Lynne Ramsay (born 5 December 1969) is a Scottish film director, writer, producer, and cinematographer best known for the feature films Ratcatcher, Morvern Callar and We Need to Talk about Kevin. She is married to Rory Stewart Kinnear (March 2002 – present), a musician, not to be confused with the actor Rory Kinnear. 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 death and its aftermath. They are low on dialogue and explicit story exposition, and instead use images, vivid details, music and sound design to create their unsettling worlds. In April 2013 she was selected as a member of the main competition jury at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival.
[on We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011)] My first thought was maybe Tilda [Tilda Swinton] is too extraordinary. But then I thought 'Well, if you look like Tilda and you're stuck in this community, it's going to be really hard to hide yourself'.
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The nature/nurture argument has been going on since the beginning of time. I think it would be crass of me to put some big stamp on it. That's the whole provocation of the film.
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...I get questions about what it's like to be a woman film-maker, and you don't get that question a lot if you're a man. I don't really go there because I can't really define what I bring to films as a woman.
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Well, there was a lot of that kind of stuff from American agents, yeah. And through the years I've been sent scripts as well. But it's always all packaged and ready to go, and that just isn't me. Do you know what I mean?
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Morvern Callar (2002)'s a really weird film, in a sense, where I was trying to experiment with taking things in a different direction, and it kind of half works and it half doesn't. And I kind of felt with that film that perhaps I should have pushed it more into the realms of black comedy, slightly.
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I've found that film-making's not just a job, it becomes part of your whole life.
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Sometimes people go, "Do you improvise a lot?" Well, you maybe improvise a lot beforehand to get to that point, but once I'm sure of what I want to do, that's it.
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Member of the 'Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' (AMPAS) since 2016.
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Member of the 'Official Competition' jury at the 66th Cannes International Film Festival in 2013.
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Member of the 'Official Competition' jury at the 72nd Venice International Film Festival in 2015.
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Ramsay quit the indie drama Jane Got a Gun (2016) prior to the first day of shooting following a 3-day standoff with producer-financier Scott Steindorff in March 2013. Ramsey complained about alleged fraudulent behavior of the producer during pre-production, mainly trying to force upon her an impossible schedule at the last minute. She felt tricked with false promises and left the production therefore. Ramsay was supposed to receive $750,000 for directing the film plus bonuses, her best salary ever, but she said, that the producers made it impossible to direct the movie the way she had planned. Ramsey was sued for breach of contract, but the resulting lawsuit was settled privately in March 2014. The producers announced that they would no longer pursue her for any damages.
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Trained as a camera operator.
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Graduated from the UK's National Film and Television School in 1995.
$100,000
