Director Lynne Ramsay and producers Justine Ciarrocchi and Andrea Calderwood talk Screen through their $15m adaptation of Ariana Harwicz’s 2012 novel.
“We had to be so incredibly discerning about who we chose to direct it,” says producer Justine Ciarrocchi of Die My Love, the film adaptation of Argentinian writer Ariana Harwicz’s 2012 novel, starring Jennifer Lawrence as a woman losing her mind amid isolation, post-partum illness and a toxic relationship. “It was going to require an ambitious adaptation to honour the source material, somebody who could match the freak of the book.”
One name quickly came to mind for Ciarrocchi and her Excellent Cadaver producing partner Lawrence. Lynne Ramsay, the Scottish director of We Need To Talk About Kevin and Morvern Callar, was as bold as the novel, they thought. There was just one problem: Ramsay was busy developing her own upcoming projects, Stone Mattress and Polaris, and was not sure she could do it.
It was one delay for a film that would experience more than its fair share. The project had begun life during the pandemic, when Sikelia Productions’ Martin Scorsese had a Zoom call with the producers, and challenged them to find material dealing with female relationships. But it was Scorsese himself who found Harwicz’s 2012 novel, in its 2017 translation by Sarah Moses and Carolina Orloff, at his book club.
“We have no further detail on the book club,” says Ciarrocchi. “It remains a mystery. But we read it and we were floored. It was one of the most audacious pieces of literature we’d ever encountered.”
Ramsay was uncertain but sufficiently interested to keep talking, and Ciarrocchi and Lawrence secured development money for her to start work on a script, initially with Enda Walsh (Hunger) and later during prep and shooting with Alice Birch (Lady Macbeth). “It’s not the easiest adaptation,” remembers Ramsay. “It’s quite surrealist, and you’re very much in her head. I wanted to find my own way in and not make it too much like any material I’ve done before.”
The character’s isolation seemed most relatable to Ramsay, which gave her a way in, and the story sank its hooks in further with each draft. She focused more on the relationship than just the unnamed woman in the book and found the universality underneath.
“These are things that are recognisable to lots of couples,” says Ramsay. “It’s idealistic at the beginning, they’re having this fantastic sex, and then it breaks down. It wasn’t one of those characters where it’s like, ‘Let’s feel sorry for her’. She’s unapologetic, irreverent, frustrating. I felt she was kind of liberating, in terms of where she was going. There was something about the character I hadn’t seen before.”
Ciarrocchi calls this type of movie “impossible” to fund. “That was a process,” she says. “But Black Label Media were ballsy enough to pull the trigger. They were enormous fans of Lynne and Jen. We made the movie for $15m, as responsibly as we could.”
Ramsay had brought on board another producer, Andrea Calderwood, who produced her first film Ratcatcher back in 1999, before features including The Last King Of Scotland and A Most Wanted Man.
“Each film she [Ramsay] has done is about a different stage of life, forensically looking at somebody in a very particular situation,” says Calderwood. “Die My Love is a film of experience, of looking at the things that can happen in relationships. It felt like a film of maturity for Lynne as well, because she is so unflinching in the way she looks at emotions.”
They were almost ready to go by late 2022, before a combination of guild strikes and the turn of the seasons – the filmmakers needed physical as well as emotional heat – pushed production back to September 2024. Then, at last, Lawrence would play the wild and uninhibited female lead, now christened Grace, while her partner Jackson would be played by Robert Pattinson, at the initial suggestion of Ramsay’s film student niece.
“I love his work,” says Ramsay. “I didn’t even think about him being in these big franchises; he’s just a really interesting actor. It’s a bit of a hapless role, in that he doesn’t know what to do with her and he gets things wrong.”
Pattinson came full of ideas to develop the role and make it a more complex balance in the relationship, as did Sissy Spacek when cast as his mother.
After considering the weather, the stars’ availability and financing, Alberta and its tax credits came into focus as a shooting location for the script’s unspecified Midwestern setting – a change from the novel’s location in rural France, where Harwicz lives. Bafta-winning casting director Lucy Pardee (Rocks, Aftersun) not only found actors but had built visual references for each of them and for the film as a whole.
“Quite early on, we shared this deck with Martin Scorsese and Justine and Jennifer and the team around the film, something like 108 images that Lynn and Lucy had put together,” says Calderwood. “That was an early springboard into pre-production, because Lynne is a very visual director and it allowed her to articulate her vision.”
Instant chemistry
Such preparation meant Ramsay and production designer Tim Grimes (You Were Never Really Here) were able to find the farmhouse that would become the film’s principal location on their first scouting trip. Meanwhile, the director was relieved to find “instant” chemistry between her two stars.
They shot the sex scenes on day one, partly because Lawrence was already four months pregnant, partly as an ice-breaker. After that, the actor pair and director had a sense of mutual trust that powered the shoot, with Ramsay free to follow her instincts in the moment and the stars throwing themselves alongside.
“I like being on set because sometimes actors are doing something naturally during a break, and there’s something interesting in that,” says Ramsay. “It was exciting. You have the script but also what’s happening now. You have to take in what’s in front of you and be conscious to change and try out different things. They were up for that, so it was always alive.”
Calderwood and Ciarrocchi both hail Ramsay’s resulting fluidity; she would shoot the planned scenes but also grab a shot as the light fell in a particular way in the house, or conceive new moments with Birch on the basis of suggestions from Lawrence, Pattinson or Spacek.
Ramsay remembers a day when Lawrence and Pattinson burst out laughing while shooting an intense argument: “Jennifer was like, ‘I’m really sorry,’ but I was like, ‘That was actually brilliant.’ There was something weird and raw about it. The set had a good vibe in that respect – everyone was just doing the work.”
The energy stayed alive during a fast-paced post-production period that finished in the hand delivery of a still-wet cut to Cannes Film Festival. The day after the premiere, Mubi swooped in with a $24m deal for North America, the UK and multiple territories, going on to release theatrically in November. “It felt like a good fit,” says Ciarrocchi.
But even then, Ramsay was not quite done. She had always told her partners that she was willing to rush for Cannes, but wanted to go back into the edit afterwards and fine-tune the film.
“I knew I could push it more,” says Ramsay. “I still think I could push it more. I could make it shorter, but with different scenes. There are new things I’m thinking of now. But I suppose films are never really finished, just abandoned. It doesn’t matter how long your film is or how many things you have to explore.”
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