Movern Callar’s Lynne Ramsey is back at last.
It hasn’t been an easy time of it for the writer-director, who had put all of her post-Callar efforts into adapting Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones for FilmFour. She’d been hard at work on the script when the book became a huge blockbuster, and the new fame for the novel meant that she’d be forced to compromise on the screenplay – ie, keep the schmaltzier second half that she never liked. She was eventually ditched from the project in favour of none other than Peter Jackson.
And now she’s turned her attention to a different novel, Lionel Shriver’s (we'll point out now, to avoid confusion further down the line, that Lionel is a woman) We Need To Talk About Kevin. The book didn’t initially take off in the US, but has been received well over here.
The plot is set in New York and focuses on an educated mother struggling to raise a son she never truly wanted. Despite her best efforts, he turns out to be a nasty piece of work that shatters her marriage and kills several fellow pupils with a crossbow. Now there’s an ASBO just waiting to be slapped on.
Ramsay has written the screenplay with In The Bedroom’s scribe Rob Festinger and hopes to be ready to shoot in 2007.