After several years seemingly lost in the cinematic wilderness, filmmaker Lynne Ramsay is finally starting to cook. Returning to Cannes last year with “Die My Love,” starring Jennifer Lawrence and Robert Pattinson, the Scottish filmmaker had not made a film in eight years before that. But in a new interview with the U.K.’s The Gentlewoman, Ramsay said she has five irons in the fire and has named her next picture.
That film is “Polaris,” the long-gestating psychological horror starring Joaquin Phoenix and Rooney Mara, which she has described as “‘Rosemary’s Baby’ in the Arctic,” previously. The project has been in the works for years, but Ramsay now says it is next, and she described it in fittingly spare, strange terms.
“My next film, ‘Polaris,’ is about a photographer at the turn of the 20th century who goes to Alaska, taking photographs of the Inuit, and meets the devil in the Arctic,” Ramsay said. “It’s my epic, my 2001.”
That is a loaded description from a filmmaker whose work has usually operated in tighter, more subjective spaces. “Ratcatcher,” “Morvern Callar,” “We Need To Talk About Kevin,” and “You Were Never Really Here” are all visceral and emotionally bruised films. Still, none of them suggested Ramsay was itching to make something she would compare to Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey.” Still, “Polaris” sounds like a Ramsay film through and through: isolation, violence, and psychic disturbance pushed onto a larger canvas.
And “Polaris” is not the only thing she is developing. Ramsay told The Gentlewoman she currently has “two treatments, three scripts. That’s because of Covid, really; I wrote a lot.”
One of those scripts is “Stone Mattress,” an adaptation of the Margaret Atwood short story about wealthy tourists on a cruise in—you guessed it—the Arctic. Julianne Moore is attached to star as a passenger seeking to punish her high school rapist against the backdrop of melting icebergs. Ramsay’s description makes clear that she sees the story’s revenge-movie bones as only one part of it.
“It’s a revenge film, but it’s environmental,” she explained. “The character uncovers the past, and the landscape is uncovering the past as well; it’s melting.”
The filmmaker has already gone deep into the visual groundwork. In preparation, she created a 560-page visual deck with casting director Lucy Pardee—a massive image-and-dialogue guide to the film’s shape. “The whole film in stills, plus the dialogue, like a graphic novel,” Ramsay said. “It took me three weeks.”
Both Netflix and the film production arm of Saint Laurent are interested, Ramsay said, though nothing has been locked. The filmmaker said the biggest obstacle is not just financing but logistics. Ramsay wants to shoot in Greenland rather than rely on CGI, and Arctic cruise liners must be booked a year in advance. She called the biggest challenge “the bloody boat,” which sounds about right for a Ramsay production.
Strangely enough, Ramsay also said she wants to make popcorn fare, aka, “the ultimate escapist film,” a surprising admission from a director whose filmography includes child drownings, school shootings, maternal dread, grief, and other emotional traumas. But Ramsay framed that impulse through the movies she loved as a child, when cinema could pull her fully out of the world around her. “Because that’s what I loved as a child—something that just brought you out of your world,” she said. “There is value to that, and I never thought I’d say that.”
Meanwhile, there may also be more life left in “Die My Love” itself. Ramsay said her mother’s death complicated the film’s postproduction period, and she still thinks there is another version of the movie to explore. “It was kind of crazy,” Ramsay said of the rushed postproduction, something she spoke to us about last year, too. “I still want to do a new cut, because when my mum died, we only had two weeks left. I know there’s material in it that we didn’t really explore.”
So, from the sounds of it, “Polaris” is next, and “Stone Mattress” is waiting in the weeks with Moore attached, with interested backers seemingly circling both. The three other projects seem to be elsewhere in the mix, but a filmmaker whose career has often been defined by long silences between movies, Ramsay suddenly sounds like she has a full slate with the momentum to make at least some of it real.
Rodrigo Perez is the founder and editor-in-chief of The Playlist, which he launched in 2008. He has worked in entertainment journalism since 2000, including at MTV, and has written for SPIN, IndieWire, Pitchfork, Complex, Magnet, and various music, film, and entertainment publications over the past two decades.
- Rodrigo Perez
- Rodrigo Perez
- Rodrigo Perez
- Rodrigo Perez
- Rodrigo Perez
- Rodrigo Perez
- Rodrigo Perez
- Rodrigo Perez
- Rodrigo Perez
- Rodrigo Perez
