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| The film team from Die, My Love line up the red carpet at the Cannes Film Festival for last night’s premiere, from left: Jennifer Lawrence, Lynne Ramsay, Robert Pattinson and Sissy Spacek Photo: Courtesy of Cannes Film Festival |
Ramsay, 55, was impressed by the writing and the background subject of post-natal depression featuring a young couple with a baby (played in the film by Robert Pattinson and Jennifer Lawrence) who seem to be stuck in a dreamlike web of sex, passion and wildness.
At the press conference for the film after its premiere in Cannes, Ramsay said: “In some ways it was similar to We Need to Talk About Kevin but I saw it more as a love story.
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| Lynne Ramsay: 'My parents had a crazy marriage and were always fighting' Photo: Richard Mowe |
"My parents had a crazy marriage and were always fighting. But it was hilarious because in the middle of arguing they would break off and fall about laughing. So a bit of personal experience came into it. I thought I am going to try it as and experiment, although I was not sure it was going to work.” The film, in common with most of her work over the years, received a standing ovation at the festival and positive vibes.
Lawrence came on board with Martin Scorsese as producers and the Oscar-winning actress took one of the two main roles as Grace, the young mother in an abusively toxic relationship with Jackson, her musician partner (Pattinson). Lawrence said she had found the book “devastating and powerful”.
The star, who is married to Cooke Maroney, an art gallery owner with international interests, added: “I had been wanting to work with Lynne since Ratcatcher. I had just had my first born and suffered from some post-natal depression and it can be extremely isolating. Having children changes everything: it is brutal but also incredible and, of course, they impact on every decision I make about work. I did not know I could feel so much emotion, bearing in mind my job has a lot to do with emotion.
“I am not actor who brings work home. Part of what she is going through is hormonal imbalance and also having an identity crisis, and she is playing with this feeling that she is disappearing. I was also actually four or five months pregnant when we shot and it was only way I could have dipped into this emotional state. It so hard to go through something that your partner cannot understand.”
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| Robert Pattinson: 'The birth of my daughter has reinvigorated my approach to work' Photo: Richard Mowe |
When Ramsay’s Ratcatcher bowed at the Festival in Un Certain Regard in 1999 and won the jury prize it was described by the late eminent film critic Michel Ciment as “one of the most auspicious debuts by a British director in 15 years.”
At the time of Ratcatcher the filmmaker said she felt “on the verge of a nervous breakdown. It was a really tough shoot with non-professional actors and we had to actually build a canal. I'd only made short films before, with 15 minutes being the longest. I felt under a lot of pressure to change my style of working, and then I thought ‘Why did you ask me to do the film?’. I stuck to my guns but it was a completely exhausting experience.”
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| Jennifer Lawrence: 'I was also actually four or five months pregnant when we shot and it was only way I could have dipped into this emotional state' Photo: Richard Mowe |
In a previous interview Ramsay told me candidly: “Families are so complicated. My brother and my mother had a complicated relationship. My mother would always cheer for him even if sometimes she did not like him.”
When she embarks on a literary adaptation Ramsay tries to translate the spirit of the book “into a vision that is different. With Die, My Love it was like peeling away the layers of an onion which is why I was frightened by it”.
