As a storyteller, David Lowery has a flair for the formidable. His films are often steely and stern, even as his characters find themselves in fantastical situations—becoming a ghost, befriending a dragon, or pursuing a medieval knight.

Lowery is the writer, director, and editor behind films like The Green Knight, Ain’t Them Bodies Saints, and The Old Man & the Gun, his stories taking us through fantasy, psychological drama, true heists, and more. His roots are in indie film, though he’s taken on bigger budgets of late, particularly to give his spin to beloved Disney classics.

A screenwriter/director with such a singular voice and vision is going to produce work like no one else, and that’s certainly the case for his new original holiday short, An Almost Christmas Story, now streaming on Disney+.

Cowritten with Alfonso Cuarón and Jack Thorne, the short is an animated tale of a young owl lost in New York City after being spirited away in the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree. He meets Luna, an equally adrift little girl. These delicate, paper-like characters inhabit a world of harsh cardboard cars and two-dimensional adults, where they have to find their own way during the holiday season. There’s a mix of whimsy and weight that feels distinctly like Lowery in the work.

Final Draft jumped into Zoom with Lowery to discuss his approach to his first animated project and the discoveries he’ll bring to his next live-action film, including economy in screenwriting and the importance of storyboards. 

Final Draft: This is your first animated project. Did your approach as a writer change as you started working on this?

David Lowery: Definitely. It was an entirely new experience and one that I really loved. I loved the process of writing this film because I’ve been writing screenplays my entire life, it feels like at this point, and I felt like I was relearning the art form with this film. It was nice to be knocked out of my comfort zone and forced to relearn how to tell a story for the screen in a way that I had never done before.

Final Draft: What was it that was so different? Having to focus so much on the intentionality of the visuals?

Lowery: It really was exactly that, but the process in which we focused on that intentionality was very different. 

I’m an inveterate rewriter. I will have my laptop on set, and Final Draft will be open. I am writing as we go. And this process was of course different because with animation, once you start animating, you can’t improvise the way that I’m used to. So it all happens earlier. 

I had already gotten the script to a place that I was pretty happy with when we began the storyboarding process. My brother did the storyboard. It was a very familial effort in that regard. And then we took those storyboards and brought them into the edit and cut them together, and my assistant editor did all the voices on them.

So we had a rough animatic of the entire movie. I would look at that and think, “Oh, it’d be nice if this line was here, or we don’t need this piece of dialogue, or let’s rearrange these scenes.” It was far more like we were making the movie in the storyboard form and rewriting it as we went. 

And we didn’t go back to the script in Final Draft … it was hilarious because by the time we got to the finished film, we had to submit a copy of the script to the WGA, and the screenplay file that was technically the shooting draft was so different from the movie that we were like, “We can’t turn this in!”

We had to go back and transcribe the movie into the script, because it had evolved so much, but in a way that never touched the screenplay itself. We were writing all the way through up until the very end, but it was all done in a different medium. It never didn’t feel like writing, but we were writing with storyboards, with voices. 

And again, it was similar, I suppose, to how I might rewrite something on set, but because we hadn’t started animating yet, it was like, we aren’t in production. We’re writing this script, but we aren’t ever using an actual screenplay to do so.

Final Draft: With a short film, the pacing and the structure are so important because you have that limited timeframe. What was that approach like for you?

Lowery: That was another part of it. The initial script was much longer. This is always the case with screenplays, but this was 35 pages or so, and I could just guess that it would wind up being closer to an hour if we had shot that, or animated that version of it.

I did my first pass trying to simplify and get things just a little bit more streamlined. And then, once again, we took it to the storyboards. And you’re getting a rough sense of pacing at first, but you can just tell like, “Oh, we don’t need all of this,” or “We don’t need to underline these things as much as I thought we did.” 

Then, once we got into the actual process of counting the number of frames each shot would last so that we could budget the animation appropriately, you approach things with a different set of values. Where normally you’d be on a live action film and be like, “Well, let’s just shoot it. Maybe we’ll use it here.” We can’t do that. 

So you’re really saying, “Okay, we can only afford this many minutes and we’re 30 seconds over. Where do you want to pull those 30 seconds from?” And you go through shot by shot, and you’re like going, “What is absolutely essential to the story? What makes this story work better?” 

Often in the process of doing those subtractions, you realize there is a way to make not just the movie shorter but better. And the way that we improved it as we did those many, many rewrites was really eye-opening to me. Again, I’m spoiled by live action when you have a lot more flexibility. Here there wasn’t quite as much, and we really forced ourselves to make every single frame count.

Final Draft: I’m interested in that editing and revision process. How do you know that something is naturally moving better?

Lowery: You just see it. It’s something that you may have been hanging onto for dear life. You feel that this dialogue or this scene is vital to the movie, or maybe it has a big laugh that you're like, “We can’t deprive the audience of this joke. It’s funny.” 

And then you take it out, and all of a sudden everything just cinches up, and the momentum that you gain is so meaningful to your experience as a viewer that even me having seen the movie countless times suddenly realizes, “Oh, this is a much better movie than it was for the past 600 times that I watched it.”

It’s a really beautiful process, and it’s why when I’m working as an editor, when I’m editing my movies, I force myself to cut out anything I love, just to get used to the feeling of, “What will it be like to take this out?”

And it’s something that I’ve now, having gone through this, I am much more keen to do in the screenplay portion of the process. Because usually I write long, and I just know that I’ll change it on set or cut it down. I think this might’ve tricked me into becoming a more efficient filmmaker.

Final Draft: I’ve heard of different writer/directors rewriting in the edit. “I’ll just shoot it and I’ll get rid of it later. I’ll refine it.”

Lowery: I made this movie concurrently with a live-action film that I’m editing right now, and I’m looking at the footage and it’s all beautiful, but I was like, “I should have been a little bit more restrained. I knew we weren’t going to use that scene, but I demanded we shoot it anyway.” And sure enough, it comes right out in the edit.

So I think the allocation of resources … put me in the mindset of someone who’s like, “What if we don’t lean toward excess? What if we just try to make the best version of the movie possible and put our energies towards that?”

I mean, you’re always doing that, but often it’s like, I love the process of discovery so much. I just am thinking maybe I’d move the discovery process earlier when we’re not on set spending lots of money.

Final Draft: Do you have any advice from your experience that you would give to a beginning writer?

Lowery: I still go back and read “10 Things Every New Writer Should Know Before They Write Their First Script,” because I feel—and I think this is true for every filmmaker—you feel like an amateur no matter where you are in your life, and you’re always looking for ways to improve.

I would say one thing that I heard early on was that you have to write X number of bad scripts before you write a good one. And I don’t believe that to be a hundred percent true, but generally speaking, you do get better the more you do it. 

I am a slow writer, but I also feel like, just write as much as you possibly can and interrogate your own work. Whether it’s writing or editing or shooting, being on set, I always want to interrogate what I believe to be good. 

I finish a scene and I’m like, “Great. I killed it. I crushed it. Onto the next one.” But it’s really important to know that tomorrow I need to go back and look at that scene and make sure that my feelings were true and poke at it and not be so confident in that valedictory feeling that I don’t go and see if I can’t just make it a little bit better.

Final Draft: It’s sometimes hard to go back to scripts that you might not feel are working and really look at why something is bumping you.

Lowery: It really is. And it’s also important to just always know there will always be another one. 

So as much as I might be [feeling] the script I’m working on is all-consuming, I know that it’ll be done and then it’ll be time to make the next one, and to not be precious about, “Ah, I’ve done an incredible job finishing this screenplay.” 

Finish it, put it away. Open a new file, start a new one. That’s the best thing anyone could ever do.