Joaquin Phoenix, right, stars in “You Were Never Really Here.”
With the modern noir “You Were Never Really Here,” Scottish filmmaker Lynne Ramsay might finally become better known for the films she has made than for those she hasn’t.
“Here,” which stars Joaquin Phoenix as a hammer-wielding enforcer who tracks down missing girls for a living, picked up awards at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival for Ramsay’s screenplay and Phoenix’s performance. These were honors on their own but also signifiers that Ramsay’s reputation had recovered from her wellpublicized exit from the Natalie Portman film “Jane’s Got a Gun.”
Ramsay, acclaimed director of “Morvern Callar” and “We Need to Talk About Kevin,” made headlines in 2013 when she walked away from “Gun” just before cameras were to roll after a dispute with producers. They sued, settling with Ramsay in 2014. The film eventually was made, with Gavin O’Connor directing, but failed to hit with critics or audiences.
“A different film was being made to the one I’d signed up for,” Ramsay, 48, said by phone from Scotland, about leaving the production. “It was a really tough and painful decision to make, but I was not going to be making a film that neither party was going to like.”
Ramsay said she has not been aware of industry blowback from the incident. But she also has not paid close attention, she said.
“I don’t really think in career terms,” Ramsay said. “I just get up and brush myself off. I put all my energy into writing and preparing” for her next movie, she said. She wrote the script, based on Jonathan Ames’ novella, in Greece, where she met the man who would become her partner and father to her now 3-yearold daughter.
The Portman film would have been a relatively quick turnaround for Ramsay, whose black-and-white debut film, “Ratcatcher,” about an impoverished boy in Glasgow, so clearly augured a significant new talent with a distinctive style — emotionally fraught, beautifully composed — that it received a Criterion Collection DVD release. She has not been prolific since.
“Kevin,” a psychological drama in which Tilda Swinton played the mother of a young killer, came nine years after “Callar,” in which Samantha Morton played a woman who leaves the body of her boyfriend, after his suicide, at home while she goes out to party.
For a few of those years, Ramsay worked on an adaptation of Alice Sebold’s best-seller “The Lovely Bones,” in which a murdered girl watches her family from heaven. Peter Jackson was tapped as that film’s director instead.
Jackson’s film was treacly, so it would be interesting to see what Ramsay might have done with the material. On the other hand, there has been enough morbidity in her work.
“You Were Never Really Here,” Ramsay’s first action film, is dark and violent, but also life-affirming, in its way. Phoenix’s character, Joe, a former Marine and FBI operative with PTSD, is a complex killer, staving off suicidal thoughts so he can care for his mother (Judith Roberts), who has dementia.
He goes after the same type of sexual predator he pursued for the FBI, this time as hammer for hire by people who do not want to contact the authorities. When Joe rescues the daughter (Ekaterina Samsonov) of a politician, the scene visually evokes “Taxi Driver” because of the girl’s youth and blond hair. But Joe is more sympathetic, less mysterious, than Travis Bickle.
Ramsay wrote her script with Phoenix in mind, though she had not yet met him.
“I think he’s got quite a vulnerable side, and he’s never done the same thing twice,” she said. She got word to him through a producer that she was working on a project for him, “and then I decided to play it cool,” Ramsay said with a laugh. Buoyant on the phone, Ramsay can be hard to understand, because of her Glaswegian accent and because she often laughs while speaking.
“You Were Never Really Here,” Ramsay’s first action film, is dark and violent, but also life-affirming.
Phoenix bit, but had limited availability. So Ramsay shot the film in 29 days in New York. The shoot’s brevity led to some of the movie’s best stylistic flourishes, like a showdown between Joe and a bunch of criminals that unfolds via security-camera footage.
“I didn’t have four days to do a really big, balletic sequence,” Ramsay said. “You have to think really creatively.”
“Here” is impressionistic, like “Callar,” when Ramsay uses flashes of imagery to suggest Joe’s past traumas instead of spelling them out, as the book did. But the artful touches exist within lean, tense storytelling.
“I gravitated to it more as a character study, but I wanted to retain the page-turner” quality of Ames’ book, Ramsay said. The movie, she said, is “a genre film, but stood on its head.”