‘Die My Love’: Lynne Ramsay On Cannes Pressure, Building Ferocity With Jennifer Lawrence, Hoping To Work With Robert Pattinson Again & More [Interview]

Scottish auteur Lynne Ramsay returned to cinema this weekend with “Die My Love,” her first feature in eight years since “You Were Never Really Here,” and the arrival feels seismic because Ramsay never works lightly or half-formed. Across her career — from “Ratcatcher,” to “Morvern Callar,” to “We Need to Talk About Kevin”— Ramsay has carved out a singular place in contemporary film language: psychological, sensory, confrontational, deeply interior. And in the years since her last feature premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, she has remained a fiercely pursued voice, repeatedly attached to ambitious projects that prove maddeningly difficult to wrestle into existence. That tension between wild vision and brutal production reality runs through her work and defines her latest film.

READ MORE: ‘Die, My Love’ Review: Lynne Ramsay Returns With Thorny Psychological Thriller Crowned By Brilliant Jennifer Lawrence [Cannes]

“Die My Love,” adapted from Ariana Harwicz’s novel, stars Jennifer Lawrence and Robert Pattinson as a couple unraveling inside a remote countryside home, where early-parenthood delirium, sexual volatility, and mental collapse twist the domestic space into a claustrophobic psychological chamber. The ensemble around them is equally sharp: Sissy Spacek brings heartbreaking warmth and grounded clarity as Lawrence’s empathetic mother-in-law, while Lakeith Stanfield and Nick Nolte add deeper texture to the film’s combustible emotional landscape. And the movie itself — It’s giving Cassavetes. Jittery, jagged, and intimate, it explodes with raw impulses, feeling closer to modern Cassavetes than to conventional literary adaptation; it privileges emotional experience over plot, sensation over structure, and instinct over exposition. The house becomes a site of entrapment; the forest a pulse of desire and danger; the sound design a language unto itself. It’s Ramsay returning to her deepest obsessions: bodies in crisis, environments that speak, and cinema as sensory immersion.

The filmmaker has spent much of the time since “You Were Never Really Here,” circling other ambitious undertakings — Arctic expeditions, period pieces, an adaptation of “Stone Mattress,” her original script “Polaris,” and long-gestating thematic visions inspired by Moby Dick — each of them rich with scale but challenging to mount. Production realities, COVID disruptions, and the sheer logistical brutality of filming in the Arctic have slowed major movements. But Ramsay has continued to write, experiment, cut, and refine, waiting for the right constellation to form around the projects she believes in.

“Die My Love” emerged from that period of near-projects and stalled momentum with startling force. Lawrence reached out directly, advocating for Ramsay’s vision and inviting her to take on the adaptation. The film evolved fast once Ramsay entered it — a sprint to Cannes, a furious edit, an intense sound mix, and a process defined by improvisation, instinct, and discovery. Ramsay describes it as filmmaking shaped by the location, by the actors’ physical impulses, by sound, by pressure, by the unpredictable nature of creation itself. And with that pressure came clarity: Ramsay returned fully, fiercely, to the kind of filmmaking only she can make.

There are plenty of places we could start, but I like the sneaky credits that revealed you as the singer of the Joy Division “Love Will Tear Us Apart” cover. Do you have a secret album in the works that we’re not aware of? [laughs]
It started as something purely for prep, just a temp track. We were rushing to get ready for Cannes, and I recorded it on an iPhone because we needed something quick to help shape the tone. I didn’t expect it to stick, and I always deny it’s me, though the credits expose me. It was done on the fly, and people liked it, so it stayed.

Were you under Cannes pressure again, similar to “You Were Never Really Here,” I take it.
Yes. It wasn’t as chaotic as “You Were Never Really Here,” where people were asking me to present storyboards of scenes we hadn’t even shot in the final cut. That one involved filming underwater scenes a week before the Cannes Film Festival. This one wasn’t that extreme, but we still didn’t have much time left in the edit.

The sound was recorded in five days, and it was huge, broad, and needed refining. I focused intensely on sound because it impacts the whole mood of the picture. Sometimes it felt like editing a different film. I had a lot of scenes that worked, but leaving them all in created double endings. I could still be cutting the film. Maybe one day I’ll do another cut.

I read you were experimenting with music and songs for Jennifer Lawrence to sing at some point?
We played around with music a lot, including the possibility of using Johnny Cash’s “The Beast in Me.” I debated whether it would work. We tried things out because everything was moving quickly toward Cannes. There were moments of considering songs Jennifer might sing, but the film evolved constantly as the edit shifted. Nothing was fixed for long. We were experimenting under pressure, and certain ideas stuck while others didn’t.

Did the rushed sound recording affect the mix?
Definitely. Recording sound in five days meant it was broad, big, and rough. I had to rein it in and refine it during the mix. The sound made me rethink scenes because it changed the emotional tone so dramatically. I spent a lot of time in the mix shaping it. It influenced the whole film and shifted the picture in ways I didn’t expect.

You often explore beyond the script in the edit.
Yes. “We Need to Talk About Kevin” taught me how nonlinear storytelling can emerge organically. I cut that script down heavily just to get it made, and its nonlinear structure was built in the editing. A simple image, such as a sprinkler sign, became ominous through repetition. With this film, I wanted the actors to be free in the frame, not restricted to precise marks. I built the world visually so they could move in it without constraint. Prep time helps with that because they start to understand the character’s environment. It’s freedom inside a structure that I set up.

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The house itself feels like a character. Did the house location impact your approach?
The house changed everything. It wasn’t a constructed set, so its real layout told me what the film needed. Originally, the script opened with the characters approaching the house across a field, but stepping inside made me feel that the film should be observed from within the house. The house becomes a place of oppression, where the character’s mind unravels. Once you’re in a location, it tells you what it wants. You start to see that something could work better this way or that way. Actors handle props differently, gestures change, and the film reveals itself. Filmmaking is about discovering those things, not just executing the script.