Read on for Ramsay’s thoughts on singing pig puppets, making her own soundtrack-music debut as a vocalist, Joaquin Phoenix swinging a hammer to classic oldies, and the one soundtrack choice that made Die My Love producer Martin Scorsese (another filmmaker who knows a thing or two about putting a soundtrack together) bow down with respect.
GQ: The first film of yours I saw was your second feature, Morvern Callar. You adapted Alan Warner’s book, which is one of the great mixtape novels, into one of the great mixtape movies—but you swapped out most of the song choices from the book for your own selections, which struck me as a very “music person” thing to do.
Lynne Ramsay: Well, Alan Warner has actually great taste of music. The stuff in the book’s really good. I hadn’t heard, like, Pablo Casals before, and things like that, that were really great. So he introduced me to some other stuff I hadn’t heard before. But yeah—I think [the Morvern Callar soundtrack] came out as a CD from Warp at the time, and I’ve been trying for years to get that out on vinyl, because it’s such an interesting soundtrack. We made it before we made the film, the mixtape, and played it on set. So it was pretty special, doing that.
Did you work with music in any way before you started making films? Were you ever any kind of a musician, or a critic, or a DJ?
No. I always wished I had. I like to write songs. I’ve been doing that more lately because in a way it’s like, films take so long. And I used to write poems when I was a kid, so it just feels like sometimes it’s a way of getting an idea out. And so I wrote quite a lot of songs over the last couple of years, probably in that kind of frustration, like, “When’s the film going to happen?”
And I was jamming with George Vjestica from Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds. And I can’t sing or anything like that, but I just like sometimes making things up on the spot as well, when we’re kind of jamming. We have the same Gibson guitar, but mine’s a bit smaller. It’s an accoustic guitar—mine’s slightly older. John C. Reilly bought me that as a present after We Need to Talk About Kevin, and it was the nicest present anyone ever bought me. And I cried because he did it in secret and brought me this guitar that was quite small. It kind of fitted me. And I can play two chords. I’m a kind of wannabe musician probably—in a different life, maybe.
That makes sense. Even in the films you’ve made where the score is more prominent than the needle-drops, it always feels like your song choices are really specific and personal. And that’s certainly true of Die My Love—the songs are really prominent, and I’m curious about the thought process behind some of these selections.
Some of it, we played on set, so I knew I was going to use it. But I suppose the thought behind it—it was a bit like when I did Morvern Callar, in a way. It’s like, “Who is the guy who leaves this tape?” There’s some bits of it, the soundtrack, that give a little flavor of where [Robert Pattinson and Lawrence’s characters, Jackson and Grace] are at in the relationship, additionally. But I saw Jackson as being a bit of a failed musician, and he probably has got good stuff on vinyl. You see the record player once. A lot of it came from thinking [Grace and Jackson] probably lived in New York, in a pretty small flat. She’d written a couple of things, maybe they get published. He was trying to be in a band. And then he inherits this house, this odd house. A lot of people can’t afford these kinds of things, so it seems like a dream. And then, it all starts to disintegrate. So the music sort of plays a part in that.
I watched the film again last night, getting ready to do this, and when you’re listening for it, the soundtrack cuts often seems to be speaking to Grace and Jackson’s situation. Even that deranged version of “Let’s Twist Again” at the beginning feels like her voice speaking to him, almost. He’s ignoring her and she’s saying “Come on, let’s get it on again like we used to, let’s make love…”
Yeah, yeah. I mean, that was funny. I found that on YouTube or something. But I remember Pinky and Perky, getting this seven-inch record from some aunt, of Pinky and Perky, and it driving me absolutely nuts. But we played it over and over again. So that’s what led me to “Let’s Twist Again,” and I was like, “Wow, that’s wild. I love this.” So that came up, the memory of this track that went round and round and round and round. And it had this kind of nuttiness to it—it’s something for kids, but it’s so absurd, and slightly deranged, like you said.
Pinky and Perky were puppet characters on a BBC kids’ show from the ’50s. That’s before your time, but were they still around when you were growing up?
No, I just had this ancient aunt. She was very, very old. And she bought us this seven-inch single. I don’t know where the hell she got it from, a flea market or something. And my sister and I, at the time, just played this Pinky and Perky track on repeat, because we thought it was funny. But then it started becoming sinister, actually, after you played it one million times.
When you’re writing scenes where there’s a song playing or characters are putting music on and listening to it, do you always script those song choices, or do you try different things against a particular moment when you’re cutting?
I did write some [song choices] in the script that didn’t end up in the final thing, but I still want to use them so I don’t want to mention them, because there’s a couple of tracks I’m like, “They’re so awesome that I know I’m going to use them in something else.” I’d say it’s something I often write into scripts, but sometimes it’ll turn out a bit different. In the case of Morvern Callar, I made the mixtape beforehand, and we played it on set, but some of those things changed a little bit.
And then there was a Bowie track, “Lazarus,” that I really wanted to use in You Were Never Really Here, and it was before he died. I don’t think they had the money, basically. I was trying to use Michael Jackson before, for the end of Morvern Callar—“Don’t Stop Till You Get Enough.” Nearly got it. Sometimes you can’t get it, but I always try really hard. If you approach the artists and they like the film, often you can do more than you think you can do. Considering some of the artists we use in [Die My Love], it was almost amazing that we got half the stuff, really, for the budget.