Turns out you can win a couple of highly prestigious awards with an incomplete film!
Lynne Ramsay‘s You Were Never Really Here picked up two prizes at the recent Cannes Film Festival – Best Actor went to star Joaquin Phoenix, whilst the film shared the Best Screenplay award with Yorgos Lanthimos‘ The Killing Of A Sacred Deer – but she revealed that the film isn’t quite complete yet.
At the press conference following the awards, Ramsay mentioned how she’d especially like to add more music from Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood into the final version:
“We worked with Jonny Greenwood who is an amazing musician. He has done so much beautiful music so we want to explore that a bit more. We didn’t have that much time. He sent me lots of beautiful music, some of it is very moving. So that is what I want to explore”.
The shoot for the film was swift – it only had two months to get into production and to fit into Phoenix’s schedule, thus everyone worked exceptionally hard with such a small time frame. Ramsay went on to say about Greenwood:
“Jonny is genius – he doesn’t compose to picture so you have to listen through everything he does. I also worked with Paul Davis and a Swedish music editor that works in documentaries – that whole sound team made the sound edit work in 5 days, rather than the usual 3 weeks. It was crazy”.
Phoenix himself described what the shoot was like and how the film was able to come together in such a short period of time:
“She [Ramsay] had not yet finished the script, so she would be writing every day – nothing felt fixed. We would try things, and often we would laugh about it if it didn’t work. Somehow she pulled it together”.
Thus, with a few awards under her belt, Ramsay now has the time to return to the film and tweak aspects that weren’t able to be refined during the initial shoot. If it can garner such acclaim in its unfinished form, who knows what we’ll be treated to once Ramsay fine-tunes and finishes the film. Hopefully it’ll be another masterpiece to add to her oeuvre.
The film currently does not have a theatrical release date, but will be distributed by Amazon Studios.
#Peace.Love.YouWereNeverReallyHere
