A new film from Lynne Ramsay is always cause for excitement. Die My Love, a tense, psychological nightmare, pairs the director with two of the most exciting performers working today: Jennifer Lawrence and Robert Pattinson. Equally exciting is the fact that Ramsay is back collaborating with cinematographer Seamus McGarvey.
A multiple Oscar nominee, McGarvey has created some stunning imagery across a range of projects, from Avengers Assemble (2012) to Atonement (2007). After a particularly busy day filming Greta Gerwig’s Narnia adaptation days before Christmas, McGarvey spoke with FILMHOUNDS about working on Die My Love. He goes in-depth about shooting on Ektachrome film stock, deciding on the aspect ratio, and working with world-class actors.
First of all, congrats on the BIFA win! How was that night?
I’m so happy about it. Have you seen it? [He grabs the award, a large slab with a sharp-looking edge, and shows it to the camera]
Oh, wow.
It’s made of recycled plastic. And it’s actually dense.
You could kill a man with that.
I know. It’s like a knife. I haven’t won many awards, but that’s a good one.
Apart from the BIFA win, congrats on the film itself. I caught it back at the London Film Festival. It’s a very tense experience, but I really appreciate the craft and filmmaking and the story. I talked to a filmmaker friend earlier today and said I was talking to you tonight. And his response, excuse the language, and I quote, “Oh my God, it is beautiful as fuck.”
[laughs]
And it really is amazing work. What I want to start with is the aspect ratio. I know that you’ve talked about it in a previous interview where you said that it was a very early decision that you made, with having a more square aspect ratio and it works so well. It’s very oppressive, you get that claustrophobic feeling. But was that a decision that you made? Was that what Lynne [Ramsay] suggested, or was it a ‘great minds think alike’ situation?
Every photographic decision on the film was made mutually. And that’s the lovely thing about working with Lynne because she is previously a cinematographer and then migrated into directing. But it’s also the way I work with most directors, is that everything’s a democracy of ideas. And that one about aspect ratio was very definitely a decision that came on early because we wanted to look at our characters, Grace and Jackson, in portraiture terms, and they also had to exist cinematographically singly. You know, individually, rather than group shots. We very rarely did two shots or group shots. So, the aspect ratio was about curtailment of vista, because we didn’t want that. We wanted, as you said, claustrophobia, but we also wanted a portrait of a person on the verge, and also a portrait of Jackson sort of blithely ignoring his love’s predicament.
So this square format, we knew that we wanted to photograph the film as though we were maybe in format photography, stills photography, and we looked at those sort of things. We looked at Richard Avedon and we looked at other photographers for the nocturnal scenes like Edward Steichen. But the portraiture was about that arresting direct to camera. It feels like direct to camera, but it’s not, obviously. But it’s also thinking about being in someone’s head. That square format felt right, the sort of subjective lens was kind of right. We wanted to get a sense of when we’re looking at somebody, Jen as Grace, it feels like it’s her POV, even though we’re looking at her, so almost like she’s controlling the camera. I mean, in a silly way, it’s like that bloke on the trains, you know, the fella who has the little Go-Pro wide angle. That’s kind of what I wanted the camera to look like, except without the extreme distortion of that fella. I love his videos, but I wanted the camera to feel like it was her looking at herself. I don’t know what that fella’s name is, but that’s the style of photography that I wanted for the film, without the wide angle.
And with the film stock—is it Ektachrome film stock that you shot on?
Yeah.
What did you particularly love about it?
Well, it was just that Ektachrome is transparency film. It’s slide film. It’s the film that you have when you shoot your holiday photographs. It’s tinted with nostalgia and memory and optimism. But at the same time, as we know, sometimes memories can go bad. So I love the colour because it takes you away from the real because it’s not real. It’s not real colour. It’s sort of tuned up and tuned down. But I wanted it to feel that at the start of the film that there was this kind of frothy, colourful vibe that then suddenly became distinctly rotten or ripe to the point of rotten. So the colour can take that as a binary sort of photographic sensibility that it’s at once beguiling and on the other side, repulsive. So the Ektachrome serves that photographically.
I’ve had experience, not being hands on, but producing a short film on 16mm stock. One of the most stressful shoots I’ve ever been on. Do you still get that stress of working with film and going, “Well, we run out, that’s it!”
Yes! I mean, that’s why I’ve got grey hair. I mean, you’ve got lovely brown hair. But my hair is grey because I’ve shot, most of the films I’ve worked, on celluloid. And Ektachrome was particularly, well, I wouldn’t say stressful, but you know that it can fuck up really, really easily. It’s latitude, it’s so narrow that you can go one way or the other, but that’s part of the properties, the structural properties. That means that your statement of intent is emblazoned in the structural properties of the film. It’s an act of faith to shoot on this because you know that you’re going to get accidents that you can claim afterwards in post-film rationalisation as happy accidents. But actually, they’re complete surprises at the time that you shoot them. And there’s something lovely in that because with digital, you kind of see what you’ve got and it’s right in front of you. I found [it] sort of encourages laziness, a little bit of laziness in looking, because you know what you have. So there’s no danger. There’s no striving to invent what you think you might [be] creating.
That was a lovely thing, particularly with the day for night stuff. Like, you do this stuff and it’s in the film. It’s literally burnt in. Like I burnt in candle smoke filters and smoked up these optical flats and then painted out the bits that I wanted to see in the image. And there’s no way out of that. So, you know, sometimes producers had raised eyebrows where they went, “Can’t we do this stuff in post, in visual effects?” And I was like, “Well, you could do something approximating it, but you can’t do this, because what the smoke does, it diffuses the image, it’s in camera.” And there’s something lovely about that because the actors see it. I mean, we’ve got a shitty little video playback. There’s no proper playback, but you can say, “Look, it’s going to look kind of like this.” But when you see in celluloid and in the photochemistry of it all, how it all melds together, it actually works really well because it sort of depicts Grace’s madness and postpartum condition. It’s where day and night fuse, one into another. Seeing a night scene shot for day, but apparently night, but not really night. And it looks kind of strange. It was all part and parcel of the depiction of her unravelling mind.
You’ve worked with Lynne on We Need to Talk About Kevin. How has the relationship developed over working with her again on Die My Love?
It was just so lovely. People say, “Oh, do you have a shorthand?” There’s no shorthand with Lynne because she’s such a passionate cinema poet, that everything in front of her is the there and the end of looking. So there’s no shorthand with Lynne Ramsay. You are in the moment and you hope that you will react, not correctly, but in conjunction with her and in conjunction with the actors. Actually that really worked because you kind of trust yourself and you trust your instinct and your vision. And there is that circle of trust. It was a low enough budget film that you can sort of set up a scenario and then set up your camera and then just let it roll. Actors love that because they run around like free range chickens, brilliant free range chickens. In fact, the best free range chicken actors in the world. Like Jennifer Lawrence and Robert Pattinson, I mean, they’re the best. And they kind of ran with it, knowing that was what was on the table, that was how we were going to make the film. And that goes to a certain levity and kind of elasticity in feeling and the energy that comes from actors doing their thing. Me with the camera, with Chris Chow, the operator, being sensitive to what happens unexpectedly and on the hoof.
As a final question, what’s the shot you’re most proud of on Die My Love?
I really love this film, actually. And it was quite a tough one to do. But… can I choose two, Gavin?
Go for it, why not. It’s nearly Christmas.
There was one that was just one happy accident. We’d gone from one location to another and we were on a beach looking out into sparkling water, and we did a big wide shot. But I had filters left over from the previous setup we’d done. So when a matte box closed, there were too many filters from the last setup. But it was really underexposed and it was looking into this silhouette of people at the beach and the water was sparkling.
Yes, I love that shot.
That was a total accident. It was happenstance in the extreme. And Lynne was just like, “What are you doing there?” And I said, “I don’t know, but it looks amazing and let’s not correct it.” So we just went with it and it has this sort of psychic vibe where it’s ghostly and phantasmorical, so it worked at that time. Grace’s sort of vision was cascading into a different area and it kind of unintentionally depicted that. And the other one, just briefly, was in the day for night stuff. I love Sissy Spacek and it was just such an honour to work with somebody as extraordinary as her. But we did this day for night shot with her in a profile walking along a country road while she was sleepwalking with a rifle over her. And the sun is up there, but the sun is actually a moon because of the filter that we used. I just like to look at that shot because we shot that at 12 o’clock in the day and there it is, feeling like a moonlight moment.
Die My Love is available to stream on MUBI.
