  Director Lynne Ramsay and actor Ezra Miller promote the film "We Need to Talk About Kevin", during the Toronto International Film Festival. (Veronica Henri/QMI Agency files) |
Welcome back, Lynne Ramsay.
The brilliant filmmaker behind Ratcatcher and Morvern Callar is back where she belongs with her new movie, We Need To Talk About Kevin. It's her first film in a decade, and it opens here Friday.
Ramsay's years away were spent working up a film version of The Lovely Bones, which she'd read before the book was even finished. She then watched the published book become a bestseller, and then had the movie wrestled away from her and given to Peter Jackson to direct. Ouch.
For what it's worth, Ramsay knew that to work properly, any film version would have to be quite different from the book; the film that was released stayed very close to the book, and was a tremendous failure, critically and financially. In a perfect world, we'd still like to see Ramsay's version of that movie.
The Glasgow native brought We Need To Talk About Kevin to TIFF last fall.
The film is based on Lionel Shriver's best-selling book, and stars Tilda Swinton as Eva and Ezra Miller as her very disturbed teenager, Kevin. The film is a sort of domestic thriller about parents and children; it's a story about tragedy and the roles played by various people in that tragedy.
Ramsay, 42, and her star, Ezra Miller, 19, met the press together to promote the film. Both displayed a giddiness peculiar to film festivals: A mix of exhaustion and the happy certainty that your film is a keeper.
Ramsay says her first task with We Need To Talk About Kevin was taking Lionel Shriver's novel apart and putting it back together as a screenplay.
(The award-winning filmmaker co-wrote the screenplay with her husband, writer Rory Stewart Kinnear.) One of the first people the filmmaker sent the script to was Tilda Swinton, who signed on within 20 minutes.
"I thought it was a killer part role for a woman, and for a woman of a certain age, to tell you the truth," says Ramsay, "because I love Joan Crawford, I love Bette Davis, I love those meaty roles, like Mildred Pierce. Those were great parts!" Swinton, herself the mother of twins, loved the script immediately.
"She took me by the scruff of the neck and said, 'Look, I want this.' We went to lunch and had a bottle of wine, and she said, 'I'll do anything, walk over hot coals, audition, whatever.' I said, 'No, you're doing it. I want you in it.' The only worry I had was she's so beautiful and so exotic and she's Orlando and all these things, and it was how to make her more normal, almost, you know?"
We do know.
On his side, Ezra Miller says he knew acting was his calling from the very first thing he ever did. The actor, who has appeared in TV's Californication and Royal Pains and in the movies City Island, Beware The Gonzo and Another
Happy Day, among others, says it was immediate. At age eight, he performed in the American premiere of Philip Glass's opera, White Raven.
"That was the first opera I ever did. I did many others thereafter, but I played a child of the earth. I conducted the orchestra, brought up the sun, had this whole exchange with Portuguese scientists. I was levitated 300 feet above the stage," he says. "At that moment, I had a very very clear ephiphany in eight-year-old-mind words, and it was something like, through interpretation, humans can harness, move through, and open up to the phenomena of this world. We are here to tell a story, sing a song, or dance a dance. That's literally all we're doing here, the rest is garbage. I just realized, as an eight-year-old, that I was a human being, and that that's what it meant."
Pausing briefly for breath, he adds, "Then I joined the Metropolitan Opera Children's Chorus and started writing screenplays I'll never show anyone. I still sing. I write songs. I'm in a band called Sons of An Illustrious Father."
The curious may want to know that Sons Of An Illustrious Father released their second folky, bluesy, album last November: One Body. Check Bandcamp.com for more.
More Artists
