As unflinching a film about postpartum as you’ll ever see, “Die, My Love,” the haunting new work from acclaimed filmmaker Lynne Ramsay, has marked a long-anticipated return for the director eight years after her last film, 2017’s “You Were Never Really Here.”
Premiering Saturday night in Cannes to largely rave reviews, it’s a film that centers on Jennifer Lawrence’s Grace as she finds herself trying to raise a child almost entirely alone in a remote Montana home, an experience the actress said is about her world “peeling away.” The film, Lawrence said at a Cannes press conference on Sunday morning, resonated on a personal level after she had a child herself.
“As a mother, it was really hard to separate what I would do as opposed to what she would do. It was just heartbreaking.” Lawrence said at the press conference alongside Ramsay and co-stars Robert Pattinson, Sissy Spacek and LaKeith Stanfield. “There’s not anything like postpartum. It’s extremely isolating.”
Lawrence said that she was pregnant with her second child during the filming, with the good hormones allowing her to navigate some of the painful elements of the story. She also pointed to having kids as helping her to tap into character and emotion that much better.
“Having children changes everything,” she said. “It changes your whole life. It’s brutal and incredible. I didn’t know that I could feel so much and my job has a lot to do with emotion. They’ve opened up the world to me. It’s almost like feeling a blister, so sensitive. They’ve changed my life for the best and they’ve changed me creatively. I highly recommend having kids if you want to be an actor.”
For her part, Ramsay said that she wasn’t always sure if this project, which has been years in the making, is something she could do as “the writing was very special” and “dreamlike.”
Comparing it to her 2011 film “We Need to Talk About Kevin,” she said it was still a new “experiment” for her and that she used the love story to find her way into the film.
Though specific in terms of its location, a remote rural house that the couple moves into, Lawrence said that “extreme anxiety and extreme depression [are] isolating no matter where you are. You feel like an alien.”
For his part, Pattinson said that this part was something different for him in that the character “was more a normal guy than I ever played.” That normality provides the central tension of the film.
“Trying to deal with her isolation and figure out what your part and role in the relationship afterwards is incredibly difficult,” he said. “Trying to hold on, he doesn’t have the vernacular, he’s just a guy. He’s not looking at TikTok reels about parenting and stuff.”
Pattinson, who has a one-year-old daughter with his partner, Suki Waterhouse, did not reveal which TikTokers, if any, he used to get his own parenting advice.
The post ‘Die, My Love’ Star Jennifer Lawrence Says She Was Heartbroken By Postpartum Story: ‘It’s Extremely Isolating’ appeared first on TheWrap.