Lynne Ramsay on "You Were Never Really Here", Joaquin Phoenix's "Joker" and Her "Radical Superhero" Hopes

Why so serious? Director Lynne Ramsay swears she isn't. Well, not as serious as people think.

Lynne Ramsay is cheerful and quick to chuckle during our chat; a surprise for those who only know her dark movies Morvern Callar (about a secret suicide), We Need to Talk About Kevin (about a sociopathic, homicidal teen) and new child abduction thriller You Were Never Really Here, in Australian cinemas 6 September.

"You hate to be put in a box in any capacity," she tells Student Edge.

That’s why she’s eager to someday helm a comedy or superhero flick, and wishes she was making Joker, starring her latest feature's antihero, Joaquin Phoenix.

"I’d love that," she laughs.

"I think it’d be great to make a pretty radical superhero movie, and very timely."

In a way, You Were Never Really Here is a fitting audition for the superhero genre. (Plus, Ramsay already has an affinity for comic book characters, going back to the time her "first boyfriend had a flat so full of comic books, you had to walk through a path of boxes"). Still, Hollywood hasn’t snagged the Scottish filmmaker for one of their tentpoles yet, sometimes citing her CV, and even her gender.

"Some people find my films are quite scary because a lot is left up to the imagination; they’re not very conventional," she says.

"You either love them or hate them or whatever. But I don’t see that I just make one type of movie. That’d be so claustrophobic, you know? Every movie is different to me.

"I don’t like it when it feels like, 'Women can’t make something that’s a violent movie,' which has come up. That’s terribly short-sighted to me."

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Movie Review: Joaquin Phoenix Hammers It Home in the Stunning "You Were Never Really Here"

You Were Never Really Here, based on Jonathan Ames’ novella of the same name, stars Phoenix as Joe, a "terrifying and terrified" man, in Ramsay's words, who rescues children from kidnappers, and who gets tangled up in a gnarly conspiracy while wrestling with a mangled psyche from his long history of violence. (Joe’s weapon of choice when confronting abductors: a hammer. It's pretty effective.)

"It was a real page-turner," Ramsay says of the novella.

"It was quite short; you could read it in the same length of this movie, time-like.

"[So] how do you approach this in a radical way? There’s no knight in shining armour coming to save the girl. It’s actually a guy who has a breakdown; a fallible man. You know as much as he knows, and he goes down the rabbit hole."

Ramsay sought Ames’ blessing before changing up the storyline, including giving the main missing girl "more agency than in the novel". They ended up sparking up an email friendship that involved trading recipes and talking "boyfriend trouble or girlfriend trouble". He also approved of her additions to the tale.

"I think he’s writing another book inspired by the film; a sequel, as far as I know," she says.

Though she was eager to push the limits of the story’s "hard-boiled" tropes, the action sequences posed a "brilliant challenge" (and one she called "super fun" to boot): "How am I gonna stage this?" she wondered.

"Because I’ve never done anything like this before, with guns or hammers or whatever," she laughs.

"Same for Joaquin."

Phoenix, for his part, helped flesh out the character of Joe early on, which Ramsay describes as "like seeing this beast come alive before my eyes."

"I don’t think he’s the kind of guy to be the typical action hero," she admits. Nonetheless, together they developed the perfect way to convey Joe’s efficiency as a killer (in a low-budget, 27-day shoot).

Take Joe’s nail-biting raid on an apartment building where several kids are being held captive. Ramsay follows Joe via security cameras, cutting back to him just after he’s hammered the guards and abductors.

"It was a light bulb moment in prep," she says, calling the robotic CCTV footage "mechanical, like him."

Ramsay says she watched real security footage violence on YouTube before shooting a camera test. After cutting together the elliptical sequence with music, she was vindicated: "Wow, that really messes with your head," she recalls, laughing (again).

"It was quite seat-of-your-pants stuff, because if it doesn’t work, I didn’t have the shot [of violence] to add in," she adds.

"That in a way made it a bit more radical as well; sometimes those moments with your back to the wall are tough but great. You have to come up with solutions."

This isn’t to say Joaquin was completely confident about his ability to be the action hero.

"He has apprehensions the whole time and that’s what’s brilliant," she says.

"He’ll question everything to the end."

Ramsay remembers an anecdote from the set: "There’s a few things in the book that are very James Bond-y, prop-y; Joe in the book is kind-of OCD and he wears these latex gloves and he has a couple of gadgets. It seemed pretty cool in the script. And then I remember Joaquin saw the props guy and was like, 'This is bulls***, this is bulls***'."

"The poor props guy came out shaking," she laughed, adding, "You have to keep questioning when you make films."

"There’s no one like him, basically. I think he’s just getting to the top of his game now."

For that reason, she has high expectation for Joker, explaining that Joaquin's "deep in character now. I’m really curious how he’s going to play it; I think he’s gonna be terrific."

And though she won’t be directing it, she hopes her next picture—whatever it may be—will similarly help viewers see her in a different light.

"Watch this space for the comedy; a radical take on a rom-com," she jokes.

You Were Never Really Here arrives in Australian cinemas 6 September.

Header Image: StudioCanal