Joan of Arc goes Manic Panic

Director Lynne Ramsay talks about child actors, chugging Jack Daniel's on Latvian TV and her celebrated coming-of-age movie, "Ratcatcher."

By Carlene Bauer

Oct 24, 2000 | Lynne Ramsay has a thing for Joan of Arc. "She's a good person to be into if you have to be obsessed with someone," says the 30-year-old Scottish director, who looks like Joan gone Manic Panic -- tiny, slender, with a girlish haircut dyed red and black. And she has a bit of the unexpected visionary about her. Ramsay grew up thinking she'd be a photographer, but on a whim, after seeing Maya Deren's film "Meshes of the Afternoon," she applied to Britain's National Film and Television School. Even though she'd never made a film she was accepted.

After a few years of confidence shaking she came out the other end with a graduation short film that won the Prix du Jury at the Cannes Film Festival. Now, with one more Prix du Jury and an acclaimed feature, "Ratcatcher," to her name, Ramsay has been dubbed one of Britain's finest young filmmakers by the U.K. press.

"Ratcatcher," which was released in the U.K. last year but is opening in the U.S. now., takes place in Glasgow, Scotland, during a garbage strike in the '70s. At its center is James Gillespie (William Eadie), a desultory 12-year-old haunted by his implication in a playmate's death. To escape his occasionally drunk dad (Tommy Flanagan), long-suffering mom (Mandy Matthews) and snappish sisters, he buses to the end of the line and knocks about in the fields behind the empty homes of a new housing estate. Or he shuffles between Kenny, a kid with a speech impediment and an idiot savant-ish obsession with animals, and a gang of wannabe toughs, who practice being men on James' friend, Margaret Anne.

That's not much in the way of story, but Ramsay creates cinema the old-fashioned way -- with silent, moving pictures. Like her patron saint, she sees the things others overlook. The power of "Ratcatcher" comes from Ramsay's ability to visually articulate all sorts of indescribables: the pinched grief on James' dad's face as he and his mom dance their way through apology and forgiveness; the quiet contentment between James and Margaret Anne as they sit watching television.

I interviewed Ramsay in a New York hotel room during a press tour for "Ratcatcher." She drank room service Budweiser and chain-smoked while answering away -- with the occasional giggle breaking through her rapid-fire Scottish accent.

You wrote in one of the British papers that you felt that movies should provide an unquotable experience, that they should leave you feeling wordless. And it seems that you give that to the viewer with "Ratcatcher." You do an extraordinary job of evoking people's interior lives without much dialogue. Since the film feels more composed than scripted, how did you go about writing it?

I knew that I wanted to write about a young boy because I had never done that before. And I thought it was interesting because they have a bit more peer pressure to be desensitized and not express their emotions from a very early age, so that interested me. Also, I didn't want to write a cute kid, you know, the kid who's seen as the innocent victim. Right away we present this kid [James] whom the audience questions. But I start off the film with a much conventionally cuter kid and then shock the audience out of complacency by introducing who you think is going to be a main character and then kill him off.

For me, the script's not the final product, it's just a working process. People always know that it's always going to be a bit stressful working with me, but hopefully we'll get results! It's a bit like taking photos, actually, writing a script. You look at people, you listen to people, you look at the details, the body language that says something about them. So I guess being a photographer helps. But it's like taking photographs you'd always really want to take but could never quite get.

So how did you get from photography to directing?

I think I was provoked to apply because someone said, "Oh, you'll never ever get in, you need to have made a film," so I thought, "Fuck it, I'll just send in some stills and see what happens." With my stills I was documenting my life, going to clubs, some of the early rave scene. I was doing quite surreal still-life work, and I knew the school wouldn't accept me as a director, so I thought I'd apply as a cinematographer because then I could shoot documentaries and I could shoot fiction. But I had no idea what it really involved!

I made a lot of mistakes, but then I saw that those mistakes could be something that would work emotionally. I would maybe shoot a whole scene with the same lens and people would say, "Oh, you can't do that," and I would crop someone's head off while they were speaking a really important monologue. I was trying to think of interesting ways to get psychological insight into the character, but some people thought I was bonkers.

Because in film school a lot of the scripts for the short films, especially, they were really formulaic with a punch in the end, a twist in the tale. And I thought, "This means nothing to me; why I am shooting this?" Because I had to really understand it even as a cinematographer. Is this camera here for stylistic reasons? Explain it to me. So I was trying to think why I was putting the camera where it was. I think that helped me later as a director; you know, you're always looking for a reason, always looking for a kind of logic -- even my own illogic kind!

What did your parents think of all this mastering of fine arts?

They thought, "When is she going to be done with school?" But when the first film I directed went to Cannes, Francis Ford Coppola gave me the Prix and the press came to them in Glasgow, they were like, "What the hell?" They were really chuffed that I was going to Cannes but it was something abstract as well. I think that's when it started kicking in for them. We didn't have any money growing up, but they were great. My mom was a cleaner and dad had odd jobs, was unemployed for a bit, managed a bar and an outdoor market. They were cool about me doing something arty-farty and not knowing what I was doing, switching from painting to film or whatever I was doing.

Next Page: Glasgow's split personality; Jack Daniel's in Latvia

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