The Jane Campion Experience
Over three decades, the consummate storyteller and a likely winner of this year’s best film Oscar, has put the female experience front and centre. So why did she make a film about a sexually repressed cowboy?
It’s tempting to claim Kiwi director Jane Campion as Australian – after all, she learnt her craft in Sydney and spends much time in the city, away from the traditional film-career hubs in the US and Europe. Now the filmmaker is poised to take best director Oscar at Monday’s Academy Awards, and maybe a sweep of others: her tour de force The Power of the Dog is nominated in 12 categories.
The Power of the Dog is a psychological drama set in 1925 Montana that centres around family and identity, familiar terrain for Campion, who first piqued cineastes’ interest in 1989 with Sweetie, a hilariously dark tale of two sisters. The main character in The Power of the Dog is the dark, complex, college-educated cowboy Phil Burbank (played by Benedict Cumberbatch) who, with his brother George, run an isolated ranch. The status quo is disrupted when George weds Rose, a widow with a teenaged son. Phil unleashes his vitriol upon Rose and her son with devastating results. Cumberbatch and his co-stars Kodi Smit-McPhee, Kirsten Dunst and Jesse Plemon, are all vying for an Oscar on Monday.
The Power of The Dog’s impact on audiences, its taut drama from opening frame to closing credit, is perhaps best explained by one of the film’s producers Emile Sherman. Speaking on ABC Radio about the director’s working methods, Sherman said Campion “takes the actors and everyone, even her producing partners like myself, in on a very immersive experience … we enter into the Jane Campion experience and everyone comes out of it transformed because she’s taken [them] into places that they normally don’t go.”
In an interview in The Guardian, Kirsten Dunst concurs: “Jane creates a tribe. You feel part of her family. She constantly wants to give you a hug but you also know you have to get down to the nitty gritty of your character.” Kerry Fox, who portrayed NZ writer Janet Frame in Campion’s 1990 film An Angel At My Table, notes Campion’s generosity and her expertise in drawing out a character’s essence. “What I loved about Jane was that she never thought she knew it all, like a lot of directors do. Instead, she worked with me, and we ended up going deeper and deeper into the character.”
““#MeToo was such a powerful force … those women, young women mostly, had peeled away so many layers of the onion as regards masculinity, that it created a space for old warriors like myself to explore a very male story like this one.””
Campion, 67, was born into a cultured New Zealand family – her parents, Richard and heiress mother Edith, founded theatre company the New Zealand Players. She is close with her elder sister, Anna, and has a younger brother. Her daughter, Alice, 28, is an actor.
Campion’s intelligent eye for nature’s power and beauty links her strongly to Aotearoa, (think of those lush littoral scenes in The Piano) and she recently said she intends to spend more time in the land of her birth. She masterfully frames the South Island as a perfect double for the US west in The Power of the Dog which was shot by Ari Wegner, who is only the second woman nominated in the Best Cinematography category. Wegner will make Oscar history if she wins.
Campion was well-positioned, it would seem, to burst through the movie industry's glass ceiling nearly 30 years ago with The Piano but her subsequent films, which actors jostled to be part of and which put female characters centrestage, battled to find audiences and get financial backing. In an interview last year she said the #MeToo movement had some bearing on her decision to make a film that was driven by a character like Phil Burbank.
“#MeToo was such a powerful force that I think it opened up a whole different space to explore this kind of subject matter. It was like those women, young women mostly, had peeled away so many layers of the onion as regards masculinity, that it created a space for old warriors like myself to explore a very male story like this one.”
The final word on Campion goes to Sherman, who said the fact she doesn’t even have an agent in the US marks out her unique qualities. “She’s a very unusual person to work with,” he says. “She protects herself in a bubble with people who she feels she has trust with and confidence in. She’s just incredibly authentic. I mean, every director is different, but you know, she’s just an incredible human being as well.”
Here is a round-up of Jane Campion’s work and where where it is streamable, so you can embark on your very own “Jane Campion experience”.