The 40-year-old American artist has spent the past decade oscillating between beloved independent and studio movies, ranging from Pete’s Dragon, a Disney live-action remake to A Ghost Story, an experiential cinematic meditation on death and memory.He helmed Robert Redford’s final film before retirement, the gentle crime caper The Old Man & the Gun.So, it shouldn’t surprise that Lowery’s latest film is yet another genre shift, a visually dazzling, provocative and sensual adaptation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, an anonymous 14th century poem of Arthurian legend. Lowery wrote, directed and edited the film.The Green Knight stars Dev Patel as Gawain, and the film follows a stripped back version of the character as he embarks on a quest to meet his end after impulsively agreeing to play the beheading game with the mythical, titular creature.With a cast that also includes Joel Edgerton, Alicia Vikander, Sean Harris, Kate Dickie and Sarita Choudhury, the film feels like a distillation of Lowery’s artistic focuses, which includes his preoccupation with the inevitability of death.Lowery talks to news.com.au about the challenging process of The Green Knight, the way Patel changed the character he wrote and why he’s never not thinking about the end.I read that you before you decided to adapt Gawain’s poem, you wanted to tell a story about someone on a quest. Why is the quest attractive to you as a narrative device?It’s a somewhat reductive answer, but I really like watching people travel across landscapes in movies. It’s one of my favourite tropes. There’s that Gus Van Sant movie called Gerry and most of the movie is just two actors walking across a landscape without talking. And I just love that.There’s something incredibly cinematic about seeing physical progress in a spatial environment. On a very basic level, it’s similar to watching someone dancing on film.A quest naturally lends itself to that.I thought to myself, ‘If I could make a movie about a knight on a horse, going from one place to the other, that’s all that needs to happen’.As soon as I started to dig into that, it got far more complex and then the original poem came into play, but initially, it was as simple as that.And for that journey, there are so many beautiful exterior locations, that can’t have been easy to shoot.The movie was really hard to make, and it was arduous and challenging, one of the hardest movies I’ve made. I never make it easy for myself, I always want to go to difficult locations, that’s number one on my list of things to do in every movie. ‘How can we make this harder? Let’s go someplace that’s really hard to shoot in.’But I also have to give great credit to Ireland, you don’t have to go too far to find an environment that looks incredibly epic. We shot the movie around Dublin and it was a 40-minute drive to someplace that feels like you’re on another planet 1000 years ago.Your version of Gawain is unlikeable – he’s kind of a prat, does impetuous things and makes baffling decisions. Were you ever afraid that people weren’t going to be able to relate to him or wouldn’t want to go on the journey with him?A little bit. That was one of the things that I intentionally set out to do. And I used the term prat to describe the character. Like, he wasn’t a truly awful person, but he was a bit of a cad.I wanted to make sure he could embody those qualities so that he’d have a journey to go on as a character. But I also knew he couldn’t be insufferable. Audiences had to empathise with him enough to watch the movie because he’s in pretty much frame.So, when I was casting the movie, that’s what I was looking for, someone who could win an audience’s sympathies no matter how bad their behaviour may be.When I met Dev, it was instantaneous, I knew that he would be someone on whose side the audience would take no matter what. Because you see in Gawain a person who has goodness in them, even if they’re not embodying it yet.Dev has oodles of irrepressible charisma. Was he always at the top of your list or were there a few different names you played around with?I didn’t have a list per se but I met with a lot of people. There was a lot of hemming and hawing on my part because any actor you cast will change the movie. And you consider the ways in which it’ll change when you cast somebody.I had an initial conversation with Dev while he was shooting The Personal History of David Copperfield and I really liked him and everything he had to say about the movie. But I was still sort of thinking about other people, looking at other actors.Then as soon as he was done shooting, we met up in person and the second I met him in person, that was the end of the story. The next day he was in the movie. I instantly could not imagine the movie without him.How did Dev changed that character?One of them was Dev wanting to bring more redeeming qualities to Gawain, to bring his naivete to the surface.At the time we shot it, Dev was in his late 20s and I said, ‘Play him like he’s in his late 20s but still acting like a 15-year-old, like someone who stopped maturing at 15 and is stuck living at his mum’s house’.Instead of being a truly toxic person, which at one point he was more of in the script, he was someone who has failed to launch completely.Then the other thing Dev brought was Gawain’s desire to achieve something. I remember when we were shooting the scene with the Green Knight, he brought something to be table I hadn’t even considered, which is that he’s standing there in front of all these other knights who he’d grown up hearing legends about.And the way he would carry himself when he knew those guys were looking at him would change – his gait, the way he projected himself was always changing.That’s something I hadn’t thought about. The way he comports himself with the Lady and Scavenger are two different versions of Gawain. You’re watching someone who’s figuring out how to project what he thinks other people need to see, instead of what he feels he should be.Whether through my own daftness, immaturity or focusing on production design, I hadn’t given it that much thought, and then watching him do that and talking to him about it, I was so glad he was approaching it from that perspective.That’s why you hire great actors, because they can bring that extra stuff.Exactly. So much of directing is hiring actors who will bring that to the table and saving you the trouble of having to think about it. In honesty, I probably wouldn’t think about it and the movie would be lesser for it.When you have a great actor like him or any of the actors in this film, they’re bringing so much to the table themselves and they make me look like a better director.Historically and literarily, Gawain was one of those legendary knights of the round table. Talk me through the process of stripping that character back so he’s not a hero yet.One of the great things about the poem is that it’s incredibly nuanced and is also part of a storytelling tradition of all these Arthurian knights who are going on quests and having adventures. There’s built-in context.That allows us to understand that Gawain can be this incredibly noble knight who’s done great things and also someone who is susceptible to classic human foibles. Because this movie is coming out in 2021, I felt, perversely, that we needed to have less nuance in terms of our characterisation of Gawain and let him become the Sir Gawain of legend over the course of the movie. It’s a classic zero to hero character arc, I suppose.He’s not Sir Gawain, he’s just Gawain. He hasn’t become a knight, he has no tale to tell. And by doing that, it makes all these other archaic storytelling traditions click into place, including the battle with the Green Knight.That’s hard to wrap your head around in a 21st century context, the idea of honour doesn’t make sense as it did then. Those ideas of honour and chivalry that would lead to one to engage in a game like that, cut off a knight’s head, knowing what would be in store for you.It’s hard to explain to a modern audience, but if you have someone like Gawain not knowing the ropes yet, it’s a little easier to swallow.It’s almost as if he engages in the game out of maybe hubris or an impulsive need to prove himself?He’s doing what he thinks a knight should do. And there is hubris to that because he thinks he can be a knight.But there is also a lack of self-awareness. He thinks that being the aggressor is the right thing to do. That solving a situation with violence is the traditionally masculine thing to do, and you see the second he does it, he knows he’s made a mistake.I love the idea of unpacking that ideal, which still persists to this day, that what an action hero should do is kill the bad guy. Here he tries to do that and realises that’s not the right way through life.Then he goes on this journey and the end point is supposed to be death, which is something you’ve explored in your previous works, obviously A Ghost Story. Is death a preoccupation of yours?Definitely. I know I’m not alone in that. There are many artists before me who are fixated on their own demise.But I think about it a lot and my place in the world as it relates to both my life and death is something I’m never not thinking about. And you see that come through very prevalently in A Ghost Story, and the ideas of legacy.And then in The Green Knight, the issue I was reconciling with was the idea of, ‘Is legacy even important if you’ve not lived a good life, and is integrity more important than legacy?’.The answer to that for me is yes. That’s the question I wanted to pose with this film.Is your answer to that question different on different days?It’s different on different days over the course of my life. Five years ago, I don’t think I had the maturity to say that. I spent my whole life working towards making movies and that can be viewed as a legacy, as the thing that will outlast me.But they’re entirely worthless if I’m not living my life the best way I can. And that’s more important than any of the work I do as a filmmaker, to better myself as a person and a human being, trying to be aware of my flaws and shortcomings, seeking ways to correct them. And that then feeds back into the work itself.The version of me that made A Ghost Story, couldn’t have made The Green Knight – hopefully, because I think I’ve matured to some extent.I definitely grew in that time and needed to reconcile with new aspects of life that I’d become aware of, so it’s not so much my perspective on mortality changes on different days, it’s more that each day I’m hopefully becoming a better version of myself.And by virtue of that progression, my perspective on mortality and myself grows, along with that sense of betterment.[Edited for length and clarity.]The Green Knight premieres on Amazon Prime Video on Friday, October 27Share your movies and TV obsessions | @wenleima
Source: Sun Herald
