Rethinking the West with "Ain't Them Bodies Saints," David Lowery's Artful Sophomore Feature

A look at newcomer David Lowery's atmospheric indie drama of crime and love, starring Rooney Mara, Casey Affleck, and Ben Foster

Not Available Lead
Complex Original

Image via Complex Original

Not Available Lead

It's a half hour past 9 on a chilly Thursday night at the Queens County Farm Museum. Dozens of New York City denizens are sitting in rows of metal folding chairs digging into the plush grass beneath them. The property is almost an hour's ride from Manhattan, only accessible via car, LIRR, or a million transfers of buses and subways. Everyone here wants to be here. Here, that is, at this event for the Rooftop Films Summer Series, where writer/director David Lowery is about to premiere his critically acclaimed independent film, Ain't Them Bodies Saints.

A chorus of crickets on the farm can be heard over the score as the spotlight dims to reveal the title card on screen followed by the inscription dead center: "This was in Texas."

Set in the Lone Star countryside in the 1970s, the film tells of the disrupted romance between a pair of outlaws, Bob Muldoon (Casey Affleck) and his wife Ruth Guthrie (Rooney Mara). However, don't expect this to be a Bonnie-and-Clyde-type film that chases the ragtag team around in their heyday. Rather, it's a meditation on life after the gunpowder and dust settles. 

Four years after the stand-off that left a police officer shot and saw Bob willingly take the fall for his wife, Ruth is living a quiet life with her nearly 4-year-old daughter. And there's another man in her life now, Sheriff Patrick Wheeler (Ben Foster), the same man she wounded all those years ago. Despite their violent shared history, he's taken by her, and has appointed himself her unofficial protector. Which is why he breaks the news to her first: Bob Muldoon has successfully escaped prison, and he's coming back for his family.

Immediately, the wheels turn in her head as she debates whether or not she could runaway with her husband. It breaks the heart of the lovestuck Sheriff.

Meanwhile, Bob, true to his word, is hitchhiking his way across the plains to reunite with his love. In his mind, he's got the story played out: he'd take his family away and they'd start a new life together somewhere far away from their small town of Meridian. He'd open a shop, do something decent with his life, grow old with Ruth and their daughter. But that's Bob. Often speaking about himself in the third person, he mythologizes everything in his life and makes himself the character of his own folktale. Even the story of his escape is a fiction. He's omnipresent in the film, through the worried looks of Ruth, Patrick, and everyone else in the town, even when he's not sharing scenes with them. And that's a testament to Casey Affleck's harrowing performance as the idealist of a character David Lowery set out to create. 

But nothing goes as planned and what becomes of the film is a well-worn story about love, responsiblity, and ultimately, forgiveness.

Down to its soundtrack, which uses a breathtaking blend of violin, piano, and hand-clapping as the main score, Lowery's Ain't Them Bodies Saints is a sweeping, picturesque masterpiece recognized by critics, audiences, and festival programmers alike.

"We all really love it for its sort of searing intensity and it being kind of an action movie or revenge drama that isn't filled with a lot of explosions and shoot-outs, but just has this constant slow burn of desperation and intensity to it," said Mark Rosenberg, founder of Rooftop Films.

Complex had the chance to sit down with Lowery, as well as Rooney Mara and Ben Foster, to not only discuss the making of the film, but the mythology behind each of the characters and the themes central to the remarkable story.

As told to Tara Aquino (@t_akino)

RELATEDThe 10 Most Anticipated Movies at Rooftop Films' 2013 Summer Series 
RELATED: The 25 Most Anticipated Indie Movies of Summer 2013  

David Lowery

Not Available Interstitial

David Lowery is the most prolific indie filmmaker you haven't heard about. To date, he's got 33 films to his credit as an editor, including Shane Caruth's Upstream Color, 15 as a cinematographer, 13 as a writer, and 14 as a director. But that's about to change.

Born in Milwaukee and raised in Texas, the 32-year-old Dallas-based filmmaker skipped film school and taught himself how to make movies. Inspired by greats like cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond (McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Close Encounters of the Third Kind) and the Coen brothers, Lowery's developing a distinct style, a misty blend of Americana and modern grit, that's got the potential to make his name as recognizable as Fincher, Malick, or Redford. In fact, the latter has tapped him to write and direct The Old Man With a Gun, taken from a 2003 New York Times story about 1920s outlaw Forrest Tucker. Robert Redford is also attached to star. And that's in addition to reports that Lowery is also attached to helm the long talked about adaptation of Brian Michael Bendis' graphic novel, Torso.

But today, Lowery is talking about the film that's starting it all, Ain't Them Bodies Saints. After premiering at Sundance earlier this year, buzz about the film spread through Hollywood, and it was picked up by IFC Films. In May, it became an official Cannes selection for its Critics Week as a special out-of-competition piece.

Ain't Them Bodies Saints is a peculiar film full of cinematic poetry whose backstory is as captivating as the final product itself. And we had the opportunity to get those tales from Lowery himself.

Is there anything that you haven’t said about this movie?
Someone the other day asked me about the story that Casey tells in the movie, about the guy who has the jacket that splits down the middle. That's fairly autobiographical and no one had ever asked me. It was a fun thing to delve into momentarily.

So that actually happened to you?
Not as the story literally goes. I was a very goth teenager, and I had this velvet jacket that was too small for me and it split down the middle. I thought that it made me look like Sally from The Nightmare Before Christmas, but I wore it anyway, so that's where that came from. [Laughs.]

How did you get the cast on board?
There was a great deal of luck and good timing, but also the cast liked the script and they liked the short film that I sent over, Pioneer. I think between the two of them—Casey and Rooney—it communicated an idea of what I was trying to make. For whatever reason, they all liked that idea and said yes. It was remarkable because they were my first choices.

Rooney was the only actress who read the script and, when I met Casey and Ben, I wasn’t sure who would play which part or even if they would take the parts, but we very quickly decided on it. The funny thing is, I never made movies with the idea of trying to cast famous actors, I’ve always just assumed it would be too long a process or too difficult. Everything I've made before has been with friends or untrained actors. This was the first time I worked with anyone with any reputation and I was delighted that it was as easy and painless.

Was it nerve-racking at all knowing their reputations?
I remember sitting at a café in Los Feliz waiting for Casey to show up and thinking, Wow, I’m about to meet Casey Affleck. I’ve loved him for so long, since Good Will Hunting, and he was about to walk into the room and sit down and talk about this movie. Within 30 seconds of meeting, we realized we were on the same page and liked the same things. We became good friends.

Shooting the movie felt like summer camp. You’re hanging out with friends. It was a very hard and hot summer camp with long days, but there was no sense of hierarchy. We all had skin in the game; it was a team effort in every way, which is all you can ask for from collaborators, whether it be in front of the camera or behind.

You've said that most challenging scenes to film were the emotional ones. Was that because you have to be in a certain mood to act in them?
It is, and also as a director, you are asking people to get to a very delicate place, and you want to make sure they have all the support they need. You almost have to be that safety net. Especially with the scenes that involved Ben and Rooney, they were difficult because, as we were shooting them, we were figuring out where everyone was standing as far as the characters go, what they were feeling, on a day-to-day basis.

It would've been very easy to make it a traditional romance or a traditional love triangle and for Ruth to fall into Patrick's arms. That would have been the easy way out but I wanted it to be more difficult and elusive than that. Finding the right beats to make that work and still be satisfying on a narrative level was tricky and created a lot of tension. But it wasn’t bad tension, it was just trying to make sure that we were all making the movie that we wanted to make.

Rooney Mara mentioned that the love triangle she saw was between her, her daughter Sylvie, and Bob, but Ben talked about getting between Bob and Ruth. How did you see it? Did you have two different conversations with them?
In a way, yes. There is a part of it where you have to approach each actor and each character like they are the central character in the movie, because for them they are.

When I was talking to Ben, I remember telling him: "It doesn’t matter for your character and for you as an actor. You don’t need to know whether or not you know whether she is going to go with Bob or not. You go in there and you as a character are spilling your guts to her, you don’t know what's going to happen. She might slap you in the face. She might fall into your arms and kiss you. All you know is that you care for her and you need to tell her that and let her know that you don’t hold anything against her. That's you, that's what you are bringing to the table."

At the same time, I was having a conversation with Rooney about how she was feeling about that character and how she was feeling about Bob. Indeed, ultimately it's a love triangle not between her, Bob, and the daughter—well it is that, but it also involves Patrick, too; he's the catalyst for her getting to where she needs to be. It was important for me not to reduce her character to a women who can only define herself by these two men, and I know Rooney felt strongly about that as well. It was important that she transcend that love triangle, and the daughter was the way to do that. That is not to say that women should only be lovers or mothers, but to say that that was the way that she could get out of both of those situations and establish herself as her own person.

Casey Affleck's character Bob is this figure who never shares a scene with both Patrick and Ruth, yet you can feel his presence the whole time.
His character was the easiest because he doesn’t change until the end of the movie. The conversations between Casey and me were more about coming to an understanding about how Bob feels about himself and the degree to which he believes in his own self-mythologizing.


 

Every character in the movie has a different definition of what the right thing is, but they’re all trying to do good by themselves and by others. That's something that’s really important to me.


 

We shot the movie in two stages. We did all of Casey’s scenes, then we did everything with Rooney, then we had two days of overlap. And Casey’s character, over the course of the shoot, became someone and the drive for him to get back home to Ruth became that much stronger. His tie to her became that much stronger. The script was there, but you always hope that it would be much more profound when you are watching it on screen. It resounded much more strongly than we expected it too, and that affected how Rooney played her scenes.

I told Rooney, "You have to be aware that he's coming and you have to love him but but you also have to know that that isn’t the right choice." It is a very complicated thing. So with Casey, it was just a matter of perfecting that drive and also perfecting the degree to which he is diluted because as a character he completely is.

How did you come up with the title? Did you have any alternates?
I never had alternates. I tried to think of something, because I thought some people wouldn't like the title. Certainly some of our financiers said, “You gotta change that title. No one will ever go see a movie called that." But the cast and the producers, we all stuck by it. It was the right title.

[The title] predates the movie. It’s something I came up with way back when. The literal origins I’d heard in some country song and misheard the lyrics. These lyrics morphed into this other phrase in my head, which is what the title is. I thought that that would be a neat movie title.

When I started writing this movie, I went back to that title and decided to use it because I wanted the whole movie to have a feel that was similar to a song, something that you would experience more like a folk song than you would an actual film. Aside from whatever thematic qualities there are, I think that the title has this cadence to it and this rhyming structure that is very musical, and it is also idiomatic in a very distinctly American way. You can’t translate the word “ain't.”

You said the title is thematic. Can you expand on that?
I could break it all the way down to being raised in the Catholic Church and being raised around the idea of sainthood and what that actually means. But on a basic level, it suggests to me that everyone has the potential to do the right thing. I think every character in this movie is good and, aside from those three bad guys who are clearly bad because they wear big hats and look mean, everyone in the movie is trying to do the right thing. Every character in the movie has a different definition of what the right thing is, but they’re all trying to do good by themselves and by others. That's important to me. I wanted the movie to be about people who’ve made bad choices but are all trying to fix those mistakes.

David Lowery, continued

Not Available Interstitial

You've said that you wanted to make an action movie, but then it became less about that and more about these people who made mistakes reconciling their lives. Was that an idea that came out through the writing process?
Yeah, but that shouldn't have surprised me because that's the type of thing that I gravitate toward. I tried to write an action movie, I honestly did. You go see any action movie and you’ll have a shootout where characters get killed and you have no idea who they are, like Iron Man 3. They're faceless bad guys who are there to get shot.

I go see those movies and have no issue with it usually, but writing it, I felt guilty, that I was complicit in something uncomfortable by killing off somebody. By writing in one sentence, “A guy with the mustache gets killed.” All of a sudden you’re thinking, Who was that guy? How did he get to that point?

I was fascinated by the fact that I felt guilty about that and that made me switch gears and focus on the aftermath. Otherwise, it would've been a movie about Bob and Ruth in their heyday.

How did Texas influence the film?
It’s my backyard. You can drive 15 minutes outside the city and you can be in the middle of nowhere, and I love that you can escape into that. I love the landscape of north Texas, where I live. That’s just something that I responded to and I think that, a inasmuch as the movie is a movie about outlaws, there’s sort of a rebellious attitude toward Texas, in the ideological and spiritual sense, and that is something I didn’t always love. It wasn’t something I was always aware of, but as I spent more time there—I moved there when I was 7—I went from hating it to loving it.


 

With Joanna Newsom, whom I just adore, I just wanted to make a movie that feels like one of her songs.


 

One of the things I love about it is how people do things their own way there and there’s an upstart attitude that extends all the way to the politics of the state (though I don’t agree with them to a large extent). On a real level, that sense of rebelliousness and pride is something that, as an independent filmmaker, I can’t help but associate with, and it speaks to the larger-than-life nature of this type of the story. The characters themselves aren’t larger than life, they’re small and somewhat insignificant. But when you put them in the context suggested by the state of Texas—"This story takes place in Texas," right up on screen—it emboldens them as archetypes. It gives them a larger scope to act out within. That was something that made the story feel right to me.

What was it about the music of Will Oldham, Joanna Newsom, and Bill Callahan that inspired you while making the film?
With Will Oldham and Bill Callahan, the way they use language certainly has influenced the way I speak and the dialogue that I write. The things they sing about are very true to what is going in this film.

I adore Joanna Newsom and wanted to make a movie that feels like one of her songs. I constantly returned to her music to use as a reference point, whether it was the lyrics or just the overall feeling. Especially with regards to Rooney’s character, there are a number of Newsom's songs that directly relate to what this character goes through, and I used those songs as reference points for Rooney. At certain points, there were versions of the script where dialogue was directly taken from that.

When you think about people that you've worked with—Amy Seimetz, Shane Caruth, and Joe Swanberg—it seems like all of you are having a moment right now. What you guys are putting out feels like a return to film with a purpose. What's your take on this?
It’s great. It's wonderful to have this group of friends that I've been working alongside for so long. And it's not only wonderful to be living off of it—because we have been living poor for so long—but also to be able to reach a wider audience, to be recognized. The validation is huge.

We stuck with it because we love movies and we care about film as a means of communication, a way to tell stories, a mean of expression. And it's the means of expression that we've chosen to use and it is more than money to us and trying to get money on screen. I mean, we certainly will take whatever we get and put it towards making the best movie possible and to that degree, it is about putting money on screen.

Joe has made movies for no money whatsoever and my first feature was made for almost no money. It's not so much about the means that you have, it's about working within those means and trying to express yourself as sincerely and directly as possible in order to do something that means something to somebody.

All my friends have grown from film to film and tried new things and tried to expand their horizons. None of them have quit. It's wonderful to see that perseverance pay off.

How has your life changed at all since this film? Do you get offers to direct bigger pictures now?
I do. I get scripts sent to me and I read most of them, unless it's something I can tell I don’t like right off the bat. And it is nice right now because I feel like I have the luxury of getting another movie made. That's wonderful but it's also nice to know that I can go make another $12,000 movie, or a $2,000 movie, because I know I can do that.

Right now, I'm focused on writing. When you take someone else’s script, you are diving into their perspective and, for me, it's important that everything I make have my perspective, for better or worse. And so even if I find a script that I like, I would have to rewrite it just to yank it into my line of sight. I haven’t found one of those scripts yet.

It'll be a year on Thursday since we wrapped Ain't Them Bodies Saints. I want to direct something else. I'm writing patiently but also with the mindset that I’d like to be directing again very soon.

PIONEER - Trailer from David Lowery on Vimeo.

Rooney Mara

Not Available Interstitial

There are a lot of things we think we know about Rooney Mara. She's quiet, tough to crack, and stone-faced, being the three most common descriptors.

However, that isn't even a start.

In Ain't Them Bodies Saints, the 28-year-old Oscar-nominated actress plays Ruth, an outlaw who's given up the criminal lifestyle for her 4-year-old daughter. She's solitary most of the time, in her own head. Her husband's recent successful attempt at escaping prison weighs heavily on her. We don't know her well, save for the bits and pieces she reveals in flashbacks, and in the fleeting moments she confides in her only friend, Sheriff Patrick Wheeler (Ben Foster), who is hopelessly in love with her.

The character asks for your imagination to fill in the rest. Like Casey Affeck's Bob Muldoon says in the film, "People don't know things the way they think they know them." And Rooney Mara is the perfect of embodiment of that. 

"I was fairly confident that [Rooney would] be able to nail the part, but I’d also never seen her open up in any sort of real way, much less even smile on screen before," said director David Lowery. "She’s a very guarded person in real life and it was easy to see how, once you get to know her and could see her open up on a day to day basis, you could see how that [vulnerability] would come out in a performance."

The following is an interview with Mara conducted by a number of writers. 

What degree of loyalty and guilt did your character Ruth feel toward Bob and how did that shape your motivation?
Ruth certainly has a lot of loyalty to Bob and to her daughter and she certainly has a lot of guilt, but I don’t think that one has to do with the other. She’s not staying loyal out of guilt, but I think she feels both things very strongly.

There's a lot vulnerability in your character. Is that something you want viewers to see more of?
I never think of it as, "Oh, what do I want people to see?” But the character does have a lot more vulnerability. That was where I was at when I chose those roles. Maybe I was feeling more vulnerable and that’s what I responded to.


 

When you’re in love with someone, you could be quite delusional, you could convince yourself of anything.


 

Do you feel like David Lowery challenged you to be more vulnerable?
No, that was just the character. It was never a problem that I needed to be more vulnerable. The character is just more vulnerable, physically and emotionally, and her character is more complicated.

What was it about the character and the story in general that you responded to?
David has a special and unique voice, and the script was so beautifully written. Ruth, in the first script I read, wasn't that well-developed. She was the least developed of all the characters, but he knew that and he said that when I read it. It was something that he was working on. But I could still see the potential there.

Her relationship with Bob I found to be so beautiful and interesting and I also just really loved the love story between her and her child. I read a lot of scripts where the woman is just the mom. But I found her relationship with her daughter to be very different.

What would your character be like if she never had a baby?
I’ve never thought about that. I can’t imagine where she would end up. It’s sad to even think about. Maybe she would’ve ended up in jail. I think having Sylvie was the best possible scenario of her life, I think it changed her life tremendously.

I don’t think Ruth is necessarily excited when she finds out she’s having a baby. It’s not something that she planned on doing. We always talked about how, up until the point where she looks at the baby for the first time, she's fighting it. It’s not something she feels ready for. It’s not something she wants. She wants her life with Bob. She wants her childhood back with Bob, until the moment she sees the baby for the first time.

Do you feel like people view you personally in a way that’s not quite accurate?
I don’t know. Do they?

You have a fairly intimidating persona.
That’s OK. [Laughs.]

What’s something that the general public may seem to think they know about you but isn't accurate?
Probably everything they think they know about me isn't accurate. There are very few people you know in your life. People are complicated. They are. I think we try and simplify people and put them in this category and that category, but it’s simply not true.

David Lowery's style is often compared to Terrence Malick's. Having worked with them both, can you compare and contrast working with Terrence Malick and David Lowery?
Their directing style could not be more different. I would say the same thing about any two directors I worked with. I would say the similarity between David and Terry is that they’re both romantic. They both see the world in a very similar sort of poetic [way].

Ruth says two things to Patrick, “I don’t need anything” and something about not having been able to sleep in four years. What does she need and what can make her sleep?
The thing with the not sleeping, that comes back to guilt. Bob has been writing her the entire time he’s been in prison and I think Ruth started off writing him as well, but then as soon as she had Sylvie, it became: How do you write about looking into your child’s eyes or their first birthday or the first time they walked or the first time they said Mommy? How do you write about that in a letter and make someone understand it?

I think as soon as she had Sylvie and started thinking that way, she stopped writing because there was no way to express it. She hasn’t slept in four years because she’s been wondering if he’s OK and having all this guilt that she’s not writing to him and that he’s gone to prison for something she’s done. All of that.

Is it just a matter of having closure?
I think it would probably take a lot of time, a lot of healing. I think she’ll sleep. Then Sylvie will turn into a teenager and she’ll stop sleeping. [Laughs.]

What gestures did you try to employ to make her more relatable to the audience? She has a very gruff, stern personality.
Well, I think before the movie takes place, Ruth was a very different person. Her relationship with Bob was very passionate and fiery. I think there was a lot of fighting and then making up. I think she was this kind of wild and stubborn and fiesty character and then what happens happens and she has this child and it changes who she is.

It’s hard moving on and finding happiness with something great in your life when the person you love is in prison for something you did. I liked the character, so I didn’t ever think about what I had to do to make her more likeable and accessible to the audience.

David said he sent a bunch of music and Joanna Newsom was one of them. How did that sort of inform the character for you?
He sent me a bunch of songs and I liked them, but I had my own songs that made me feel like the character, so I listened to them and I appreciated them, but then I never listened to them again.

Can you say what they were?
God, I don’t know. I had such a long playlist. A few of the songs he sent me were on there, but there were a few Loretta Lynne songs, and a lot of sad songs. I'm constantly listening to music when I’m working and I have different playlists for each character, but I haven’t listened to it in a year.

One the things people say they like about this movie is that there’s a lot of things that are open to interpretation in terms of the love triangle. What's your perspective on how your character feels about that?
I didn’t see the movie as a love triangle between me, Casey, and Ben. I saw it as a love triangle between me, Casey, and my daughter. That was the choice I was making. I was never choosing between Bob and Patrick. I was always choosing between Bob and Sylvie. Patrick, for Ruth, is the guy you wish you could date but just don’t. You just don’t have those kinds of feelings for him, but you wish that you could because life would be so much easier and better.

Does Ruth want Sylvie and Bob to meet?
Oh yeah. I thought it, and at least played it for most of the movie, that she was planning on going with him, and thinks that is the right thing to do. When you’re in love with someone, you can be quite delusional, you can convince yourself of anything.

Ben Foster

Not Available Interstitial

Ben Foster is a name we should hear more often. An actor who got his start on Disney's Flash Forward, he's been in the biz since he was a kid. Given that fact, your great aunt in rural Pennsylvania should be able to recognize him. But he's not interested in celebrity.

Foster is a bit of a dreamer when it comes to his work, which makes him the perfect actor to play Sheriff Patrick Wheeler. Wheeler is a thoughtful small-town guy with a hidden adoration for a woman who could never return his feelings with the same intensity, Ruth. And this is on top of the fact that Ruth has hurt him—badly. Wheeler's got a sense of goodness the most devout of Christians would aspire to, and he expects nothing in return. 

Like Wheeler, Foster's got a distinct stillness that makes him see life through the eyes of romantics, and speak as such. In this interview, given to a few other writers as well, Foster discusses everything from love at first sight to the nature of true relationships.

What was your character’s perspective on what he saw in Rooney Mara's character? Knowing that she’s got this baggage of a husband.
And that he potentially received her bullet. Well, they made contact early. I don’t think they knew each other beforehand, but she contacted him with a bullet. And you have a lot of time to think in those moments when your life has been in question, when there’s a close call. I believe that once you’ve been in touch with somebody, you think about them, and what he says toward the end of the picture is essentially what love ought to be, which is absolute forgiveness: “No matter who you’ve been in the past, I see goodness here now. Please don’t carry this around for the rest of your life.” So in terms of a love triangle, I think he’s respectful of the situation. For all intents and purposes, she’s a single mom, her man is out of the picture and he starts coming back into the picture, and he’s got to gauge. He’s a gentleman. There aren’t many gentleman, at least in film today. So it was nice to explore those corners.


 

What I hope is most successful in this film is, in a time where film has turned into going to the theater and watching hundreds of millions of dollars burn, we have the opportunity to watch people be with people, and that’s become more rare.


 

In terms of his falling for her, you don’t think he ever saw her growing up?
It’s left to our imagination. David and I talked about it at length. What’s there is there.

His line, “All I see is good,” but he says that when he sees Ruth with her daughter. If she didn’t have a daughter, would he have fallen for her? Would he have seen the goodness that attracted him?
I think you’re touching on something there, which was discussed in a backstory element, which was only suggested with Patrick Wheeler’s wedding ring.

What do you think?
Who’s to say? I think kids can affect someone’s sense of responsibility where it becomes if you’ve got to take care of something bigger than yourself, you can’t live a selfish life. Therefore, by sacrificing yourself, there is a greater good. I understand that logic. But I’m not going to say in an alternate film—she’s an attractive lady, she’s spirited—who knows why people fall?

Was it just her goodness that drew him in?
He sees goodness in her, and I imagine he’s haunted like we all are by our own ghosts, the things we regret. And he’s telling her to let it go. Just let it go, because you’re good.

There’s a lot of restraint in the scenes with you and Rooney Mara. Did you have conversations about your chemistry and how to play those scenes beforehand?
I think it’s kind of hard to talk about chemistry. She’s such a wonderful actor. She has such a unique balance of almost a translucent vulnerability and an equal measure of strength. She’s unusual. My goal was to try to make her smile. What a sweet smile she has. You had to sneak around to get it.

In the tradition of movie westerns, there’s always two characters who sort of grow up together. One went the good way and the other went the bad way—that's Bob and Patrick. Did you see it that way or did it evolve naturally with these two characters?
I don’t mean to circle around it. I never saw us as parallel. In personal circumstances, you can’t help but compare if you’re the other guy. If you’re the other man or the other woman, you’re gonna compare yourself.

Whether or not he was transplanted there by the sheriff’s department, I think what’s important to him is an old world value, which I saw and experienced in researching the picture by spending time in Midland with the sheriff’s department. I mean, you’ve got third generation sheriffs there and there’s just a way. There’s a way that I experienced about having a respect for the people they protect, whether they care for them or not.

Could you talk a little bit about the research you did? In an article, David talks about how he wanted your character to have little more of a confessional towards the end of the film, but you fought against his emotional opening up.
So that was from the Times. The language used by the author was “disarm,” which was take your gun off. Our discussion was, in a draft I got, was that he wanted Wheeler to take his gun off, which is to say, “I don’t even want to have a gun." From my experience being down in Texas, that is not a necessary action for this love story to work. We had a very respectful dialogue that people have when you’re collaborating. In these days of very high octane discussions about gun regulations, this being a soft period picture, I saw no reason for a policeman, or a man of law, not even a policeman, but a sheriff, to say and to prove his care for a woman by saying I have to put my gun down. Just because you care for a woman doesn’t make you a bad man.

David Lowery gave Rooney Mara Joanna Newsom to listen to. He also talked about Will Oldham and Bill Callahan. Did he expose you to any of that?
I saw Pioneer first, his short film, which stars Will Oldham, and I’m a huge Bonnie "Prince" Billy. so time spent with Townes Van Zandt and Willie Nelson—that's where I live musically, anyway. So putting together music for myself was—you’re pretty much home.

He also says the cadence of the film was almost like a song. He said he was going after a Joanna Newsom song sort of feel.
Which is wild because I like Joanna Newsom and "Sprout and the Bean." I didn’t understand it but he said [The Milk-Eyed Mender] was the record that he wrote it to. I think I’m a little more of a traditionalist and a little less harp tuned, or modern harp, whatever gets you there. David is a unique creature.

Can you speak a little more on the character’s motivation in terms of the restraint he had in pursuing Rooney Mara’s character?
It’s complicated when you care for somebody but you can’t, be it your own ethics, or morals, or your job has restrictions and you can’t date a fellow co-worker. Love is curious that way, and he’s contemplating it, and he’s intending or attempting what I imagine to be a right action. He’s a good Christian. In his mind, he’s just trying to figure out. He doesn’t have answers. 

What I hope is most successful in this film is, in a time where film has turned into going to the theater and watching hundreds of millions of dollars burn, we have the opportunity to watch people be with people, and that’s become more rare. And I think David really wrapped his arms around it.

David’s worked on three projects within the past year [Sun Don't Shine, Upstream Color, and Ain't Them Bodies Saints] that haven’t had millions of dollars burning on screen. He’s obviously got his finger on the pulse of something great.
He’s tuned, really tuned, very special.

You mentioned Patrick's wedding ring, but he's a lonely character. Is Ruth his only hope for a full life? Does he see that?
The imagination is funny that way. We can’t help but fantasize every day. How do you not walk down the street and fall in love a few times? Whether or not you act on it is up to your own ethics. I think we’re all looking to be saved from, in the darker moments, our miserable lives. Someone’s just gonna come fix it. Someone’s gonna give it value. Unfortunately, that’s an impossible thing to put on a human being and even if you do get together, to my experience, that will only crush you. So is she the one for Patrick Wheeler? I think he thinks about it.

She says she doesn’t need anything, but it seems like he sees that she does and thinks that he can provide it.
[Sigh.] Just a bunch of codependents. [Laughs.]

Do you agree that he sees himself as a good influence on her? Can be a positive in her life?
I think he sees a good woman who’s struggling and is probably conflicted with his own profession, her own circumstances, and his own male genetics.

Latest in Pop Culture