Jennifer Lawrence gives one of her most all-consuming and risky performances as a writer crashing down badly from postpartum in the countryside in Lynne Ramsay’s “Die My Love.” The Cannes Competition premiere is an adaptation of Ariana Harwicz’s 2017 novel, which Lawrence and her Excellent Cadaver production team sent to Ramsay a couple of years ago, hoping the “We Need to Talk About Kevin” filmmaker would want to direct it. The dark, intensely subjective drama is Ramsay’s first film since 2017 Cannes screenplay winner “You Were Never Really Here,” and it’s looking for a distributor.
“There’s not really anything like postpartum. It’s extremely isolating,” Lawrence said at Sunday’s Cannes press conference when asked about her character, Grace. “Lynne moves this couple into Montana. She doesn’t have a community. She doesn’t have her people, but the truth is, extreme anxiety and extreme depression [are] isolating no matter where you are. You feel like an alien. So it deeply moved me. I wanted to work with Lynne Ramsay since I saw ‘Ratcatcher,’ and I was just like, there’s no way. But we took a chance and we sent it to her, and I really cannot believe that I’m here.”
Lawrence, who’d just had her firstborn when she read the book, added, “As a mother, it was really hard to separate what I would do as opposed to what [the character] would do, and it was just heartbreaking when I first read the book.”
Lawrence had her second child earlier this year. In “Die My Love,” her protagonist is engulfed by depression and madness after giving birth to a child with her boyfriend, Jackson (Robert Pattinson), who doesn’t know how to help her. Sissy Spacek, LaKeith Stanfield, and Nick Nolte co-star.
“I’m not really an actor who brings my work home,” Lawrence said when asked if it was hard to wash off the role after shooting in rural Calgary last year. “Part of what she’s going through is the hormonal imbalance that comes from postpartum. She’s also having an identity crisis. Who am I as a mother? Who am I as a wife? Who am I as a sexual person to my husband? Who am I as a creative? She’s plagued with this feeling that she’s disappearing. For me, I was four and a half, five months pregnant when we shot. I had great hormones! I was feeling great, which is the only way I would be able to dip into this emotion…also in terms of answering any question about my acting or performance at all, I had Lynne Ramsay as my director, so that kind of is it.”
She added, “Having children changes everything, it changes your whole life, it’s brutal and incredible… They’ve changed my life obviously for the best, and they’ve changed me creatively.” She laughed, “I highly recommend having kids if you want to be an actor.”
Lawrence and Pattinson were inevitably asked about the hardest day on set for a movie that demands a lot of its actors, and in emotional distress as Lawrence’s character Grace is at one moment a doting mother, the next a psychosexually crazed housewife, the next throwing herself through a glass door just to feel something.
“I didn’t find anything particularly hard. I really just kind of, there’s someone I’ve always wanted to work with. You create an atmosphere on set; I wouldn’t describe it as hard or easy,” Pattinson said to Ramsay. “It is just quite an unusual environment… Some of the stuff we’re doing… there’s one scene where there were three or four pages of dialogue, and we turn up and Lynne says, ‘I think I’m just going to do it with no dialogue.’ It’s kind of scary, but it’s very, very exciting. It makes you feel very alive.”
Lawrence said that showing up to the first day on set, Ramsay gave very specific direction for an early scene in the movie in which Grace and Jackson are writhing around on the floor and on top of each other in a naked sexual frenzy.
“The day before our first day, Lynne showed Rob and I a scene from ‘If,’” Lawrence said, referring to Lindsay Anderson’s 1968 British classic starring Malcolm McDowell as a prep school student heading up a revolt against his peers. “It was these actors, and they’re attacking each other like tigers, and we were like, ‘OK, yeah,’ and she was like, ‘Can you do it naked, yeah?’ [imitating Ramsay’s Scottish accent]. We were like, ‘Oh, OK,’ and that was the first day on set, so that’s my answer.”
