scene in Michael Mann’s Thief.

When you have more preparation time with your actors, how does that affect the script’s development? What is the process between the draft you send them and the final version that gets filmed?
For example that scene in the diner that we talked about yesterday at the , that seemed to not change. That was, I wrote it and that’s what we shot, and [Redford and Spacek] illuminated it but they worked with that material.

But then there are other scenes that they had a lot of input on and Sissy, I give her all the credit for a jewelry store scene in the movie that she latched onto early on. It was a very short scene in the script and she saw a way in which to expand it that she felt was necessary for the character. It was 100% right, she was 100% right about that and it’s one of my favorite scenes in the movie—but it wouldn’t even have been in the movie had it not been for her.

Presumably A-list actors are often looking for ways to expand their scenes, but for female actors, who continue to be under-represented in strong roles on screen, it’s even more important?
Definitely, definitely, definitely. That’s an interesting perspective. I hadn’t thought about it from that perspective. Because I always feel like I’m asking the actors to do too much, like, “that big scene? Let’s get rid of that so you can take a break tomorrow.” I mean, I never do that, but in my mind I always feel like I need to remove scenes so they don’t have to work so hard. I always want to give them a break because they’re doing so much.

But certainly, especially a movie called The Old Man & the Gun that’s about men, it was great to find any opportunity in that film to give precedence to the female characters. And so I’m so thankful that Sissy took that opportunity. She has great scenes in the movie. She’s in quite a bit of the film but she really used that scene to define who her character was for her. And then because it worked for her it works for the audience as well and for me.

And does also reading something like that flip a switch in your brain that maybe wasn’t flipped?
Definitely. I mean it’s very important to be open about the fact that that switch had not been flipped, I just took for granted the fact that I work with a lot of great women. But I certainly never thought about it in a cultural perspective and I never thought about from a woman’s perspective. But now I am and I feel like I’m a much better person for doing so.

A nerdy question: in your wildest dream when you began being a filmmaker could you have imagined making not one but two films with the great Robert Redford?
No. But also because when I first started making movies those weren’t the movies I was interested in, you know? I wanted to make, from an early age, Star Wars movies, so I didn’t even become aware of Robert Redford until I became aware of the Sundance Film Festival when I was eleven or twelve or thirteen.

And so for me the goal was always to be associated with him through his festival. The goal for me to be a part of what he’d created. His films came later. I got to know him more as a director than as an actor because I saw Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid shockingly late in life… So working with him twice now I recognize the weight of it but it certainly wasn’t on my checklist of things to do. It’s really been a nice surprise to fall into alignment with him in the way that I have.

What’s the best thing about working with him? What do we not know about the way that he works that you would like people to know?
I feel like everyone sort of expects this and it’s not going to be a surprise but that it’s just so laid back and fun. He just really likes to have fun. He’s very, very playful and that twinkle in his eye that we know and love on the big screen is there when you’re working with him because he loves doing what he does. And he doesn’t take himself seriously. He takes the work seriously but he doesn’t take himself seriously and neither do I and so I think one of the reasons we get along so well is because we both are just having fun doing it.

Intermission: David Lowery’s five favorite Redford performances.

I wanting to see Clash of the Titans. I was really into Greek mythology and so I knew that Clash of the Titans was a Greek mythology film and had Medusa in it and so finally we rented this TV and VCR and I went and got Clash of the Titans from the video store and just watched it four times. Like, I just watched it over and over again because I knew that I only had that one weekend to see it.

When you were making Pete’s Dragon was there a sense that you wanted kids to have a similar experience?
Definitely. I just really tried to make a movie that I would have loved when I was seven. That was the barometer. I feel very in touch with me as a seven year old! I feel like I ceased to mature at the age of seven and so it’s not hard for me to tap into that mindset and I just would think about the things that I liked and often what I liked at seven years old were the movies that would scare me. Or that would provoke some emotion in me that I didn’t know how to handle.

I was terrified of Ghostbusters. I had seen the beginning of it at a friend’s house and it terrified me but I couldn’t stop thinking about it and so that was like a really exciting thing to me. The idea of finding that balance of fear and scariness to inject into a movie that would have hooked me at that age, even though it would also have traumatized me to a certain extent. And then also making sure that it was a movie that I as a 37-year-old would also really, really like.