Photo: Frederic Batier/A24
Director David Lowery drew inspiration from Taylor Swift’s Reputation tour for Mother Mary, an art-house drama about a pop star (Anne Hathaway) on the eve of her comeback performance. What’s more Rep than that? “Her Reputation concert film is one of the best concert films ever,” he told Empire. “It’s truly phenomenal. And for our concert sequences we looked at that repeatedly. You would not believe the amount of time we were talking about Taylor.”
Lowery transformed into a Swiftie throughout the production of the film, analyzing individual performances from the concert to determine how to budget for a concert film within a full-length film. “We took three songs from Reputation and broke it down, shot by shot, and looked at them like, ‘Okay, if we were doing these, how much would these shots cost to do in visual effects?’” he continued. “We used that as a budgeting tool, because we didn’t know how to wrap our heads around actually pulling off a stadium concert show on a minimal budget. We were literally using Reputation as a guide. I can go on about Reputation all day.” Hathaway even gave him an “Anti-Hero” bracelet as a wrap gift, since they both went to the Eras Tour.
Ultimately, Hathaway’s character, Mother Mary, is Lowery’s vision for what a Taylor Swift–like figure would be in the future. He added, “I definitely brought a lot of Taylor Swift to the table in terms of who Mother Mary was. I would often would be like, ‘Imagine Taylor Swift in ten or 15 years — that’s sort of who this character could be.’”
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