The movie that saw Lynne Ramsay pelted with tomatoes: “It was like chaos”
Lynne Ramsay is perhaps one of the most interesting directors working today, even if the most sporadic. Her films often grapple with uncomfortable and deeply vulnerable stories, creating an unsettling atmosphere that worms its way to your core, forcing us to think about the intersections between love, guilt and loss.
In her 2011 film We Need to Talk About Kevin, Ramsay explores the age-old argument of nature versus nurture in her disturbing portrait of a teenage mass shooter. However, given all the horrors that are explored in the film, there was one real-life moment that stuck out to the director involving a lot of tomatoes.
We Need to Talk About Kevin stars Tilda Swinton and John C Reilly as the parents of a disturbed child, aptly played by Ezra Miller. The film uses a jarring colour palette and surrealist imagery to heighten our feelings of unease and suspense as we are slowly immersed in the twisted parent-child dynamic.
A notable example of this would be the infamous tomato scene, in which we open with a shot that looks down on a sea of writhing bodies covered in bright red tomato juice. The fruit is thrown and crushed over the people in the crowd before Swinton’s character slowly emerges from the chaos.
The image of her body being lifted by the people bears some religious connotations, almost looking as if she is being sacrificed or offered to some benign force. In many ways, it reflects the idea of motherhood—of offering your flesh and blood to create new life—a theme that is at the heart of the film.
However, the filming of this scene was just as chaotic as it looks, with the scene being filmed during the infamous La Tomatina festival in Spain. When asked about this, Ramsay discussed the process of creating a hand-held look while also trying to maintain some control amidst a real-life festival with hundreds of extras involved.
Ramsay explained, “No, we actually didn’t use a steadi-cam. We used a handheld that we fooled around with but I definitely know what you’re saying. So it looks like it. But there’s no steadi-cam in the film. I was very conscientious about La Tomatina; the festival. The producers would ask me if we [could recreate it]. There’s no way to get forty thousand people in the street. So I said that the clever thing to do is to go into the real thing… But what I didn’t know was that the whole thing lasts like two hours, and we had about 15-20 minutes to shoot it… And also it’s very dangerous. People don’t care that it’s Tilda Swinton or if you’re the director. They just kill you with tomatoes. Tilda was very cool about that. Because I don’t think many actresses would have went into that situation. I felt threatened. I got slammed against a door and fucking tomatoes against my head. The camera jammed. It was like chaos. Like hell. A fun hell, but hell”.
Few directors would voluntarily shoot in a situation as volatile as this, something that was also attempted by Justine Triet in one of her first feature films, with a scene that takes place at a real political protest in Paris. However, it undoubtedly adds to the tension and surrealism of the story, cleverly using a real-life situation that feels just as nightmarish as the story.
