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Interview: Lynne Ramsay

WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN directed by Lynne Ramsay, written by Ramsay and Rory Kinnear from the novel by Lionel Shriver, with Tilda Swinton, John C. Reilly, Ezra Miller and Jasper Newell. An eOne release. 112 minutes. Opens Friday (February 10). For venues and times, see Movies.


Before she found We Need To Talk About Kevin, it seemed like Scottish director Lynne Ramsay might never make another film. Certainly, she never planned on adapting another successful novel.

Ramsay didn’t simply disappear for a decade. She worked on The Lovely Bones for years before losing the project to Peter Jackson amidst a series of personal and professional setbacks.

“DreamWorks took over and a lot of people started mulching around, so I got screwed and that hurt a lot,” recalls Ramsay after screening the new film at the Toronto Film Festival. “Then my best friend died and my dad died, so it was a couple of years of fuck. But film is like that. It’s Fitzcarraldo: you’re always pushing a boat over a mountain.”

Thankfully, the inventive director of Ratcatcher and Morvern Callar eventually found a project worth the fight in Lionel Shriver’s novel about a detached mother (Tilda Swinton) struggling with the memories and scars left by her disturbed killer son.

“The book almost felt like a modern classic,” she says. “It was sent to me early on, and I’m sure it was sent to other people as well, but they were frightened of it. It felt right, and I had to make it.”

The filmmaker, known for vividly depicting the internal lives of her characters through beautifully expressive cinematography, related to the project about a woman’s mental breakdown because of her own troubled years away from the camera.

Her return to moviemaking was fraught with almost as many challenges as her last project, from financing to dealing with the bureaucracy of American film production.

“It took seven or eight meetings just to get a jackhammer on the streets of New York. I started laughing in some meetings because it became Kafkaesque,” she recalls, but admits that once shooting began, it was her smoothest production yet.

A major part of what made it a joyful experience was the extraordinary cast led by Swinton and Ezra Miller, who was fascinated by his murderous role.

“What I love about this film is how much it asks, like ‘Where does violence really come from?'” says Miller, speaking with impressive insight for a 20-year-old. “It’s not actually in your hands in the moment when you kill someone. It’s deeper and found in some pretty suburban castle.”

Ramsay and Miller’s depiction of a frightening child may evoke superficial comparisons to parental horror classics like The Bad Seed, but the director and her precocious actor dismiss the genre label.

“I don’t really see it as black-and-white like The Bad Seed, where the kid is truly evil. I’m much more interested in how the mother projects onto that as well,” says Ramsay.

Then Miller jumps in.

“We invent mythologies like that to cope with real situations,” he says. “So it’s interesting that when we make a movie about that real situation, everybody wants to call it The Bad Seed.”

movies@nowtoronto.com

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