 Lynne Ramsay's work bears a powerful personal imprint. Her films are marked
by a fascination with children and young people and the recurring, unresolvable
themes of grief, guilt and, above all, death and its aftermath. They are low on
dialogue and explicit story exposition; instead, they look to bold, unusual
images, vivid details, an astute use of music and highly wrought sound design to
create their unsettling worlds. Bill Douglas and Terence Davies have been cited
as points of comparison, but her films are very much the product of an original
vision.
Born in Glasgow on 5 December 1969, she studied photography at Napier
College, Edinburgh, then entered the National Film and Television School, where
she specialised in cinematography and direction. Her graduation film, Small
Deaths, vignettes of three disquieting moments in a young girl's life, won the
Prix du Jury at Cannes in 1996, a feat which the writer-cinematographer-director
repeated two years later with her third short, Gasman, a child's-eye-view of
family tensions at a Christmas party.
Her debut feature, Ratcatcher (1999), explored a working-class childhood in
Glasgow in the early 1970s - not too different from her own - against the
backdrop of chaos and decay caused by a refuse collectors' strike. The portrait
of a 12-year-old boy consumed with sorrow after accidentally causing a friend's
death, it was unveiled in Cannes' Un Certain Regard section and won a BAFTA
award, among many others.
Morvern Callar (2002) was Ramsay's first adaptation from other source
material, in this case Alan Warner's 1995 novel about a young woman from a small
town in Western Scotland who hopes to use her boyfriend's sudden suicide as her
springboard to freedom. Samantha Morton garnered great praise as the luminously
amoral and enigmatic central character, although the film itself met a more
mixed reception.
A hiatus followed, but for other reasons. Ramsay read Alice Sebold's The
Lovely Bones as a half-finished manuscript and in 2001 signed up to write and
direct the film adaptation. Once again, it begins with a death, of a 14-year-old
girl who, in heaven, watches her family reacting to her murder. But although
apparently ideal for Ramsay, the project got caught in creative differences and,
when the book became a bestseller, Steven Spielberg acquired the rights. In 2004
she was dropped in favour of Peter Jackson, whose (poorly received) version
appeared in 2009.
In 2006 Ramsay agreed to adapt another American bestseller, Lionel Shriver's
We Need to Talk about Kevin, a study of the fraught and complex relationship
between a mother and her son, who grows up to become a multiple murderer.
Budgetary difficulties held this production up too. But, after several script
drafts, the film, which employed a fragmented, elliptical narrative and was
crowned by a stellar performance from Tilda Swinton as the tormented mother,
premiered in 2011 to great acclaim at the Cannes Film Festival.
In 2002 Ramsay married the musician Rory Stewart Kinnear, who worked with her
on the script for We Need to Talk about Kevin.
Sheila Johnston
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FILM & TV CREDITS
