Dear friends,
Mother Mary is my third A24 film, and as such I have had three opportunities to write this opening-day letter.
In previous editions, I’ve traced the movie at hand back to my childhood: A Ghost Story had its precedent in the first short film I ever made at age seven; The Green Knight began with my siblings and me making our cardboard armor and spray-painting it silver.
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For Mother Mary, however, its roots seem to terminate in the earliest days of my adulthood. Yes, I can trace the Catholic iconography back to my Sunday school days, and the film's gothic sensibilities were certainly prevalent in high school, but I can find no evidence of this story, these characters, or their plight in any part of my biography prior to my early twenties. Perhaps this may mean that I am growing up - and resulting, have maybe, at long last, made a somewhat grown-up movie. I'll let you be the judge of that, and I am sure I am on the precipice of a massive regression; but until that occurs, let me share with you one of the film's key points of provenance. |
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By now, you may have heard that Mother Mary was conceived whilst making The Green Knight, and that it was born of my love of pop music. But another formative wellspring occurred in Costa Rica, in December of 2008, in the mountain village of Monteverde, where one night I awoke to find that my upper right wisdom tooth had cracked wide open.
Now, I wasn’t actually aware that it had cracked open until the next day, when I made an emergency visit to a dentist. All I was aware of that night was that this pain was unlike any I’d ever felt before; it was deep and profound, and awful in the most etymologically accurate sense, in that it left me in utter awe at its enormity. This pain seemed less like a sensation and more like an object, an unwelcome inhabitant, who had taken up residence in my jaw. The whole of my being was reduced to my mouth and this pain that had laid conquest to it…
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…until the next day, when the very cheerful village dentist gave me a cursory shot of novocaine and, before the numbness had even set in, grabbed hold of my tooth with his forceps and gave it a sudden pull. So extreme was the pain that the extraction, an agony in its own right, became a beautiful lessening, an indelible reduction. Tug by tug, it diminished, and then suddenly it was gone, both the pain and my tooth. My jaw-socket flooded with relief, and then with blood. And there it was, on a silver tray, in front of me, my tooth, the sepulchre of all that pain, its roots reaching out like three bloody tentacles. I saw now that there was a jagged, gaping hole in its crown, a little hovel that the pain had made its home in. How it had cracked open I'll never know, but the dentist let me keep it, so that I might never forget it. I gave it to my wife as a keepsake during our courtship. |
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Over ten years later, when I was writing Mother Mary and plumbing about for a way to represent the hurt that its characters were trading back and forth, I thought of my tooth, and what it felt like when it split open, and knew that this pain, as I recalled it, matched the immensity of what I wanted to evoke. And so it was that this unhappy intruder found a most welcome home in my script: I put it into words, and gave those words to Sam Anselm, played by Michaela Coel, who brought the specificity of that feeling right back to life - except that the cracked-open tooth that she’s speaking of isn’t actually located in her jaw at all, but in her heart, which when we meet her is as broken as that little white piece of bone on the dentist's tray.
So: when you watch the film, and Sam begins to speak about going to the dentist, know that you are, in fact, time-traveling with me, back to the mountains of Costa Rica and to the source of the only feeling I could summon that might match what Mother Mary and Sam exchange in the film. I pray I am lucky enough to never feel a pain like that again, but I am grateful that I was able to draw from it - and that you, dear reader, might soon be party to all that it came to manifest.
Yours truly,
David Lowery
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