The 2000s director Harris Dickinson would move heaven and earth to work with: “I’ll do anything”
One of the greatest things about being an actor is surely the ability to work with filmmakers you’ve previously admired. Suddenly, you get to move from simply being a fan of their art to a direct contributor to it, which must be a terrific ‘I’ve made it’ kind of moment.
Harris Dickinson has been lucky enough to work with many big filmmakers since making his debut in 2017 in Eliza Hittman’s tender queer coming-of-age story Beach Rats. Two years later, he worked with Xavier Dolan on Matthias & Maxime, proving himself to be more attuned to projects with a slightly more challenging and personal edge, as further emphasised by a role in Joanna Hogg’s The Souvenir Part II.
The actor isn’t against a bigger role; he played Prince Phillip in Maleficent: Mistress of Evil and is, of course, set to play John Lennon in the upcoming Beatles biopics, but Dickinson time and again comes back to smaller-scale filmmakers. In 2023, for example, he appeared in Scrapper, a working-class tale of grief and fatherhood from first-time director Charlotte Regan. The following year, he lent himself to Halina Reijn’s BDSM-tinged age-gap romance Babygirl, giving a great performance as the younger intern who becomes involved in an affair with the unhappily married Romy, played by Nicole Kidman.
When you assess Dickinson’s filmography, one of the most striking things you’ll notice is that he has worked with a large percentage of female directors, which is actually quite a rarity, especially for young male stars. He has already ticked off some great filmmakers from his bucket list, but there are many more with whom he is still gasping to work, and one in particular that he’d practically cut off a limb for.
When asked by W magazine who he’d most be interested in working with in the future, Dickinson replied, “Oh my gosh, so many. Lynne Ramsay, Claire Denis, Jacques Audiard, Mike Leigh. I’m constantly putting out feelers in my head because I think it works. The law of attraction, you know? If you think it and will it into some sense of existence, it’s a possibility.”
It’s Ramsay that sticks out as the one he’d love to work with the most, though, with Dickinson adding, “Lynne Ramsay, if you’re reading this, I’ll do anything”. Perhaps he really could will this into fruition, because a Dickinson/Ramsay collaboration sounds pretty fantastic.
The Scottish director has made many great movies since she began directing short films in the 1990s. Ratcatcher, her feature debut, is an incredible, searing exploration of boyhood and grief, while her next film, Morvern Callar, brought similar themes of death and identity to the big screen with decisive tenderness.
This film in particular demonstrated Ramsay’s spellbinding ability to create such a thick, melancholic atmosphere with music, which becomes a character in and of itself. Watching the film really feels like we’ve been given an exclusive, intimate access into Morvern’s mind; it’s enveloping, introspective, heartbreaking, brutal.
More recently, Ramsay directed Die My Love, starring Jennifer Lawrence and Robert Pattinson, and it’s the kind of project that you can imagine Dickinson being a part of. Perhaps she could find a role for the actor in her next film?
