Page 3 Profile: Lynne Ramsay, film director

Lynne Ramsay (Getty Images)

Britain’s best director?

Ramsay, a straight-talking Glaswegian, directed the acclaimed adaptation of Lionel Shriver’s We Need To Talk About Kevin. It was a chilling, visually impressive affair released in 2011 to waves of critical acclaim. It didn’t, however, manage to bag the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, losing out to Terrence Malick’s divisive Tree of Life. But now Ramsay has the chance to choose who will nab independent cinema’s biggest honour after being named as a member of Steven Spielberg’s Cannes jury. The 43-year-old joins Django Unchained actor Christoph Waltz, French actor Daniel Auteuil, Bollywood actress Vidya Balan and others on the Jaws director’s star-studded panel.

Does she have any preferences?

Of the films in competition, those with the biggest profile are Steven Soderbergh’s Liberace biopic, the Coen Brothers’ Inside Llewyn Davis and Roman Polanski’s Venus In Fur. The most hyped of all is Only God Forgives, the follow-up to Drive by Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn with actor Ryan Gosling. But Refn won’t be getting an easy ride from Ramsay. In an interview last year, she said: “Nicolas Winding Refn or whatever, he didn’t write Drive – that takes two minutes to direct.” She went on: “If they write and they’re really delving into a project, it takes longer.”

But not every project has to take ten years

Ramsay has something of a history with troubled film productions – largely, perhaps, because her unrelenting commitment to quality doesn’t always sit well with Tinsel Town executives. Around a decade ago, she was working on a Lovely Bones adaptation which was snatched from her when the book became a hit and Peter Jackson expressed an interest in directing it. Recently, she abandoned Jane Got A Gun, a Natalie Portman-produced western, after she was allegedly forced to relinquish control over the final edit.