Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour was such a juggernaut that it’s easy to forget she had several impactful tours prior to that, and one of them helped inspire Anne Hathaway’s new movie. No, not The Devil Wears Prada 2, a different one.
The movie Mother Mary casts the actress as a major pop star known as Mother Mary, who’s seen performing songs that were written by Charli XCX, producer Jack Antonoff and others. But to stage the concert sequences, director David Lowery tells Empire magazine that his touchstone was the concert film that captured Taylor’s 2018 tour.
“Her Reputation concert film is one of the best concert films ever. It’s truly phenomenal. And for our concert sequences we looked at that repeatedly,” he tells Empire. “You would not believe the amount of time we were talking about Taylor.”
Lowery notes that he and his team specifically looked at three songs and broke them down shot by shot.
“[We] looked at them like, ‘Okay, if we were doing these, how much would these shots cost to do in visual effects?’” he explains. “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. We were literally using Reputation as a guide. I can go on about Reputation all day.”
And in terms of Hathaway’s character, Lowery said, “I definitely brought a lot of Taylor Swift to the table in terms of who Mother Mary was. I would often would be like, ‘Imagine Taylor Swift in ten or 15 years – that’s sort of who this character could be.’”
Mother Mary is in theaters April 17.
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