Rooney Mara and Casey Affleck. Photo by Bret Curry, courtesy of A24
Asay: The film is so much about the emotional connections we make to physical things—and how dissonant that can feel when we set it beside the transitory nature of time. You find this house that you love and you live in and you raise your family in, and it becomes a home. It really becomes a part of you. And yet then you move on and it becomes someone else’s home. Was that something you wanted to explore?
Lowery: Yes, absolutely. That’s something I’m just fascinated by to no end. That sense of history, which ripples out both behind us and ahead of us, is really interesting to me. It’s something that you pick up at a history class in college, the idea that history and time is something to which we can’t even hold a candle to. We as human beings are just a small element in the overarching sweep of narrative history. That really had a profound effect on me, that realization. We spend most of our days living in very limited spaces, but those spaces are not defined by us, [and that’s] a really hard one to wrap one’s head around. …I’m in a hotel room right now, and this hotel room feels like it’s defined by my presence. But I will be gone tomorrow and a million other guests will follow in my footsteps, and ultimately, the hotel room will define itself by the fact that it endures in the face of all these visitors who come in and head in and out over the course of years, decades. And that is something that I do think a lot about.
Asay: Where does this interest come from? Do you have a point in your life where you realized that this was a really important issue to you?
Lowery: No, not really (laughing). I wish that I did. It’s just a general interest. It’s the way I see the world around me. And I can point to all sorts of influences that have sort of made me more aware of time, and yes, one of them might be my college history courses, or another one might be the fact that I spent several years working as a [film] editor, working as an editor, you become acutely aware of the passage of time as it relates to motion pictures, which then sort of trickles into your everyday life. So there are all sorts of points in my life where I have become very aware of the temporality of things.