He'd near chopped off His hand with the meat cleaver. He couldnt object so I lit a Silk Cut.

But the accent? That troubled me and Lynne said a lot of the decisions she made had to do with 'how fucking long would this film be if everything I loved in the book was actually in the film?' and I reckon SM would have done the accent if she could have done it perfectly. Morvern is a foster child, so it's probably OK on balance for her to sound like she wasn't from the area. SM wanted the role badly enough and is I think good enough for the part. Also the music used is integral to telling the story, and it has been compiled from stuff in book.

All in all I saw the film some three months ago already, and I still form mental pictures of it in mmy head. I'd say that was good fucking work.

I suppose the lack of information about Morvern pre James's suicide means we cannot assess he motives or her reaction to his death. But I like the way it pricks his narcissism of being posthumously published. (I've not read the book but want to now just for a look inside her head). Sight And Sound (unfairly) suggested they made her English because Morton couldn't do the accent. I would suggest firstly the displacement (is Morvern fostered in the book too - Morton was) - but that is the way Morton wanted to play her.

That said - I think I actively liked Ratcatcher a lot more.

According to Madchen (who was at a AW Borders appearance a while ago), someone asked this and he said that LR had found SM by far the beat candidate for the role and she asked him what he thought about her being English. He thought about it and said much the same as David H says above, about outsiderdom, and that he wished he'd thought of it and made her explictly English in the novel. I don't know whether SM doing a Scottish accent was an option or not.

I liked the film. More than the book, anyway. As some reviewer said, the 'no interior world/self-consiousness' narration of the book gets interpreted in the film as Morvern being in a kind of post-traumatic shock throughout the story's events, and that makes a kind of sense. In the book, this just seemed a laboured 'look - she's weird and emotionless like l'Etranger' trick and it bored me.

I think I must have a problem with Lynne Ramsay's style - the sense of detachment I felt when watching Morvern Callar, and also Ratcatcher, was so great I just got bored. I didn't really care what happened to Morvern and Alana. I didn't feel shock or pity or revulsion or anything else to see a body lying under the Christmas tree (for days). I just observed. But for an hour and a half (or more?) it's too much.

And the short they showed first was a bit pants too.