Premiered at the Sundance Film Festival January 19,2013
Winner of the Sundance Cinematography Award
a David Lowery film
Plot(Spoiler Alert)
A criminal named Bob takes the blame after his partner, Ruth, shoots an officer during a gunfight. Bob goes to jail, while Ruth makes a fresh new start for herself by giving birth to their daughter, Sylvie, and raising her. Bob manages to break out of jail 4 years later so he can find Ruth and Sylvie.
Blaine: Since the early 2000s, David Lowery had been exploring his creativity in film. He had been writing and directing nothing but short films, and editing them as well. He also directed one or two full length features, “St. Nick”. When the idea for “Ain’t Them Bodies Saints” came to David Lowery it involved a man breaking out of jail, but it wasn’t thought of as a drama at first. David Lowery’s original plan was to have “Ain’t Them Bodies Saints” be an action movie. David was having trouble coming up with more ideas for the story to “Ain’t Them Bodies Saints”, so he decided to take a long break from it. Two years later, David went back to the project because he had a lot of new ideas to add to the story. It became something else than what it supposed to be the more David worked on it. What started off as an idea for an action movie became a romance drama. David just went with whatever sounded good to him as he was writing the script. The first draft David wrote ended with everyone dying and it wasn’t till principal photography began that David realized he should had gone with that first draft because it sounded better to him. As soon as David was finished putting together the script he wanted to start shooting, but first he needed to find two actors to play the leading characters, Bob and Ruth.
David already knew he wanted Casey Affleck to play Bob. Casey Affleck thought David Lowery was a guy with a lot of passion for film and during the first 5 minutes of his conversation with David, he already knew he wanted to be apart of the project. Casey also thought the script was well written and he loved that his character, Bob, was a criminal, but wasn’t a bad man. Bob has never killed a person, never shot anyone, he has heart and that’s what Casey loved about him.
David was unsure who would be perfect to play Ruth. David got a call from Rooney Mara’s agent one day asking if she could take a look at the script. David had seen Rooney Mara in three movies and he thought she was a great actress. Rooney was starting to get a lot of attention after people saw her take as Lisabeth Salander in the American version of “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo”. David wanted Rooney after that, so he and the agent sent the script to Rooney along with a copy of David’s short film, “Pioneer”. Rooney Mara is a big fan of short films and she watched “Pioneer” before reading the script to see what type of style David has in filmmaking. When Rooney met with David, she had this feeling that he was a special director and she thought the script that he had done was well written. Rooney loved the relationship between Bob and Ruth in the script and where the story took place. The script was so detailed in explaining these two characters and Rooney had figured out the type of person Ruth is as she read through it.
David also described the relationship between Ruth and her daughter, Sylvie, very good as well. Rooney’s job was mainly to work with a little girl and she had spent a lot of time with the little girl who plays her daughter so they could feel comfortable working with each other. Rooney Mara grew up watching over a lot of kids as a babysitter, whether it was members of her own family or kids in her neighborhood, so looking after the girl like she was her daughter was easy. The accent was another thing. David Lowery basically described it to Rooney as if she was singing a folk song.
“Ain’t Them Bodies Saints” starts off with Bob and Ruth together, then after that it decides them apart because he’s in jail, then breaks out and goes on a quest to find Ruth and Ruth herself is somewhere raising her daughter.
They started shooting Casey’s scenes, then Rooney came in and they shot the scenes of them together. Then Casey’s job was done after that, so all that was left was to shoot all the scenes just of Rooney Mara. They shot “Ain’t Them Bodies Saints” in Texas and Luisiana and the weather was 105 degrees everyday. The heat would effect the actors’ performances and slow them down.
The opening shot of the film shows sunlight coming in behind Casey and Rooney. David, Casey, Rooney and the crew had to wait two hours for the cinematographer to let them know when the sun was in the right position and they could shoot. David trusted his cinematographer, Bradford Young, with what he was doing in order to make the shots of the film look good. Bradford knew where he wanted the sun to be. He had an app on his iPhone to tell him where the sun was going to be at any given time.
As I said, David Lowery is also an editor and he was experimenting with “Ain’t Them Bodies Saints” during the editing process to figure out the best way it look in the final cut. “Ain’t Them Bodies Saints” was chosen to premiere at the Sundance Film Festival and David Lowery was running out of time. “Ain’t Them Bodies Saints” was meant to be an hour and forty four minute movie, but because David was running out of time, eight minutes of the film had to be cut out. There was one scene David regretted cutting out after he saw the final cut of “Ain’t Them Bodies Saints”. It was only a minute long and David thought it was a great scene. There were other scenes that’ll never be seen, according to David, not even in the deleted scenes. “Ain’t Them Bodies Saints” became a hit at Sundance, but for David it didn’t feel complete because of those scenes he had to leave out in order to get the film finished on time. David really wanted people to see those scenes in the finished cut and he was bummed about it. But whether those scenes got added or not, “Ain’t Them Bodies Saints” turned out just fine in the end.
My rating on “Ain’t Them Bodies Saints” is five out of five stars
