Lynne Ramsay - Interview

POLLUTION, RATS, AND DEATH MAKE ONE BEAUTIFUL PICTURE

Scottish writer-director Lynne Ramsay's Ratcatcher, currently opening around the country, is a grim yet lyrical reverie of uncomprehending pre-adolescent love and the desire for escape set in and around an impoverished Glasgow tenement in the early '70s. A garbage workers' strike is on and the neighborhood is festooned with bags of rotting refuse among which children and vermin frolic. The boy we think is the protagonist is shoved into a polluted canal and drowns, so for the rest of the film we follow his accidental killer, puny twelve-year-old James (William Eadie). He seldom speaks, but demonstrates the ache inside him by taking up with simple fourteen-year-old Margaret Anne (Leanne Mullen), who betrays him by having sex with the loutish local boys who persecute her.

Ramsay, twenty-nine, had directed two shorts that each won the Cannes Prix du Jury before she embarked on her debut feature. Like Ken Loach's Kes (1969) if it had been directed by Magritte and photographed by Tarkovsky, the movie is a small miracle. Its chatty, unassuming maker will next embark on the film of Morvern Caller, Scottish "beat" writer Alan Warner's novel about a supermarket shelf-stacker and rave-goer who wakes up one Christmas morning to find her live-in boyfriend has killed himself; Ramsay has cast Samantha Morton in the title role.

GRAHAM FULLER: Lynne, you were brought up in the same district of working-class Glasgow we see in Ratcatcher ...

LYNNE RAMSAY: Yeah, Maryhill.

GF: When did you get the first inkling you had an eye for images?

LR: I liked drawing a lot when I was a kid, and by the time I was twelve or thirteen I thought I'd probably be a painter. I ended up doing a foundation course at the Glasgow Art Center and then got my degree in fine-arts photography.

GF: What did you photograph?

LR: Just my family, my life, and my pals. I used to hang around in clubs when the rave scene started. I took a lot of photos at a club called Pure in Edinburgh when I was about nineteen. It was an interesting document of that time. I also did still lifes and montages, which I like less now.

GF: When did you decide to become a director?

LR: I didn't. I didn't know anything about films. I sent my pictures to the National Film and Television School the night before my application was due, and was really surprised when they accepted me for the cinematography course. I was pretty naive about it all. I couldn't even move the camera. I think I was the least experienced person on the course. I was rubbish--just terrible. I'd shoot all of one film using wide-angle lenses, or standard lenses, and I'd get told that was a big mistake. Or I'd cut off people's heads in the shots. These were things I'd been doing in photography, but they didn't work in film. But I got to understand things like the language of cutting, and how it's like music.

GF: How has your visual style evolved?

LR: It's been a wee bit of a strange process. I started writing short stories at film school. I wanted to make something that meant more to me than the films I was asked to photograph. I felt everyone was trying to make a calling card for the industry. In the end, I ended up filming three of the stories I wrote, and in each of them I tried to play with different ideas and styles. For example, the kids' party in Gasman was a real party that I shot like a documentary. Only some of the dialogue was fictional. It was a really exciting day because all the kids started fighting and went bananas--it's all on film. I like that element of spontaneity.

GF: How did Ratcatcher evolve?

LR: The BBC asked me if I wanted to do a feature. I wrote about fifty-five pages of a script and it was a mess, but I could see potential in it. I started with the landscape, which interested me because it was breaking down, and the idea of this young boy you don't particularly like at the beginning of the story. I love Lord of the Flies and books like that, so I liked the idea of making a film about a kid who wasn't a conventional, cutesy kid that you empathize with from the beginning--though hopefully you grow to empathize with him. I like characters that are ambiguous.

GF: Were a lot of the visual impressions in Ratcatcher from your childhood?

LR: Some of them. Details like having crap shoes. Stuff like that--universal things.

GF: Did you yourself yearn to move away to the kind of new house James visits in the film?

LR: I don't know that I yearned to leave. As a kid, you accept your environment. Everything was an adventure, even playing among the garbage. Kids tend to find something beautiful wherever they live. We did move away when I was about six. The new house had a proper bathroom, so it felt like paradise. [laughs] Going back to my old neighborhood to film, I've been surprised how little the housing conditions had changed. I used to go to see the kids who I wanted to be in my short films--you know, to ask their mums and dads if it was OK--and there was one family living alone on a whole block and with no light in the stairwell. That shocked me.