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"You would not believe the amount of time we were talking about Taylor," said David Lowery.
Taylor Swift performs at ANZ Stadium on Nov. 2, 2018, in Sydney, Australia. Mark Metcalfe/Getty Images
Taylor Swift‘s got a big reputation for putting together show-stopping tour productions, and one of them served as major inspiration for Anne Hathaway’s next film.
In an interview with Empire published Tuesday (April 7), Mother Mary director David Lowery revealed that his upcoming thriller — which follows a pop star (Hathaway) who reunites with an old designer friend (Michaela Coel) to ask for a new dress to wear on her next tour — pays direct homage to Swift’s iconic Reputation Stadium Tour. “Her Reputation concert film is one of the best concert films ever,” the filmmaker told the publication. “It’s truly phenomenal.”
“And for our concert sequences we looked at that repeatedly,” he continued. “You would not believe the amount of time we were talking about Taylor.”
Lowery went on to explain that the Mother Mary team took three numbers from Swift’s show and broke them down “shot by shot” to determine how much it would cost to create similar sequences for the film. “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,” he said. “We were literally using Reputation as a guide. I can go on about Reputation all day.”
He also noted that the 14-time Grammy winner influenced how he wrote Hathaway’s character in the script. After the movie wrapped, Lowery says he received a friendship bracelet from the Devil Wears Prada actress with the title of Swift’s Billboard Hot 100 No. 1 “Anti-Hero” on it.
“I definitely brought a lot of Taylor Swift to the table in terms of who Mother Mary was,” Lowery added. “I would often would be like, ‘Imagine Taylor Swift in 10 or 15 years — that’s sort of who this character could be.’”
The real-life singer’s Reputation trek ran from May to November 2018 and grossed $345.7 million worldwide, according to numbers reported to Billboard Boxscore. If ever a Taylor Swift tour was perfect for a psychological horror film, it would be this one: Supporting 2017 Billboard 200-topper Reputation, the run was markedly darker than the rest of the musician’s tours and featured a lot of snake imagery, black bodysuits and pyrotechnics.
Watch the trailer for Mother Mary below.
English (US)