As director Lynne Ramsay’s Cannes-prizewinning movie You Were Never Really Here hits cinemas, she talks to Katherine McLaughlin about tackling the action genre for the fi rst time and bonding with leading man Joaquin Phoenix
the psychology of the character. That’s the kind of technique they used in silent movies – what you don’t know and is left to your imagination is almost more potent. I thought [the violence] should be very mechanical at i rst which is why I brought in the surveillance camera. Then the violence becomes more personal to him, and then it becomes almost post-violence in the way that you don’t see anything, but you can i ll in the gaps. He’s just moving forward. Right now, there’s a lot of explicitly violent i lms and people know how it operates. What’s more scary in this is that you don’t see everything.’
On set, Phoenix and Ramsay bonded over sharing music with one another and listening to Aphex Twin and Melkeveien’s ‘Peter Pan Death Wish’ (the song featured in the trailer) to get them in the zone.
Jonny Greenwood composed the electronic score for the i lm and Ramsay chose a soundtrack to match her character’s mindset that skips and jumps to eerie effect. Ramsay also gave Phoenix audio clips of explosions and i reworks to listen to as an explanation of what was going on in his head. ‘With the character of Joe, I was trying to understand how memory works and how you recall things as l ashes,’ says Ramsay. ‘Unlike l ashbacks which tell
a story, I was looking at fragments and how people piece things together. The explosions represent how people remember.’
An abusive upbringing and his time serving in the marines have left Joe broken and suffering from PTSD and Ramsay expertly puts the viewer in his disturbed mind. Phoenix carried out his own independent research by speaking to men who work on sex trafi cking cases. Ramsay watched documentaries on PTSD which explored the subject as far back as the Civil War, but she also focused on the modern world as part of her research.
‘I i nd documentaries really informative and I’m not on any kind of social media so it’s my way of trying to understand the world,’ she says. ‘Nothing’s black and white anymore, you can’t trust anything anymore and Joe lives in that kind of world. He kind of looks into this abyss of darkness and it’s just the tip of the iceberg. He lives in this world of uncertainty which I think is the world right now.”
You Were Never Really Here, Glasgow Film Theatre, Fri 23 & Sat 24 Feb. General release from Fri 9 Mar. See review, page 62.
1 Feb–31 Mar 2018 THE LIST 23