How do you create a pop star?
That was the question “Mother Mary” director David Lowery tasked the film’s artisans — including choreographer Dani Vitale, director of photography Rina Yang and costume designer Bina Daigeler — with figuring out as they collaborated to construct the titular diva, Mother Mary.
“Mother Mary,” in select theaters now, introduces the new icon (played by Anne Hathaway) to the ever-growing pantheon of fictional pop stars. In the movie, Mother Mary is presented as one who has defined musical genres, captivated audiences and crafted her own near-mythological persona over the decades she’s been performing. But Lowery’s thriller juxtaposes the artist’s massive arena tours with a haunting depiction of her estranged relationship with former costume designer and best friend, Sam Anselm (Michaela Coel).
The process to pull off such a feat was extensive, says Vitale, who explains that the team did approximately “10 years of artist development in six months,” which covered everything from establishing a timeline of Mother Mary’s career (“Is she on her sixth album? How long was this hiatus?”) to what her label’s album rollout would look like. And while Hathaway’s character is bound to be compared to modern pop greats — Lady Gaga and Taylor Swift are apt examples — the team focused on blending contemporary elements of stardom to create an artist who felt both familiar and yet distinctly unique.
In terms of inspiration, yes, Gaga and Swift were top of mind, says Vitale, but it was more about identifying what they wanted to evoke with Mother Mary rather than borrowing anything from each icon specifically. “It was how do we capture people’s minds and souls and emotions and spirits like Taylor?” she says. From Gaga, it was her “power and vulnerability and authenticity.” For Diageler’s costume design, Swift, along with Beyoncé and Dua Lipa, were present on the mood boards; the film’s concert scenes were influenced by Yang’s experience in creative producing arena tours and working on music videos for Swift, FKA Twigs, Haim and more. “I had a lot of knowledge on how to put together a concert and on how to sell the scale,” Yang says.
To fully establish Mother Mary’s musical prowess, Lowery recruited real-life pop icons Charli xcx, Jack Antonoff and FKA Twigs (who plays a supporting character in the film) to shape, develop and produce a full album’s worth of goth-inspired industrial pop songs for the character.
Hathaway, whose musical skills helped her win an Oscar for “Les Misérables,” worked with a vocal coach to get her voice pop-star ready. “None of us wanted Mother Mary to sound like anybody else,” she told Variety at the film’s New York premiere. “We wanted her to be her own thing, and we wanted her to be somebody the audience believed could have held her own against these pop icons and goddesses for the last 20 years.”
While Mother Mary’s sonic style was key to the character’s ideation, being a pop star is about more than just the music: The right costumes, choreography and spectacle-like concerts are needed to truly sell the vision. “We made our own pop star — in the songs, in the lyrics, in the costumes,” says Daigeler, “That was really the fun part.”
Below, Variety breaks down how Vitale, Yang and Daigeler made it work.
The Choreography
As a dancer and director in addition to being a choreographer, Vitale used her experiences working with artists like Rihanna, Katy Perry, Halsey, Panic! At the Disco, Demi Lovato and many more to get Hathaway into Mother Mary mode. Audiences might expect a choreographer to exclusively help with dance moves, but, for Vitale, that’s never been the case.
“We get in at the ground floor in pure artist development,” she explains. “So it’s, ‘What does your music sound like? What’s your persona name and what do you want to convey to the world?’ [That] is my first job.”
For Hathaway to fully embody the essence of Mother Mary, the two rehearsed as if the actor was really setting out on tour. Vitale describes the process: “I’m ignoring that you’re Anne. I’m ignoring that this is a film. Let’s actually spend the time as if you were an actual pop star.” Given Hathaway is an actor first and foremost, erasing her previously established physicality to create the foundation for Mother Mary was a big piece of the puzzle. “My goal was really to kind of crack and break and find those abrasions and weaknesses in her and really highlight that,” Vitale says. “Because that’s what makes something grungy and relatable.”
For months, Hathaway trained for six to seven hours a day in everything from jazz to ballet to hip hop, “so when we did get the music, we could just jump into anything full force,” Vitale says. Even during lunch breaks, they’d be deep in Mother Mary development. “I’d make her watch award shows, make her watch tours, make her watch music videos, teach her about certain movements. How to hold the microphone and how to switch it off,” Vitale adds. “We had to study, and she had to learn how to do it in a way that she looked like she’s been doing it her whole life.”
The final choreography for the film, which Vitale describes as “timeless and impactful and powerful,” builds upon Mother Mary’s identity as an artist, telling a story alongside her synth-pop soundtrack that makes it clear why this particular pop star is considered a great in the world of the film. Though, as Vitale notes, having a fabulous real-life star playing the icon doesn’t hurt: “What better canvas to put this on than Anne fucking Hathaway?”
The Costumes
When it came to costuming the character, Daigeler focused on capturing the essence of her song lyrics while also incorporating the pop star’s emotions and personality into the glamorous, colorful onstage looks. While not every costume Diageler ideated made it into the finished film, she conceptualized the artist’s looks from the early days of her career (somewhere in the early 2000s) to the moment she finds herself about to make her long-awaited comeback (the late 2010s). With each costume, things got “more glamorous and more glamorous,” Diageler explains; during concert scenes, audiences see Hathaway donning bright red dresses, bedazzled bodysuits and knee-high stilettos.
A defining part of Mother Mary’s on-stage look — and her identity as an artist — are her halos, a gothic element Lowery ideated. (In that same vein, imagery of saints and virgins, and medieval and baroque paintings, served as points of inspiration.) Hathaway rehearsed with the halos, just as a real-life pop star would have to, ensuring she could dance and move around on stage with them once filming began. “That was quite a challenge,” Diageler says.
Above all, though, Mother Mary’s concert costumes were song-specific. “‘Dark Cradle’ was completely inspired by the darkness,” says Diagler. “It was a very structured costume with this very specific silhouette, and the material that I used was a little bit more like a cage.”
The song “Holy Spirit,” on the other hand, lent itself to a very vulnerable costume. “It has this hole around her core, and it’s all embroidered… She looks really fragile in that costume, and it looks like everything can come inside [her], but also everything can get out,” says Diagler.
The Concerts
What would a pop star be without a lineup of elaborate, show-stopping concerts? For “Mother Mary,” Yang and Vitale (who is also credited as one of the concert’s creative producers) worked to ensure the on-stage scenes made moviegoers feel as though they were really in Mother Mary’s audience, not watching a phoned-in recreation.
“You can really lose viewers and the authenticity and realness of a performer if the concerts fall flat,” says Vitale. Yang concurs: “A lot of concerts in films just don’t look real, or it just looks sad. We wanted to make it look epic.”
One of the most important elements was nailing down the scale and vision for Mother Mary’s shows — a process that included many iterations of what the stage could look like — and translating those things onto film. “Obviously, we can’t put on an arena show,” Yang says. But the team was able to pull off most of the production without any visual effects, building the physical stage and assembling an audience for the live performances. Yang also tapped into her music background by “live directing where the camera should go,” which added a “fluid process to the music and performance.”
The extent of VFX, done by Visual Noise Creative, came down to things like crowd duplication and extending the height of the flying platform, which Hathaway actually sang on top of. “In a real arena show, it would fly farther and higher,” says Yang. “But in the venue we were in, it’s smaller than the actual arena that we envisioned.” Either way, though, the platform was suspended high in the air. “It’s pretty amazing that she did it herself,” Yang says of Hathaway.
About the actor’s transformation, she adds: “I was so amazed. I was like, ‘You’re a real pop star.’ The pop star has to be able to sell it. She pulled that off, and then we made sure that she looked good.”
Leave a Reply