Outside the wind in Park City blows cold while inside here, in this tiny restaurant nestled away from the film festival hubbub of Main Street, filmmaker David Lowery slips off his jacket as he scans though the menu’s vegan options. In town for the Slamdance screening of his graceful, thought-provoking short film A Catalog of Anticipations, Lowery, more than this year ago now, bounces from venue to venue, sledding expedition to premiere party all the while returning to his hotel room in the breaks between to prep production for his debut feature film St. Nick.

Set in an isolated Texan winter landscape, the debut, which like Lowery’s shorts is as equally graceful and thought-provoking a mystery, follows a pair of adolescent sibling runaways who, for no seemingly better reason than that they can, trek out on their own self-reliant whim. Too young to understand the world as it is and yet too old to fully embrace the blind innocence of childhood again, the two scrape by, salvaging food from dumpsters and setting up shelter in an abandoned house. While aesthetically captivating and elegant, its shot design as experimental as it is fluent, St. Nick is undeniably a film composed of several provocative ideas and moments. It’s not always an easy film to understand, and that’s exactly, Lowery mentions now, just a few weeks left before the film’s premiere at South by Southwest, what he was after.

I love this notion in the Director’s Statement that you realized you were growing up on the first day of kindergarten, this idea that from that point on you’d have to wake up early. What was it like to be in that mindset as a child, and why do you think that idea occurred to you at that young age?

I wasn’t trying to make a happy film about childhood, and that was based on my own feelings. I remember being upset a lot as a kid, and so as I was trying to address all of that, it occurred to me that maybe that idea was tied into this [fear and anger] somehow. It seemed like a dynamic related. There was another moment I remember going up to my room and trying to knock myself out with a two-by-four; I was ten years old. So that’s an equally valid explanation of where the movie came from I think.

I was feeling a lot of resentment and other emotions when I was developing the project. That, I think, comes first. I had the idea for the movie, I was making it and then all of that emotion further came out as I was working on it. It wasn’t the driving force behind it, but it welled up as I was making it or preparing to make it.

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