Writing in the Style of David Lowery

The Principle

David Lowery writes about time the way most screenwriters write about action — as the fundamental dramatic force of the narrative, the thing that drives, threatens, and ultimately transforms his characters. Whether the timeframe is a single afternoon or the entire sweep of cosmic history, Lowery's screenplays are meditations on impermanence, and his characters are people who stand in the current of time and try to hold on to something — a house, a person, a moment, a story — that the current will inevitably carry away.

A Ghost Story (2017) is the purest distillation of his vision: a man dies, becomes a ghost in a bedsheet, and watches time flow past him — his grieving partner, new tenants, demolition, construction, centuries of change — while standing in the same spot. The screenplay is almost without dialogue. Its drama is the drama of duration itself, of watching without the ability to intervene, of presence without agency. It is simultaneously one of the most experimental and one of the most emotionally accessible American films of its decade.

Lowery's range extends from this radical minimalism to the mythic grandeur of The Green Knight (2021), the Malick-influenced outlaw romance of Ain't Them Bodies Saints (2013), the gentle elegance of The Old Man & the Gun (2018), and the warmth of Pete's Dragon (2016). What connects these seemingly disparate projects is a consistent attention to the passage of time, the weight of mortality, and the human impulse to make meaning in the face of both.

Screenplay Architecture and Structure

Lowery's screenplays are structured around time rather than plot. A Ghost Story covers centuries in ninety minutes. The Green Knight follows a single journey that is also an entire life. The Old Man & the Gun compresses a career criminal's decades of gentlemanly robbery into a portrait of a man who cannot stop doing the one thing that makes him feel alive. Time is not the backdrop — it is the architecture.

He uses silence and stillness as structural elements. His screenplays contain extended passages with minimal or no dialogue, where the drama is carried by image, environment, and the audience's own contemplation. These passages are not pauses between dramatic events — they are the dramatic events, and they require a reader willing to slow down to the screenplay's deliberate pace.

His narratives often take the form of quests — physical journeys through landscapes that are simultaneously geographical and psychological. Gawain's journey to the Green Chapel in The Green Knight is a trek through a mythic landscape that is also a journey through the temptations and fears that define a life. The quest structure gives the screenplay its forward momentum while the meditative pacing gives it its depth.

Lowery builds toward culminating images rather than climactic action — a ghost standing in an empty field, a knight kneeling before his fate, an old man smiling as he walks toward one more heist. These images concentrate the screenplay's themes into a single, held composition.

Dialogue

Lowery's dialogue is sparse and weighted. His characters speak only when silence is insufficient, and when they speak, their words carry the significance of rain after drought. There are no throwaway lines in a Lowery screenplay — every spoken word has been earned by the silence that surrounds it.

He writes dialogue with a slight archaism, even in contemporary settings. His characters speak with a formality and deliberation that gives their words a quality of ceremony, as if each conversation might be the last. This is not affectation but accuracy — in Lowery's world, every conversation might indeed be the last, because mortality is always present.

In The Green Knight, the dialogue draws from medieval source material while remaining accessible to modern ears. Characters speak in elevated but not impenetrable language, and the formality of their speech is part of the world-building — these are people for whom language is ritual, and ritual is the fabric of meaning.

The Old Man & the Gun demonstrates Lowery's ability to write naturalistic dialogue when the material calls for it — Robert Redford's Forrest Tucker speaks with the easy charm of a man who has been talking his way out of trouble for sixty years, and the dialogue has the warmth and wit of genuine conversation.

Themes

Time and impermanence are the central subjects. Lowery's screenplays are haunted by the awareness that everything passes — people, buildings, civilizations, the Earth itself — and his characters are defined by how they respond to this awareness. Some try to hold on. Some let go. Some become ghosts.

Death as companion rather than antagonist gives his work its distinctive gentleness. The Green Knight begins with an invitation from death and ends with an acceptance of mortality that is framed not as defeat but as the precondition for a meaningful life. Death in Lowery's work is not the enemy — the refusal to acknowledge death is.

The haunting of American spaces — houses, fields, landscapes layered with invisible history — gives his contemporary films their ghostly quality. Every space in a Lowery screenplay is haunted by what happened there before, and the characters are both inhabitants and inheritors of that accumulated past.

The relationship between myth and lived experience is explored most directly in The Green Knight but runs through all of Lowery's work. His screenplays ask what it means to live inside a story — to be aware that your life has narrative shape, that you are on a quest, that the ending is approaching — and whether that awareness is a gift or a burden.

Writing Specifications

1. Structure the screenplay around the passage of time rather than the mechanics of plot — let the narrative's shape emerge from temporal movement (seasons, years, centuries) rather than from causal chains of events.
2. Write extended passages of silence — scenes where the drama is carried entirely by image, environment, and the reader's contemplation, with no dialogue to explain or direct the emotional response.
3. Describe landscapes and spaces as repositories of time — every house, field, and horizon should carry the weight of what has happened there before, rendering the physical world as a palimpsest of accumulated history.
4. Pace the narrative with deliberate patience — allow scenes to extend beyond their conventional duration, trusting that slowness produces a quality of attention that speed cannot achieve.
5. Write dialogue that is sparse, weighted, and slightly formal — every spoken word should feel earned by the silence that surrounds it, and characters should speak with the deliberation of people who understand that words matter.
6. Build toward culminating images rather than climactic action — the screenplay's final sequence should be a held composition that crystallizes its themes into a single visual and emotional experience.
7. Frame death and mortality as companions rather than antagonists — the awareness of impermanence should suffuse the narrative without turning it into tragedy; acceptance of death should be the precondition for meaningful life.
8. Structure at least one sequence as a quest or journey through a landscape that is simultaneously geographical and psychological — the physical terrain should externalize the protagonist's internal journey.
9. Use myth, folklore, or literary source material as a framework that the screenplay inhabits rather than illustrates — the mythic structure should feel lived-in rather than adapted, present rather than past.
10. End with stillness — the final image should be held long enough for the audience to feel time passing within it, producing an experience of contemplation rather than resolution.