'Things that work on the page don't always work on film'

Staying too faithful to a bestselling novel can ruin the film adaptation, so when she was making 'We Need to Talk About Kevin', Lynne Ramsay decided to 'smash it up and put it back together again', she tells DONALD CLARKE

IT'S MONDAY evening and Lynne Ramsay, one the era's great directors, is gathering her things before facing the masses for the London premiere of We Need to Talk About Kevin. Unpretentious, proud possessor of an unreconstructed Scottish accent, she doesn't seem like the sort of person who savours dressing up.

“Well, I’ll be a bit more glamorous than usual,” she laughs.

Ramsay knows she has little to worry about. True, the film always sounded like a controversial project. Lionel Shriver’s source novel – hugely popular, but abhorred in many quarters – is set amid the awful penumbra of a mass high-school slaying. A characteristically spooky Tilda Swinton turns out as the mother who has always been suspicious and fearful of her titular son. We are still a little wary of acknowledging that parents don’t always get on with their children. But the film’s portrait of Kevin, who eventually kills for sport, is head-spinningly savage. He is, in short, an unrelenting monster.

Happily for Ramsay, now a fresh 41, the picture has already received near-universal raves on the festival circuit. It seems unlikely the BFI London Film Festival crowd will throw cabbages during the credits.

“It has taken off,” she says cautiously. “There was a good reaction from people I’d invited to screenings. But you never know until you see it with a real audience. Cannes was a real nightmare. My poor husband’s knuckles were crushed to bits. But it got a standing ovation. I think I’m feeling quite good about it.” She goes on to say that she savours heated discussion of the film’s themes. But she must balk a little at the more extreme reactions. Once again, as was the case when the novel was published, some malcontents are arguing that the story offers an argument against having children. Just watch Swinton park her baby beside a pneumatic drill. The character finds even that noise preferable to the sound of constant wailing.

"I just say 'bullshit' to that," Ramsay says. "It's about a woman's fear. That's a universal subject. What might be going on inside your body in that situation can be frightening. It's a real question: what if you don't instantly love your child? Films such as Rosemary's Babyhave tackled that from a supernatural perspective." She doesn't have children herself? "No. But I have many nieces. Look, some parents have got on fine with it. Sometimes you do feel like throwing your teenager across the room. I grew up in a different era. If you did something wrong, you got a slap." How do disciplinarians continue this sort of discussion? It never did me any harm. I got a slap, but I turned out all right.

“Oh, I’m not recommending it,” she says slightly panicked. “But we can overprotect our children.”

Ramsay was raised in Glasgow as the child of a Catholic dad, who worked in the shipyards, and an equally hard-working Protestant mother. As a kid, she remembers being mildly obsessed with drawing. Afternoons were spent scribbling in the few vacant corners of their Maryhill house. She has always argued that her parents greatly valued education. Were they perhaps disappointed that, rather than taking a less esoteric route, she eventually decided to study photography at Napier College in Edinburgh? “No. I’d always done a lot of drawing,” she says. “So they were very supportive. They always knew I was an artistic kid. I was always showing them paintings. So they can’t have been that surprised.”

As a teenager she had been introduced to the great European art films when dating an older chap. He took her to the Glasgow Art Theatre – a truly lovely, gently modernist building – to see work by such masters as Robert Bresson, Ingmar Bergman and Rainer Werner Fassbinder. The virus lodged in her metabolism and she ended up studying at the National Film and Television School in Buckinghamshire. Her talent was never in doubt. Her graduation film, Small Deaths, won the Prix du Jury at the Cannes Film festival. Her debut feature, Ratcatcher, was received with rapturous hosannas.

Released in 1999, that film generated predictable, lazy comparisons to Ken Loach. But, set in Glasgow during the 1970s, Ratcatcherexhibited an altogether freakier, more dreamlike sensibility than you expect from a traditional social-realist drama.

The follow-up, Morvern Callar, an expressionist adaptation of Alan Warner's novel, generated more positive word in 2002. Did mainstream producers start circling? "You do suddenly meet a lot of people," she says. "And then the challenge is to find something that's right for you. A lot of agents wanted to sign me, but I had to keep my independence. Doing something like Kevin, which is still mine, is the right way to go. You could never make this for a studio."

It took nearly a decade for Ramsay to follow-up Morvern Callar. The story goes that much of that time was taken up with preparing an adaptation of Alice Sebald's hit novel The Lovely Bones. The project ended up becoming a critical and commercial flop for Peter Jackson, director of Lord of the Rings. Her version would surely have been a deal less drippy. "In a way I'd love to forget about it all," she sighs. "It was one of these weird situations with a lot of people hovering over the project. I picked it up in the early days before it was this phenomenon. Then it ended up on Oprah Winfrey's book club and so on. So it was very weird. If it hadn't become a bestseller it would have been fine. Then it was like the Holy Bible. Don't change a word! That was then the implication. Then one of the producers became involved with DreamWorks. Unless it was exactly the same as the book they weren't happy." You can understand her pain. Far too many adaptations of hit novels are, these days, far too faithful to the supposedly sacred text. Producers seem to have forgotten that successfully translating a story from one medium to another almost always requires alterations in structure and tone.

“It’s such a different form. You can’t just translate it. You have to rethink it. Often films of bestsellers don’t work because people forget that. Things that work on the page don’t always work on film.”

Which brings us neatly back to We Need to Talk About Kevin. Working with her husband, the actor Rory Kinnear (son of Roy), Ramsay admits that, when adapting the script of the epistolary novel, they had to "smash it up and put it back together again".

As it happens, most of the story remains intact, but they did have to deal with the tricky issue of the unreliable narrator. We never know quite how much to believe of the protagonist’s letters to her estranged husband. Some critics have felt that, in the film, Kevin is just too darned Satanic. But the hugely heightened production – Seamus McGarvey, the Armagh cinematographer, deals in nightmarishly broad colours – surely clarifies that this is an objective reality. We are seeing the world as the mother sees it?

"That's exactly how I approached it," she says. "First with the screenplay and then with the film. Obviously film is a little more objective. But it is definitely all through her eyes. She can never see what happened with the eventual atrocity. But, as a mother, she needs to live through the consequences of those actions. That was always the starting point. It's very subjective." The critical success of We Need to Talk About Kevinshould go so some way towards confirming a desirable change in the gender balance among contemporary directors. As recently as 10 years ago, female film-makers were still presented as interesting oddities. The rise of British directors such as Andrea Arnold, Phyllida Lloyd, Sam Taylor-Wood and Ramsay herself surely confirms that this conver- sation is nearing its overdue end.

“It’ll really be equality when, unlike this year, there aren’t four films by female directors at Cannes, but 10.” With that, she gives in to the minders and allows herself to be dragged away to prepare for her premiere. Sadly, people still expect female directors to put on a nice dress for such things.

How not to adapt the era's big read

Lynne Ramsay acknowledges that, when adapting the latest voguish novel, the film-maker must be ruthless with the original text. She found herself removed from the film version of The Lovely Bonesafter making too many changes. The "smash it up" technique worked for We Need to Talk About Kevin. Here's how not to do it.

Captain Corelli's Mandolin (2001)John Madden's take on Louis de Bernières novel of love in Greece during the second World War earned Penélope Cruz a Razzie nomination for worst actress. Standing next to Nicolas Cage, she didn't seem all that bad.

The Shipping News (2001)The protagonist of E Annie Proulx's novel is a huge, unruly man with a broad chin. You know, the sort of fellow that Gerard Depardieu might play. Lasse Hallström cast Kevin Spacey. The film went down with all hands.

Cold Mountain (2003)Anthony Minghella's adaption of Charles Frazier's Civil War drama was not a complete disaster. Renée Zellweger just about deserved her Oscar. But the plodding storytelling – and Nicole Kidman's remade face – have not aged well.

The Lovely Bones (2009)Ramsay worked on a darker version of Alice Sebold's novel for some years. Peter Jackson's version – featuring a sickly version of heaven – was largely faithful and almost entirely awful. Saoirse Ronan is the only saving grace.

– Donald Clarke