10 Directors Who Took Insane Breaks Between Movies

10. Lynne Ramsay

Lynne Ramsay is a successful Scottish film director whose filmography includes numerous critically acclaimed films including Ratcheter, Morvern Callar, We Need to Talk About Kevin, and You Were Never Really Here. Most of her films deal with guilt related to death and its aftermath, and she has been praised for her work.

She has a nine-year gap in her directing credits between Morvern Callar (2002) and We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011). That extensive gap came at the hands of her work on Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones, which Ramsay did not direct. That honor went to Peter Jackson, but only after Ramsay spent years working on it.

Ramsay spent four years following her work on Morvern Callar developing The Lovely Bones for film. She used a pre-published manuscript as a basis for her script development, but soon after the book was published in 2002, Ramsay's work wasn't considered to be mainstream enough to capture the bestselling book on film due to the departure her script took from the source material.

This led to Peter Jackson picking up the reigns where Ramsay left off, and she had to move on to other projects. She began developing We Need to Talk About Kevin, which she ultimately produced, wrote, and directed.