Hollywood
is setting sights on filmmaker Lynne Ramsay, with a Tinsel
Town agent pursuing her and the Hollywood establishment
beginning to sit up and take notice of the 31year-old
former stills photographer.
It can only be a question of time before a huge pay cheque
tempts her to defect, if only to collect a dividend on
her undoubted talent.
When collecting her Carl Foreman award for Ratcatcher
Ramsay amused her film industry audience by waving
the envelope in her hand and quipping "This will
help pay off the credit card bill!"
She is undoubtedly a filmmaker with attitude. Even her
just-try- stopping-me walk, singles her out as someone
who is heading somewhere else in a hurry. You can see
she has the balls to get there. This is not a delicate
flowering of talent, but one that is loaded, up-front,
determined and pointed at a cinema screen.
Increasingly, Ramsay’s is a talent being recognised,
not only because of her showcase clutch of Grand Prixs,
Hugos and Golden Spurs conferred by festival juries, but
by some of the sharpest operators in the business. There’s
the wonderful story from Cannes, where she was supposed,
quite literally, to bump into Alan Parker spilling red
wine over his clean crisp linen suit. Apparently about
to erupt in anger, if not fury, he checked himself when
he realised the culprit was Ramsay. He simply smiled and
said, "I’ll treasure these stains forever."
If the story is true, it merely indicates the impression
Ramsay’s talent has created on the big guns of British
film.
She is a working class woman, with a pronounced Glasgow
accent, and no concessions
to folk unable to handle that. Her first three films,
Small Deaths, Gasman and Ratcatcher, are
all rooted in Glasgow’s working class, drawing on
distressful, elemental issues, like violence, social deprivation,
drunkenness and broken marriages, but from within this
unhappy turmoil, Ramsay finds shots that convey a deeper
resonance, the human chord that connects people.
These are films that needed a certain single-mindedness
to make, they are not likely to be seen in the local multiplex
and Ramsay insists she does not look for films that find
favour, except in one direction. Films that challenge,
that make audiences think, yes, but crucially she must
please herself. As Ramsay puts it, "I want to make
work that means something to me. If I made films to please
everybody I wouldn’t be making good films. I don’t
think you can have that kind of attitude as a director.
If you set out to please everybody, you make a kind of
mediocre product. I like to make films that challenge.
That will always cause division."
Ramsay is on her fourth film, currently shooting in Oban.
It is a feature adapted from Alan Warner’s cult novel,
Morvern Callar. Ratcatcher’s success made
certain she gained a reasonable budget for it, enabling
her to progress beyond the "put it on my plastic"
school of film finance, in favour of someone else’s
plastic perhaps. The film is about a socially dysfunctional
Oban girl, played by Samantha Morton, who discovers the
body of her boyfriend after his suicide and escapes abroad
using his credit cards. The escape abroad bit could be
a portent for the film’s director.
Also on the back of Ratcatcher, Lynne Ramsay has
been selected by Film Four to write and direct The
Lovely Bones, an adaptation of Alice Sebold's Wide
Wide Heaven. It's the tale of a murdered teenage girl
watching from on high as her death disrupts her grieving
relatives lives.
It is a rapid ascent Ramsay is making and the money’s
getting better all the time. So is she likely to bend
to Hollywood overtures, with an agent who can spot a good
director when somebody tells him about one, cosying up?
Ramsay is well aware of the creative interference that
can arise through the Hollywood system, with teenage test
audiences pulled into cinema suburbia to say which ending
they would prefer to take with their popcorn. But she
is also aware, this is not a universal approach, so she
has not ruled out any invitation: "If I could get
the creative freedom that I can get here, then perhaps.
There are a lot of good people making a lot of good films
with creative freedom. Boys Don’t Cry for example,
films where the director has obviously had a big say in
how it was made. I want to make the film I want to make.
I don’t want to be a puppet. Somebody else would
be much better at that."
Quite.
And given La Ramsay’s singular sense of couture -favouring
up-front, what else?- she will always be noticed. You
will not need to ask who calls the shots around this film
set, you will probably be looking at her.
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Hollywood
is setting sights on filmmaker Lynne Ramsay, with a Tinsel
Town agent pursuing her and the Hollywood establishment
beginning to sit up and take notice of the 31year-old
former stills photographer.
concessions
to folk unable to handle that. Her first three films,
Small Deaths, Gasman and Ratcatcher, are
all rooted in Glasgow’s working class, drawing on
distressful, elemental issues, like violence, social deprivation,
drunkenness and broken marriages, but from within this
unhappy turmoil, Ramsay finds shots that convey a deeper
resonance, the human chord that connects people.