Lynne Ramsay, a great filmmaker, has “Die, My Love,” starring Jennifer Lawrence and Robert Pattinson, hitting theaters a few weeks from now. It’s her first film in over eight years.
Ramsay recently hinted that she’d be going back to her roots in Scotland for her next film. However, she now tells Australia’s The Saturday Paper that there are actually two new projects already greenlit and ready to go. The long-gestating “Polaris” — starring Joaquin Phoenix and Rooney Mara — is very much alive, and the latest update is that Jonny Greenwood is set to compose the score.
“I’ve got one script ready, another is one draft away from being ready, and both of them are greenlit,” Ramsay said. “I’ve got another one, ‘Polaris,’ that is a real passion project, with Joaquin Phoenix and Rooney Mara, that’s set in Alaska in 1910. I really love that script — Jonny Greenwood read it and said he could feel the cold, so that’s gonna make life easy.”
Greenwood, the lead guitarist of Radiohead, has become one of the best film composers of the 21st century, having scored two of Ramsay’s films, six by Paul Thomas Anderson — including “There Will Be Blood,” “The Master,” and “Phantom Thread” — as well as Jane Campion’s “The Power of the Dog.”
One of the two greenlit projects Ramsay refers to is most likely the one that’s supposed to reteam her with “We Need to Talk About Kevin” star Ezra Miller, which was teased during the summer. The pair were said to have co-written the script together, and Miller even stated that it would be “the first thing I do next.”
As for Ramsay’s planned adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s “Stone Mattress,” it appears to have been shelved. “We actually had the finance, but they wanted us to do it so quickly,” Ramsay recalls. “It was just a rush job, and there was no time for prep. It’s about a boat full of rich people going to the Arctic, so not exactly a run-and-gun shoot. I wanted to film in Greenland because that’s the Arctic, but the producers wanted Iceland.”
As for “Die, My Love,” I felt it didn’t get a fair shake at Cannes — it features a wildly unpredictable performance from Jennifer Lawrence. Hopefully, the post-Cannes reviews will be better, but the film has barely been seen since then, having skipped Telluride, TIFF, and NYFF.
“Die, My Love” is only Ramsay’s fifth film — she’s been making features for over 27 years now. The other titles in her filmography are “Ratcatcher,” “Morvern Callar,” “We Need to Talk About Kevin,” and “You Were Never Really Here.”
Still no distributor for "Bucking Fastard," "Alpha Gang," "The Last Photograph," "Closing Night," and "The Life and Deaths of Wilson Shedd." The issue seems to be quality more than a lack of willingness to buy.