It didn't help, either, that Gus Van Sant's 2003 school shooting drama Elephant was cited in the investigations into a 2005 high school massacre in Red Lake, Minnesota, in which seven people died. There were doubts whether the film would actually work at all, reflected in such severe financing problems that Ramsay rewrote the script in its entirety to make it easier to shoot. There was talk of a new, linear plot in which the massacre would be revealed at the film's denouement (Shriver, in characteristically straight-talking fashion, told The Herald in Scotland it was "a bad idea and I don't mind saying so"). But the intervening years were troubled to say the least. Indeed, she said, Tilda Swinton had always been the number one choice for the crucial role of Kevin's mother, Eva - who so devastatingly picks apart her life in an attempt to try to work out whether her son's actions were, in some way, her fault.
After all, at a Cannes press conference Ramsay admitted she had wanted to make a film of Shriver's novel ever since reading just three chapters of the book, first published in 2003. That it's taken more than five years to develop and finance the adaptation of Shriver's book, which won the Orange Prize in 2005, reflects how difficult the journey has been.
Which, as Shriver herself said in 2006, is no easy matter.
Nevertheless, the excitement in Cannes came from the realisation that the Lynne Ramsay-directed We Need to Talk About Kevin had indeed captured the ambiguities and resentments of Lionel Shriver's controversial book, but was also a hugely satisfying piece of cinema, too. Not exactly the stuff of gripping thrillers. Films: The National watchesįilm reviews, festivals and all things cinema relatedĪnd yet this was an adaptation of a book written as a series of letters, with an unreliable narrator and a distinct lack of a hero, which offers up its seismic scene - a schoolboy, Kevin, goes on a Columbine-style rampage at an American high school - within its first few pages. The winner of the Palme d'Or at Cannes this year might have been Terrence Malick's spiritual drama The Tree of Life, but it was the premiere of another film in this vintage year for the French film festival that really got people talking.
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