When Paolo Sorrentino received a lifetime achievement award at the Zurich Film Festival in 2021, he referred to it, only half-jokingly, as a prize for the first half of his career. When I mention this to Lynne Ramsay, who sat down with TFV for an interview at Stockfish, she chuckles because she’s in Reykjavik as the international recipient of the festival’s Honorary Award. “There is a sense of going, I’m not dead yet! I still have a few more films in me. That said, I love Iceland, and it was a lovely ceremony in a more intimate setting.”
This is a reference to the fact the award was handed out in a wine bar. “I’m a bit of a hermit, not much for going up on a stage,” remarks Ramsay, who is nonetheless quite used to that by now. A veteran of Cannes, where all her feature films have premiered, she first attended in 1996 with her graduation short Small Deaths, which won the Jury Prize. She has fond memories of that festival, which was huge for Scottish film (“The Trainspotting party was amazing”). She has also won prizes on the Croisette for Gasman (Jury Prize Short Film, 1998), Morvern Callar (Award of the Youth, 2002) and You Were Never Really Here (Best Screenplay, 2017).
With the exception of Ratcatcher, which is currently enjoying a new run in cinemas in the UK for its 25th anniversary, all her feature films so far have been adaptations (and there’s more on the way). Is there something particularly appealing about putting one’s own stamp on someone else’s work?
“None of them are really straight adaptations, they’re quite radical. The books are more of a jump-off point, and luckily the original writers have appreciated this, because film is a very different medium.”
This refers not only to those who have already seen their work adapted, like Lionel Shriver and Jonathan Ames, but also the authors of source material that is still waiting to reach the screen, such as Stephen King (The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon) and Margaret Atwood (Stone Mattress, which is set to star Julianne Moore and Sandra Oh).
There is one notable exception: The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold, which Ramsay was attached to before it transpired her drafts were too different from the book in the eyes of the producers. The film – about a young girl who observes her family from the afterlife after being murdered – was eventually made by Peter Jackson, who received criticism for, ironically, sticking too closely to the novel, particularly its depiction of Heaven. “Yeah, I would have done that very differently,” Ramsay says. “My approach was more similar to Hamlet, with the father trying to prove the murderer’s identity.”
In the case of We Need to Talk About Kevin, which deals with the aftermath of a school massacre as well as the build-up to it, deviating from the source material was also a practical matter. “I probably learned more about editing than anything else, working on that film. It’s a 500-page book, written in the form of letters and dealing with multiple time periods. Because of the 2008 financial crisis, the budget was cut, so I had to figure out how to make the movie with less money. I went to Stromboli, in Sicily, and while I was there I had an epiphany. Sound is very important in that film, in terms of connecting the timelines.”
In 2011, much of the critical attention went to Ezra Miller’s breakout performance as the teenaged Kevin, but upon re-watching the film at Stockfish just before the interview, I was struck by the work of the two child actors playing even younger versions of the character. How did Ramsay get such chilling performances out of them? “Oh, they were all great, the Kevins. The thing with kids is, you can’t patronize them, they can smell bullshit a mile away.”
She then shares a funny story about Jasper Newell, who played Kevin at age 6-8 and was seven years old at the time. Newell, who is now in film school (“I’m so proud of him, even back then he told me he was going to be a filmmaker”), had no objection to the script’s darker content, but did take issue with the scenes where Kevin resists toilet training: “He didn’t want to wear the diapers because he was no longer using them in real life.”
After this, what’s next? Among the projects in the pipeline is Polaris, her first original script since Ratcatcher and her second collaboration with Joaquin Phoenix, for whom she coined the nickname “Jeebus” (a Simpsons reference) after learning he was going to play Jesus right after finishing You Were Never Really Here. He affectionately reciprocates by calling her Ponty, short for Pontius Pilate.
Before that, pending schedule adjustments after the end of last year’s SAG-AFTRA strike, it’s probably going to be Die, My Love, followed by Stone Mattress (and on the adaptation front, there’s still the long-gestating sci-fi take on Moby Dick). Regarding the former, starring Jennifer Lawrence (who also produces), Ramsay offers the perfect logline: “It’s a comedy, and a love story. But it’s my kind of comedy and love story, so it’s going to be dark and fucked-up.”
Note: An earlier version of this story mentioned Polaris as being in post-production, as previously reported by other outlets. We have since been told by people close to Lynne Ramsay that the film hasn’t been shot yet.
