He has written, produced and directed feature films such as Strikebound (1984), Dogs in Space (1986) and He Died with a Felafel in His Hand (2001); music videos for bands such as INXS and U2; concert performance films, Australian Made: The Movie (1987) and U2: LoveTown (1989); TV adverts, and the documentaries We're Livin' on Dog Food (2009), Autoluminescent (2011), Ecco Homo (2015) and Mystify: Michael Hutchence (2019).
[2] His father is Werner Lowenstein, also an activist, who had fled Nazi Germany to United Kingdom and was relocated to Australia in 1940 as one of the Dunera boys.
[2] Lowenstein attended Brinsley Road Community School from 1973 to 1974; and graduated from Swinburne Institute of Technology, Film and Television Department in 1979.
[6] In 1980 Lowenstein directed a music video, "Leap for Lunch", for the debut single by art punk band, The Ears – he shared a house with their lead singer, Sam Sejavka.
[5] Geoffrey Giuliano in his book, Behind Blues Eyes: The Life of Pete Townshend (2002), described "[T]he highlight of the video is the poolside staging of the electric 'Face the Face', in which director Richard Lowenstein effectively captures the excitement of a big-band performance and Townshend's joyous jitterbugging ... in a gold lamé, forties-style tuxedo Lowenstein reveals more story line in these five minutes than the entire video".
[7][22][23] At the time, Sejavka was a member of new wave band, Beargarden, and objected to Lowenstein and Hutchence's "noxious caricature" of his earlier personality.
In a similar way, Dogs in Space was a total embarrassment to the Australian film industry because it preferred and knew how to handle innocuous candy-coated fare, like The Man from Snowy River".
The dumbing down of the art of filmmaking to merely that of efficient "storytelling" surely has to be one of the most depressing things about the current state of mainstream cinema.