Lynne Ramsay has taken all of her films — confrontational tone poems generally revolving around one individual’s fissuring psyche — to Cannes.
There was her 1999 debut, “Ratcatcher,” about an impoverished Glasgow boy suffering tragedies and drawn almost telepathically to an eerie canal. Then, “Morvern Callar,” in which Samantha Morton assumes the authorship of her dead boyfriend’s manuscript, a man she has dismembered and buried in the Scottish mountains. “We Need to Talk About Kevin” became one of 2011’s most controversial films, dousing us in the mental wreckage of a woman (Tilda Swinton) after her son shoots up his school with a bow and arrow. And her first movie with Joaquin Phoenix, 2017’s lapidary-precise mercenary-with-PTSD thriller “You Were Never Really Here,” won her the festival’s Best Screenplay prize.
Her first film in eight years, “Die My Love,” rippled divisive aftershocks along the Croisette, however, this past May. In this intense, no-apologies adaptation of Argentine writer Ariana Harwicz’s surrealistic novel, Jennifer Lawrence plays an “unfit” or “unlikable” recent mother suffering postpartum distress and basically going crazy in the Montana forest, in a small house, alongside her husband, Robert Pattinson, who doesn’t understand her or what to do with her. Some critics called for more editorial discipline in the film, or found Lawrence’s onscreen spin cycle of anguish, which involves literally clawing her way up walls or flinging herself through glass doors, to be repetitive. Others said the Cannes best actress prize was Lawrence’s to lose (as I surely did at one point).
That didn’t happen, but now this bold and precisely directed new movie is set for release from Mubi this week, and into the awards circuit. But the dazzle of a Cannes premiere or Oscar buzz (the Academy has never recognized her films) isn’t top of mind for Scottish filmmaker Ramsay when she’s making a film or untangling it for press (or even while back in the edit) after a premiere.
During a recent interview in New York City, I asked Ramsay how she perceived the “Die My Love” reaction at Cannes. The delightful director — petite, with a pixie cut and charmingly strong Scottish accent — said, “I decided not to look at anything long. The good thing, when you go when it’s not really fully shaped, you’ve just been working so hard that you don’t get any of the whole Cannes thing. Your head doesn’t get obsessed where it’s all, ‘Did they boo?’ I remember during ‘We Need to Talk About Kevin,’ I was holding my boyfriend-at-the-time’s hand so tight, and he was a guitarist. I was thinking he nearly broke his fingers. You’re like, ‘Someone’s coughing!’ or ‘the seat went up!’” She laughed.
LaKeith Stanfield, Robert Pattinson, Lynne Ramsay, Jennifer Lawrence, and Sissy Spacek at the ‘Die My Love’ New York premiereKristina Bumphrey/Variety
Ramsay continued, “Where it really counts is when you’re way down the line, it’s 20 years later, and people are still watching it. That’s when you know a movie is working for me. Like ‘Morvern Callar,’ it’s still being shown; young people like it. I saw it a couple years ago with a much younger audience than I expected. Everyone was in their twenties and they loved it and were laughing at the humor I was trying to get at at the time. To me, that’s a testament to when a movie lives or not.”
With “Die My Love” at 118 minutes, Ramsay is the first to admit it’s the longest movie of her career. Allegedly, there were changes between the Cannes version and the theatrical one opening November 7, as “Die My Love” skipped the major fall festivals besides London.
“I did quite a lot of work on the mix. We had five days to mix for Cannes [to meet the deadline], so it was just broad strokes,” said Ramsay, who wrapped filming on “Die My Love” in Calgary in mid-October 2024, so it’s amazing how quickly the filmmakers were able to slip the film under Thierry Frémaux’s door in time for a May Cannes premiere. “To me, [the mix] was too full, and I just started bringing it back a bit, with some subtle cutting work. Some scenes are better just because they’re better takes. I still would have been cutting it. There’s still bits that I want to change. There was lots of good material we didn’t include. I’m still cutting it in my mind, you know? So it’s probably good to move on.”
But Ramsay is no stranger to an unsparing edit process in time for Cannes and then also theaters. “You Were Never Really Here,” released by Amazon almost a year after Cannes in Spring 2018, is a cool 90 minutes, for one. That was “such a tight edit,” Ramsay said. “It was so economical, that film. The sound design [by Paul Davies] is amazing. There were storyboards in that film, like two weeks before [Cannes]. One of the producers that sent it to Cannes didn’t even know about it. I said, ‘It’s never going to be ready for Cannes. It’s going to be for Venice.’ He was like, ‘You can just use the storyboards,’ and I said, ‘No fucking way.’ I think every film you’re always, even years down the line, you’re like, ‘Shit, now I’ve got it!’ You become obsessive somehow.”
The material she cut out of “Die My Love” even before we saw it at Cannes included different endings or even too many endings. “My movies are never really long,” Ramsay said. “I like to be economical. I saw a couple movies recently I really liked, but was like, ‘Half an hour out of that, and it would’ve been brilliant.’”
‘Die My Love’©Mubi/Courtesy Everett Collection
One person who did not interfere, despite originating the concept of “Die My Love” as a movie: producer Martin Scorsese, who sent Harwicz’s book to Jennifer Lawrence, who then sought out Ramsay to direct the film for Lawrence’s Excellent Cadaver banner. (This was all before Mubi bought “Die My Love” for a headline-grabbing $24 million during Cannes, of which Neon CEO Tom Quinn told IndieWire at the festival, “That’s a press release, right? That’s not buying movies. And good for them.”)
“He was pretty hands-off. I remember early on, I showed him a big deck with this great casting director. I like doing mood boards, decks, and things like that,” Ramsay said. “He was pretty blown away by the deck, so that was cool. Then, he watched the cut, and we talked about some things. He was, I don’t know, pretty protective of me. I felt really free [with him]. He was quite respectful, like, ‘Maybe you could do this, but it’s totally up to you.’ The other night, I was in tears, because he was like, ‘She’s one of the best filmmakers,’ and I’m like, ‘What the hell is Scorsese saying?’ He introduced a screening. He was really respectful of how I wanted to do it. I generate my own work. I don’t normally go through this process, and I wasn’t quite sure about the book. I took a while to get there because I have to find my way in, but I never felt like people were producing me or anything like that.”
Ramsay typically writes her scripts solo or with one other person; “We Need to Talk About Kevin,” for example, she wrote with her then-partner Rory Stewart Kinnear, based on Lionel Shriver’s tough novel. In the case of “Die My Love,” Ramsay wrote the script with playwright and “Succession” and “Normal People” scribe Alice Birch, and “Hunger” screenwriter Enda Walsh. “The reason Alice became involved was because I had four weeks’ prep, so I didn’t even have time to write myself. I bounced ideas off her. She wanted to be [credited as] a script editor, but I said, fuck, she did the work,” Ramsay said. “Some people get obsessed about giving themselves millions of credits, but I like to help [other people].”
Ramsay’s cast — which along, with Jennifer Lawrence and Robert Pattinson, includes Sissy Spacek, Nick Nolte, and LaKeith Stanfield — met early in Calgary before shooting to have conversations, not rehearsal, about the characters. You pick up on the subtle differences between the leads’ acting styles: Pattinson the anxious Brit, opposite Lawrence swan-diving into the unknown as she did with Darren Aronofsky’s “mother!”
“I guess [Robert Pattinson’s] pretty anxious and neurotic because he has to deal with [Grace, Lawrence’s character],” Ramsay said, laughing. “It’s interesting how he played it. He’s a bit the hapless guy. He’s trying to navigate her somehow. He really loves her but doesn’t know what to do with her… She’s just like a wild animal, a wild beast. She’s irreverent and unapologetic, and there’s something quite liberating about her psychosis, whatever the different stages of that.”
‘Die My Love’©Mubi/Courtesy Everett Collection
Lawrence was pregnant with her second child, and in the second trimester, while filming “Die My Love,” a pregnancy that ultimately led to her own postpartum stress. And it was during that postpartum period that Lawrence, also a producer on the film, was reviewing cuts.
“She really wanted to do it, and I was like, ‘Are you sure? Because we’re going through all this stuff that’s pretty physical,’” said Ramsay when Lawrence told her she was pregnant. “When you’re pregnant, you have this kind of thing where you feel super-protective over yourself, and you’re pretty bold. You get everyone out of your way, because you’ve got something inside you. It was that boldness … that brought something to it, I thought.”
After working with director of photography Thomas Townend on “You Were Never Really Here,” Ramsay reunited with “We Need to Talk About Kevin” cinematographer Seamus McGarvey for “Die My Love” — apt, given how these are both subjective immersions into a woman’s mental unraveling. They shot “Die My Love,” a lot of which involves Lawrence crawling and writhing through tall grasses so tactile you can all but feel the Lyme disease overcoming you, in the 1.33:1 ratio and on Kodachrome reversal film stock.
“It was way before your time, but there was a stock called Kodachrome where the colors are kind of Technicolor,” Ramsay said. “I shot ‘Morvern Callar,’ the club scene, on reversal film stock, but it’s quite hard to get, and we’ve just started making it again. It’s a tricky stock to use, but [Seamus McGarvey] ended up swinging something where they made it especially for us. I think more people are shooting on it now… We did a lot of tests. We went CinemaScope, and we got into the house [where Lawrence and Pattinson’s characters live], and I said, ‘I think we should shoot Academy [ratio].’ Even though Academy was quite an unwieldy frame, I just saw it because you can see the whole length of the doors, you can see them coming in and out. And it’s a portrait frame, and a portrait film.”
Ramsay has a few upcoming projects in development, where they’ve been for a few years now. There’s the Alaska-set original script “Polaris” with Joaquin Phoenix and Rooney Mara still on board, according to Ramsay. “That’s an original script that I wrote, so it’s close to my heart. It needs another draft, but it’s been going on for a few years because it’s so not like any other film,” she said. “I sent it to [composer] Jonny Greenwood at one point, and he said, ‘I can feel the cold in this film.’ It’s set in Alaska, and it’s a period piece with Joaquin and Rooney. It needs a little bit of shaping, but I’d love to [finish] that piece.”
There’s also the Margaret Atwood short story adaptation, “Stone Mattress,” originally cast with Julianne Moore and Sandra Oh and announced in 2022 from StudioCanal, Amazon, and more. Lynne Ramsay and Thomas Townend wrote the script, and fingers crossed for the same cast once the project resumes.
“Both [‘Polaris’] and ‘Stone Mattress’ are pretty epic, so it’s good to have a simple thing as well. One of the reasons [‘Die My Love’] was appealing was because it was a couple in a house, whereas ‘Stone Mattress’ is much more complicated: It’s a boat and a cruise to the Arctic. So all sorts of things came up where I thought I would never choose to shoot anything on a boat ever again in all my life. You need to book it one year in advance, and pay a massive deposit. It’s kind of crazy, but it’s a brilliant, brilliant script. They’re both really good scripts. Right now, I’m figuring out which one.”
“I’m gonna set one in Jamaica next time,” she laughed.
“Die My Love” opens in theaters from Mubi on Friday, November 7.
