After years of stop-and-start development, iconoclastic filmmaker Lynne Ramsay has finally regained momentum. While promoting her new film “Die My Love,” the Scottish director told Australia’s The Saturday Paper that not only are two new projects already greenlit, but her long-gestating collaboration “Polaris” — starring Joaquin Phoenix and Rooney Mara — remains very much alive, with a new tidbit in tow: Jonny Greenwood set to compose the score.
“I’ve got one script ready, another is one draft away from being ready, and both of them are greenlit,” Ramsay said. “I’ve got another one, Polaris, that is a real passion project, with Joaquin Phoenix and Rooney Mara, that’s set in Alaska in 1910. I really love that script – [musician] Jonny Greenwood read it and said he could feel the cold, so that’s gonna make life easy.”
“Polaris” first surfaced several years ago as a reunion between Ramsay and Phoenix after their acclaimed collaboration on “You Were Never Really Here.” The Alaska-set project, described as a stark survival tale, was among several scripts the director had been developing in the wake of her planned adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s “Stone Mattress.”
That project, however, now appears to be dead. “We actually had the finance, but they wanted us to do it so quickly,” Ramsay recalled about ‘Mattress’. “It was just a rush job, and there was no time for prep. It’s about a boat full of rich people going to the Arctic, so not exactly a run-and-gun shoot. I wanted to film in Greenland because that’s the Arctic, but the producers wanted Iceland.”
The adaptation was once set to star Julianne Moore and Sandra Oh, but Ramsay ultimately walked away. “I’d have to do two lines here, fly for hours to get another bit of snow, and for the actors and me, that’s impossible,” she said. Ramsay admitted she “sometimes regretted” abandoning the project, but when COVID hit, she pivoted to writing new material — now seemingly the next chapter in one of the most distinctive voices in modern cinema.
Her latest film, “Die My Love,” stars Jennifer Lawrence and Robert Pattinson (read our review) and adapts the novel by Ariane Dreyfus (based on a story by Ariane Bois). Set in rural America, it follows a young woman unraveling under the pressures of isolation and motherhood while concealing a violent emotional breakdown from her husband. Ramsay’s film is expected to mark a ferocious return to the kind of psychological intensity and visual lyricism that defined “We Need to Talk About Kevin” and “You Were Never Really Here.”
Following “Die My Love,” Ramsay seems poised to finally break her long cycle of unrealized projects. “I want to do my next film in Jamaica; it’s always freezing places for me,” she joked.
Fingers crossed, we’ll soon get details on the two greenlit films and their casts. If anything can push a challenging Lynne Ramsay project across the finish line these days, it’s the A-list actors who are lining up to work with her.
