Morton As Boyfriend Chopper?

Samantha Morton has been linked to writer-director Lynne Ramsay's much anticipated follow-up to her award winning debut, Ratcatcher. Speaking at the Edinburgh International Film Festival yesterday about adapting Alan Warners' 1995 novel, Morvern Callar, for the big screen, Ramsay said: "We'd like to have Morvern cast now while we are still writing the screenplay so that it feeds back into the character." When asked if Morvern was going to be be played by Samantha Morton, who was sitting in the front row of Edinburgh's Lumiere cinema, Ramsey smiled and said: "She could be." The Oscar nominated star of Woody Allen's Sweet & Lowdown was present to read an extract from the cult Scottish novel about a girl who chops up her boyfriend after he commits suicide before embarking on a hedonistic, drug fuelled odyssey that takes her from the Highlands to the Spanish club scene. Ramsay, sporting black, spiky hair and a 'Superstar' T-shirt - the Scottish guitar band heavily name-checked in Warners' novels -jokingly talked up the film's selling points: "It's about two young girls; it's about sex, drugs and rock n' roll; it's a road movie; it's got dead bodies." But she insisted that the project would be not be another cliched attempt to capture the 'Chemical Generation' on film. "There's a lot going on [in the script], but we're trying to make a film that really means something at the end of the day. You can take something like this and make it quite shallow, but I'm not really interested in doing that. On one level, I think it has a lot of appeal for young people because it's about a lot of young peoples' lives who don't have much of a future and this girl, in a really positive way, takes her future into her own hands." After her recent turn in the drug-themed Jesus' Son, the 23 year old Morton is surely a strong contender for the lead role as the eponymous heroine. The film is being co-written by Ramsey's film school colleague Liana Dognini. Morvern Callar, which is the first film to benefit from a new lottery-funded scheme set up by Scottish Screen earlier this year, begins shooting in Scotland next February.