Director Lynne Ramsay Reveals the Inspiration Behind Her Next Film

This story is taken from the Autumn/Winter 2024 issue of AnOther Magazine:

“I’ve always been obsessed with whales – they’re just so beautiful and mysterious. I read Moby Dick when I was 17 or 18 and couldn’t get into it, with all ye olde language. I liked Dostoevsky, but that was an easier read. Then I gave Moby Dick another go years later, and I was like, fucking hell, this is biblical. I also remember seeing an animated film when I was a child – or maybe it was some kind of lucid dream – and that made a big impression. It was about these villagers who go around hunting whales. When they die you see that they’re reincarnated as the whales. They don’t realise it, but by killing the whales they’re killing the thing they become. As a kid I thought that was an amazing idea. It’s kind of the same message in my film Polaris – there’s a fantastic cut in it that moves from the circle of a burning whale’s eye to a shot from above of children waltzing. I did try to go whale-watching when I was in Greenland scouting for Stone Mattress, but I was the only person who turned up at the dock. I’ll need to get a cruise boat out there for the film – it’s very Fitzcarraldo, the whole bloody thing.” 

Lynne Ramsay has always been a water baby. She cites free-diving for sea snails off the coast of Stromboli, an island north of Sicily, as the most zen thing she has ever done, and says she gets many of her best ideas while swimming, “thinking of nothing but the next breath”. It’s been a minute since we’ve heard from the British director, who brought dark poetry to the screen with her films Ratcatcher (1999), Morvern Callar (2002) and You Were Never Really Here (2017). Now she has four scripts in varying stages of development, including Stone Mattress, about a “rich person’s cruise to see the end of the world”, and a psychological horror with two working titles – Polaris and Dark Slides – which she says is a bit like “Rosemary’s Baby in the Arctic”. For the latter, she is working for the second time with Joaquin Phoenix, who plays an “Ahab-like” figure. The film takes place at the turn of the 20th century; its dark ecological themes are encoded in that ambitious burning-whale cut that has been living, as they say, rent-free in Ramsay’s head for a while now. 

Photographic assistant: Ricardo Muñoz Carter

This story features in the Autumn/Winter 2024 issue of AnOther Magazine, which is on sale now. Order here.