Gl asgow FILM
FESTIVAL
P I EC E O F T H E A C T I O N
F or her fourth feature i lm, director Lynne Ramsay gives the male action hero a serious makeover with a tender, blackly funny and vicious thriller about an ex-marine who is sent on a mission to save a young girl from a sex trafi cking ring in New York. You Were Never Really Here stars Joaquin Phoenix in the lead role of Joe and is adapted from a novella by Jonathan Ames. Ramsay read the novella in a couple of hours and changed the i nal third by restructuring Joe’s reaction to violence. ‘I went through it very fast and I really loved this character. I liked the beginnings of this character – he’s got this hunchback quality to him, he’s almost a monster and you never know what he’s going to do next. The quality of the writing and how unusual the character was for what would usually be a B novel or B movie stuck with me. One of the things I took from the book is that he was a very fallible man.’
The acclaimed director of Morvern Callar and We Need to Talk About Kevin, Ramsay wanted Phoenix
in this role from the beginning and soon after he agreed to do it, the pair began to collaborate on the psychological and physical development of his character. Phoenix moved around the corner from Ramsay roughly seven weeks before shooting started and any spare moment she had in between scouting locations in New York she spent working with him.
‘That time was invaluable,’ she says. ‘It was cool that he did that because he prepared himself really early on. The way he looked physically and how big he was becoming before my eyes, and the way he walked was amazing. We talked a lot about the role, trying to get rid of any clichés. Joaquin and I talked a lot about masculinity and the tough guy, the knight in shining armour who rescues the girl. The male action hero normally saves the girl and we were doing the exact opposite of that. I wanted to redei ne the clichés of those movies but for it also to be an intelligent i lm. It’s about male impudence in a lot of ways, but in a way, he comes back to life. I thought of it as a bit of a Lazarus story.’ Ramsay’s approach to violence and the tense action sequences set her i lm apart. ‘I’d never done action sequences before: I’d never done anything like that.’ she notes. ‘I tried to approach them from
22 THE LIST 1 Feb–31 Mar 2018