“I have tennis elbow” Jane Campion says, stretching an arm out across the Zoom screen from her temporary Joshua Tree home. She’s in California for the release of her film The Power of the Dog—a Western set in Montana and shot in her native New Zealand.
Despite what her repetitive strain injury might suggest, Campion is by no means Wimbledon-ready. She has only learned tennis very recently during the pandemic and seems delighted by the humbling surrender of trying something new.
“I just can’t tell you the excitement I felt one night when I was playing with my coach and I hit the ball over about five times in a row,” she says. “I was like, ‘Oh my God, that was great, I can’t believe I’m hitting it.’”
But perhaps this gung-ho, game-on attitude provides some insight into who Campion is in a broader sense. In 1993, she became the first woman in Cannes history to win a Palme d’Or, having written and directed her singular film The Piano, which also netted several Oscars, and made her the second woman ever to receive a Best Director nomination.
As a young student starting out, she says, “I had a lot of energy and nowhere to put it.” Studying first art, then film, she turned to the Super 8 camera her theater-director dad taught her to use. Suddenly, she was galvanized. “I was so excited by the process. That’s what I connected to, my energy. It was so palpably different.”
But in an almost entirely male-dominated industry, the odds were stacked crushingly against her. Looking back, what does she think kept her going? It’s like with the tennis: why does one person keep trying, leaning into the risk of failure, while another avoids it and does nothing?
“I had made this decision while I was at art school that I was going to discover what my potential was, that I was sick of sitting on the fence thinking, ‘If I really tried hard maybe I’d be good.’ Nursing that idea of potential rather than really testing it. And obviously I was afraid of testing. I think everybody is, because they feel like, ‘Oh my God, it’s going to come up so much shorter than my dream of it was.’ But at that point I was so fed up, I thought, ‘I want to find out.’ And just with that decision, the energy in my body completely changed and I had so much energy, I could work, and I did work, 18 hours a day.”
Riding that buzz, Campion kept going, despite “mistakes and stupid things”, she says. “The energy just goes, ‘Oh, well, I have to work, let’s try the next thing.’”
She’s still led by this creative energy today and is very much attuned to it on a deep level. This is why she hired a dream coach named Kim Gillingham on the set of The Power of the Dog. “She works with dreams and psyche, and she says about the psyche that you can’t begin to do creative work until the psyche is engaged. And I call that the energy flow. When the psyche is involved, everything changes, and you don’t relate to fear. You’re wild, really. It’s feeding you from the inside, you are in the bubble of the work. And it’s a very enriching, empowering place to come from… It changes the balance of what you need to do between fear and enthusiasm.”
It was her dad’s second wife who sent her Thomas Savage’s 1967 book The Power of the Dog. Loosely based on his own experience as a gay rancher in Montana, it’s a Cain and Abel tale of two brothers that challenges hyper-masculinity, exposing “the vulnerability, the brutality, and the fear, and even the femininity underneath it,” Campion says.
“I think I really fell in love with his subversive voice. That was the first thing. And then this sense of extraordinary detail within the story. Here he was starting off with a scene of castration, and you couldn’t get more hyper-masculine than the ranch of Montana.”
Benedict Cumberbatch plays Phil, a cruel, cutting bully, while Jesse Plemons is his mild, kind brother George, who marries widow Rose, played by Kirsten Dunst. When Rose comes to live on the ranch, Phil mercilessly taunts her and her son Peter (Kodi Smit-McPhee)—a watchful teenager who crafts paper flowers for his beloved mother. But the deeply repressed Phil is unexpectedly drawn to the boy, and they bond as Phil teaches Peter skills like making a rope from hide.
Campion was interested in the concealment within Phil, who has been forced to hide his sexuality behind masculinity. “He always had to be secretive, he always had to know that his essential self was considered disgusting, a criminal, debased,” she says.
She also relished the attention to detail the novel contained. “I feel a sense for the details, like the paper flowers, and the braiding of the rope, which becomes such an enriched object. Not only is a rope made from a cow which is brought up on the property, but it’s a symbol of masculinity. Because with this rope, you make submissive the animals.”
Campion lit on Cumberbatch to play Phil because, she says, he’s “an amazing actor who could be very tender and who took risks. Also, I think in Sherlock you see how flamboyant he can be, which we really do need. He has to have a vocal capacity where he can speak really fast. And I think he’s very handsome. He’s this really sexy guy in a way too, and also vulnerable and tender. And he’s not afraid of these things.”
Although they are married in real-life, Jesse Plemons and Kirsten Dunst very much worked as separate entities for Campion. “I didn’t really think about them as a duo, but as [Dunst] pointed out to me endlessly, ‘It’s incredibly money-saving, Jane,’ because they were in the same accommodation,” she laughs. Calling Dunst “a luscious woman”, Campion enjoyed a truth-telling quality in her. “I just love that about some women, that they are this beautiful chaos of, ‘This is me and I’m present and you can’t shut me up.’ I really love that about her and what she brings to the story, which is this wildness.”
The New Zealand shoot was interrupted by Covid for several months, but, says Campion, that turned out to be something of a boon, giving her time to re-think the ending. Where once she had Peter returning to making his paper flowers at the end, now she knew she wanted the final scene to be the deeply symbolic rope being placed under Peter’s bed.
Phil had for years romanticized and relished the memory of his mentor ‘Bronco Henry’. And, says Campion, this new ending underlined how Phil would, in turn, become Peter’s own Bronco Henry. The rope was their connection, the secret between them, and longing for lost love was not only less dangerous than a real relationship for a gay man at that time, but it’s emotionally relatable across the board too. “It is easier to love a ghost than a real person,” Campion says, simply.
Then came the edit. Campion worked for the first time with “very, very skilled” editor Peter Sciberras, whom she says taught her “an amazing amount of what you can do technically with energy that’s not quite as you wanted, cutting off part of the screen and use a part of the tape from another place. I mean, I knew some of that, but I just didn’t know it could go as far as he showed me.”
The experience was intense. “I think even now we love each other,” she says. “It was one of those love affairs that’s not a love affair of course, but of different minds, if you like. It’s really hard to say with editing what is happening, but you have to stay so nimble and so intuitive to what’s going on. You can have your plan, but usually you find out that doesn’t work.”
And letting go of the plan is part of Campion’s mission as a filmmaker. As she puts it, “I’m just training my intuition so that when I get on set, I may have a starting point, but I have got confidence to dance with the circumstances. And there is nothing else, if you want this to be alive, because you have to respond to what the actors are doing in front of you. You don’t know what they’re going to do, so you have to learn, as Muhammad Ali said, to float like a butterfly and sting like a bee.”
Next, she’ll be putting her energies into starting a film school in New Zealand. She feels driven to give something back, she says, “because I wouldn’t be where I am without the generosity of the Australian government, and the people who created the film school there. And it was free for us, and we were paid to go. That opportunity is what people should have.”
She also notes the progress of women in the film industry since she began her career. “Everybody is really straining to make sure that they hear the female voice. And I think the women are coming into the industry now, as it opens to them, with so much energy and daring. I think they’re the interesting voices at the moment, and they are doing super well, especially in festivals. You can see that. I would say that is no longer charitable to think about hiring women, it’s actually good business, which is fantastic.”
So perhaps now, all these years after that Palme d’Or, she can relax a little, and enjoy the trail she blazed?
“I can put a rope under my bed, yeah,” she says.
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