It’s also of a piece with the much darker Mother Mary, a film that enters the pop music arena with a sullen and troubled disposition as the titular pop star played by Hathaway, Mother Mary, is driven to distraction and regret when one night she shows up on the front door of her estranged best friend, and one-time costume designer, Sam (Michaela Coel). The diva has a request to make about a dress… as well as a confession: one night, not so long ago, she saw a ghost. And it’s been by her side every night since.
While developing the iconography and look of Mother Mary, Lowery, who also wrote the film, admits he looked to pop stars past and present to understand the lifestyle.
“None of us knew what being a pop star was like, so we turned to the plethora of documentaries that exist to fill in the blanks for ourselves,” Lowery explains. “We turned to everything from Madonna’s Truth or Dare back in the ‘90s to, for me, a huge one was Taylor Swift’s Reputation tour film that was on Netflix. All of these influences went into the cauldron, but then we were also always trying to think of how we can make the sort of platonic ideal of a pop star—a pop star who can represent all things for all people.”
He adds, “For that purpose, we looked away from music and turned to fashion. We turned to other forms of iconography, including of course religious iconography, to try to figure out what this particular pop star’s language was.”
Curiously, Lowery seems to omit the one most obvious influences on Mother Mary: Lady Gaga, an iconoclastic artist that like Mary in the film is renowned for her extreme fashion choices and dabbling in Catholic imagery. Although Hathaway’s Catholic imagery takes on an added menace in the horror-adjacent context of the film. Even then, however, the filmmaker is quick to point out there is an intentional irony since he and Hathaway strove to make the woman under the dress seem soft-spoken and shaken to the point of humility.
“I find a lot of corollaries between the two sides of that coin that apply both in this movie and in life,” Lowery says of the duality between horror and religion, the frightening and the divine. “One of the important things for me when I was making this was to distinguish between the tone of the movie, as it relates to art and pop and pop culture, and the tone of Mother Mary the character. Because there’s an intersection of the two, certainly, but they are two different things. The tone of Mother Mary was less outra. She’s a pop star who embraces her audience in a very specific way, and the movie has a much thornier quality to it than she herself does, and it was really important to find that balance.”
