Of mice and men (from top): Ramsay; Ratcatcher's William Eadie

The Accidental Auteur
A startling new director find beauty in the unexpected
Elle Magazine, November 2000

With her supple combination of haunting visual poetry and dirty realism, Lynne Ramsay may be the most gifted filmmaker to come out of Britain since Mike Leigh. Two years ago, at age twenty-seven, Ramsay dazzled the festival circuit with a casually superb fifteen-minute short called Gasman, about a broken marriage and the children who play among its shards. Her first feature, Ratcatcher (which opens nationally this month) is a dark, captivating portrait of a Glasgow working-class family during the infamous 1970s garbage strike, seen through the eyes of a young, very troubled boy.

The poetry in Ramsay's films feels serendipitous, almost documentary, as if she'd happened upon it by chance. She draws closely from life, including her own. As a child in Scotland's two-fisted port city, she used to play with her mother's lace curtains. Two decades later, that stolen pleasure has become Ratcatcher's beautiful, subtly ominous opening shot, as a small boy wraps himself in the sheer netting. "It's kind of like a shroud," Ramsay says, "so you have the feeling that something's going to happen to him. I like playing peoples' expectations. You think you're in this art film, and then you're slapped back into reality."

It was an art film--Maya Deren's great Meshes of the Afternoon--that moved Ramsay, a photography major, to apply for last minute entrance to the graduate program at Britain's National Film and Television School. Although a film is required to get in, Ramsay was accepted on the grounds of her photographs. "I guess they thought I could hold a camera," she jokes.

Ramsay now lives in London near her English boyfriend--"a mad professor, totally bananas, really." For her next movie, Morvern Callar, she cast rising star Samantha Morton (Sweet and Lowdown; Jesus' Son) in the title role of a supermarket worker who reinvents her life by claiming authorship of her dead lover's unpublished novel. It was an unusual choice for Ramsay, since her contracts stipulate the right to cast unknowns. "I saw more than a thousand children for Ratcatcher," she says. "It's funny; headmistresses bring out the ones who can tap dance and do things. But you're not looking for them. You're looking for the shy kid whom nobody notices." --KD