David Lowery calls Taylor Swift's Reputation concert film 'one of the best concert films ever' and frames the homage as a creative tribute to her artistic excellence, using her work as a benchmark for cinematic spectacle.
The production literally used Swift's tour as a budgeting cheat code — they reverse-engineered three numbers shot by shot to figure out how to pull off a stadium concert on a shoestring budget, proving the 'inspiration' was more practical than purely artistic.
The Reputation tour ran May to November 2018 and grossed $345.7 million worldwide. Lowery explicitly said 'You would not believe the amount of time we were talking about Taylor' and used three numbers from the show 'shot by shot' as a budgeting tool for Mother Mary.
Taylor Swift's darkness sells — literally. David Lowery didn't just admire the Reputation tour aesthetically; he used its production secrets to solve real budget problems, proving that sometimes the best inspiration comes with a price tag attached.
When David Lowery set out to direct Anne Hathaway's upcoming psychological thriller Mother Mary, he didn't look to traditional cinema for inspiration — he looked directly at Taylor Swift's most theatrical tour to date. In an interview with Empire published Tuesday (April 7), the filmmaker revealed that Swift's Reputation Stadium Tour served as the primary reference point for the film's concert sequences, and the connection runs far deeper than casual admiration.
"You would not believe the amount of time we were talking about Taylor," Lowery told the publication. "Her Reputation concert film is one of the best concert films ever. It's truly phenomenal." The director explained that his team literally broke down three numbers from Swift's show "shot by shot" to determine production costs — a budgeting method they employed because they had no idea how to execute a stadium concert sequence on their minimal budget. "We were literally using Reputation as a guide," he admitted. "I can go on about Reputation all day."
But the Swift influence extends beyond just the concert spectacle. Lowery confirmed that he brought "a lot of Taylor Swift to the table in terms of who Mother Mary was" when writing Hathaway's character. His creative vision? Imagine Taylor Swift in 10 or 15 years — that essentially became the blueprint for his lead. The real-life pop star's influence was so pervasive that after filming wrapped, Hathaway gifted Lowery a friendship bracelet featuring the title of Swift's Billboard Hot 100 No. 1 hit "Anti-Hero" — a gesture that clearly delighted the director.
The timing of this inspiration is particularly fitting. Swift's Reputation tour ran from May to November 2018 and reportedly grossed $345.7 million worldwide, making it one of the highest-grossing tours in music history. The tour's aesthetic — heavy on snake imagery, black bodysuits and pyrotechnics — was notably darker than Swift's previous work, making it the perfect template for a psychological thriller about a pop star reuniting with an old designer friend (Michaela Coel) to create a new tour dress. If ever a concert tour was destined to inspire a horror-tinged film, it was this one.
The collaboration between Swift's world and Lowery's film doesn't appear to be official — there's no word on whether Swift herself has seen the film or weighed in on how her legacy is being used. But given that Lowery essentially built his concert sequences around her work, and Hathaway clearly appreciated the reference enough to gift that bracelet, it's safe to say Taylor's fingerprints are all over this project. Mother Mary hits theaters later this year, and if nothing else, it promises to be the mostTaylor-inspired thriller of 2026.
