‘Please don’t catch anyone’s eye’, and other Campion film-set rules

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‘Please don’t catch anyone’s eye’, and other Campion film-set rules

Jane Campion won her first Oscar in 1994, for screenwriting, then another last year – nearly three decades later – for directing. Let’s hope the film school teachers who had “no great belief or hope” in her have been watching.

By Konrad Marshall

This story is part of the May 13 Edition of Good Weekend.See all 16 stories.

In the movie version of any famous life, there’s almost always a childhood scene, rendered in black and white, grainy sepia or washed pastel footage, where the subject is brought back to square one, to a formative time and place. I can’t help but wonder, while speaking to famed film director Jane Campion, now 69, what that frame would look like in the imaginary biopic of her life. Where would Campion’s legendary filmic gaze take the audience? What would she want us to see?

“I think it’s my first memories on the planet, because in a way they are cinematic, even though they’re just fragments,” she says, speaking to me from a coastal house in New Zealand, just north-west of Wellington, which she uses when away from her long-time home in Sydney. “The one I’m remembering right now – even though there were flashes earlier – is sitting with my dad on the steps in Wellington, on a sunny day. He’s eating a grapefruit, holding a piece of the fruit on his spoon and looking around, pretending he’s not paying attention. Which is so I can grab at it, and take it, and then he can look back and go, ‘Oh, my god, what’s happened?’ ”

Campion isn’t exactly sure why this scene of mischief, collusion and love is so well-preserved in the glowing amber of her memory. “But for some reason, this creature – this person – memorialised that moment,” she says, pointing to herself. “It’s one of those beautiful mysteries about being on the planet, that we are a bit of a mystery to ourselves as well.”

Campion has more than a dash of mystery about her, as one of those auteur directors who seemingly only make passion projects. Between 1989 and now she has directed just nine feature films, far fewer than contemporaries similarly known for their artful patience, from Gus Van Sant (My Own Private Idaho) to Terrence Malick (Days of Heaven). Yet she remains one of the most acclaimed directors of her generation, winning an Academy Award in 1994 for her screenplay of The Piano – for which she also became the first woman to win the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival – then a Best Director Oscar in 2022 for her challenging western The Power of the Dog, and creating a host of haunting and beautiful works in between.

Holly Hunter, left, and Anna Paquin in The Piano, the 1993 period drama written and directed by Campion.

Holly Hunter, left, and Anna Paquin in The Piano, the 1993 period drama written and directed by Campion.

This legacy is being honoured in June and July with a retrospective hosted first by the Sydney Film Festival (June 7 to 18), in which all her feature films will be screened, plus a Q&A with veteran film critic David Stratton. The movies will also be played at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image in Melbourne (June 15 to July 2), then at the National Film & Sound Archive in Canberra (July 20 to 30).

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But talking to Campion now, what’s clear is less the gravitas she’s clearly earned and more the humility and humanity she brings with her, including a trademark giggle that frequently turns into a head-back howl. That joyful cachinnation is captured on camera in a new documentary about her, too, which will be screened at the upcoming celebration of her career.

Jane Campion: The Cinema Woman begins with the revelation that her childhood was one of a quiet, lonely worrier, but also one obsessed with creative costumed play with her friends: two descriptions that appear to sound utterly incompatible. “I feel like I’m an extrovert and also a shy person – a shy extrovert – which is very frustrating at times, but probably makes me bearable,” she explains, giggling.

“I loved putting on plays with my friends, and always had lots of ideas and costumes. They weren’t for anyone else – these imaginary games that would go on and on over months – they were for ourselves. But I can also remember feeling really childish and left out when I still wanted to play kings and queens, and the others wanted to play the Beatles. I do remember my life as being fun, and very playful, but also times of real loneliness, or aloneness.”

School, she says, was a trial. Starting at Wellington’s Queen Margaret College private girls’ school at age four, Campion thought at first they were there to play, and couldn’t understand why there was so much other stuff getting in the way. “It wasn’t until I was about 10 that I realised, ‘Oh, people are learning stuff here, and if I don’t give it a go, I’m going to end up in one of the craft classes,’ and that was humiliating, that idea.”

“I don’t have any of those natural depressive tendencies, but I am an empath, so I can take myself where anyone goes, and it used to be quite scary to feel those feelings.”

Jane Campion

And so she began trying, and trying hard. Perhaps too hard. At age 11 and 12 she would wake at 6am, sometimes 5am, to complete her homework in the most fastidious fashion. Burning herself out or boring herself numb, she’d dropped that enthusiasm by 13 or 14, which coincided with that period when the girls in her orbit began to be mean to one another, Campion as much as any. She then went to the public Wellington Girls’ College for one year, finishing school at 16.

“And that was a really rich time,” she says, “because you develop these sad feelings, which I think are just normal in human creatures, but it’s your first experience of them, so it’s quite powerful.” She started going to the library in the city to spend time looking at art books. “I just didn’t like sitting in the classroom with someone pointing to a textbook and saying, ‘Do this,’ ” she says. “I think there’s a whole lot of kids that aren’t really suited to school. I was one of them.”

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A still from the documentary ‘Jane Campion, the Cinema Woman’, which will be screened at upcoming celebrations of the 69-year-old auteur’s career.

A still from the documentary ‘Jane Campion, the Cinema Woman’, which will be screened at upcoming celebrations of the 69-year-old auteur’s career.

This is not so surprising. Campion grew up in a theatrical family who treated Shakespeare like the Bible. Her parents, Richard and Edith, established the New Zealand Players national touring theatre company, and this labour of love took them away from their children – including her big sister Anna (18 months older) and little brother Michael (seven years younger) – for long stretches, which meant leaving them in the care of nannies.

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Her parents had difficult origin stories: Mum the orphan to alcoholic parents, Dad the outcast son of an insular religious sect known as the Exclusive Brethren. This meant the Campions were almost a family of independent individuals.

“My sister and I talk about it a lot, but my parents were sort of exotic to us. It never felt like they didn’t love us, but we didn’t get a lot of them, so we were quite competitive about getting their attention at home. It ended up that my sister and I kind of hated each other when growing up. Like, really hated each other.”

That didn’t change until they became close in their early 20s. Their brother lives in Australia now, while the absence of both parents is still keenly felt. “Often I wake up in the morning and go, ‘Muuum, where are you?’ ” Campian moans, almost keening. “My mum had a very tough life, and she grew up without much resilience, so if something went wrong, it would lead to a very serious depression. I don’t have any of those natural depressive tendencies, but I am an empath, so I can take myself where anyone goes, and it used to be quite scary to feel those feelings. It’s frightening when your mum is suicidal and desperate and you can’t help her.”

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Campion studied anthropology at Victoria University in Wellington, then travelled to Europe before trying her hand at a painting degree at the Sydney College of the Arts. Essentially, she was flirting at the edge of anything real until she made a decision, at 25, to put herself at risk: “to stop dreaming about potential and to explore it” – and to fail if need be – by enrolling in production at the Australian Film, Television and Radio School. She was one of very few women there, and instead of competing with the boys for dollies and tracks and cranes, she made her shots unique by editing as much as framing.

Katie Pye in Peel, which won the 1986 Short Film Palme d’Or, making Campion the first woman to win the award.

Katie Pye in Peel, which won the 1986 Short Film Palme d’Or, making Campion the first woman to win the award.

Campion describes herself as someone in whom the faculty had “no great belief, or hope”, which became her advantage, teaching her not to become a “pleasing machine” – never pandering or obsequious, always excavating ideas and truth. “It’s very difficult if you are the darling of the school, because everyone wants attention and if you’re getting it, then it’s hard to let that go,” she says. “But for me, to not be thought much of, it did give me a lot of space and freedom.”

She got as much help from her peers as her teachers (more, actually), including during the creation of a short film in 1982 called Peel, which despite running just seven minutes long, led to such stress that Campion ended up in hospital. (“It was,” she once said, “my Apocalypse Now.” )

“For me, to not be thought much of, it did give me a lot of space and freedom.”

Jane Campion

The faculty saw little redeeming value in the tiny film about a father attempting to discipline his child, but fellow students suggested cuts Campion hadn’t considered – namely, removing any and every bad shot, and allowing voice-overs to carry the remaining good shots further. Any gaps could speak for themselves, almost like the prose of Ernest Hemingway, where the power lies between words. (“You have to take everything away,” Campion notes, “so they can see.” ) She began to play with sound design, and a film that had once been incomprehensible grew stronger. Strong enough that Peel eventually won the 1986 Short Film Palme d’Or at Cannes.

I’m curious to know what such an award does for a young director (Campion had just turned 30 at the time). How do you take that kind of shiny prize out for a spin, to see what it can do for your career? “It’s a little bit confusing because things do change and they don’t,” she says. “Your projects still need to have substance.”

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Karen Colston in the 1989 black comedy, Sweetie.

Karen Colston in the 1989 black comedy, Sweetie.

In 1986, she directed the TV film, Two Friends, written by Helen Garner, followed in 1989 by her own feature debut, a sisterly drama by equal turns sensitive and grotesque called Sweetie, which polarised not just audiences but her initial backer, the Australian Film Commission. “I had their support – ‘Whatever you want to do next, we’re interested’ – until they read it. To be fair, it was called Dot dot dot, Die at that point,” she says, roaring with laughter.

Campion followed that swiftly with An Angel at My Table (1990), a faithful and tender rendering of the autobiography of New Zealand writer Janet Frame. It feels wrong to ask Campion why she so often chose to make movies with female protagonists when the more obvious line of inquiry is, what are people who don’t make such movies missing out on (apart from, you know, half of all stories in the entire world)? “You’ve put your finger on it there – half the people on planet earth are women. It’s just so simple,” she says. “Growing up, I always really appreciated a film or a book that had female protagonists because I could imagine myself logically in the story. But it wasn’t like they were the only books or movies I loved. I loved Deliverance, which doesn’t really have any women in it. And also I do believe that some men are extraordinarily sensitive – sensitivity is not something that one gender owns.”

Kerry Fox in the 1990 biographical drama, An Angel at My Table.

Kerry Fox in the 1990 biographical drama, An Angel at My Table.

Campion was, for instance, beguiled by the way the author Henry James imagined himself into the mind of the character of Isabel Archer, the titular lady from his novel The Portrait of a Lady (which Campion adapted for the screen in 1996, starring Nicole Kidman).

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And indeed, the men in her screenplays are often as interesting as the women, or more so. She has a gift for exploring the masculine impulse, whether through attraction or revulsion. Consider the male fragility within The Piano (1993), from actor Harvey Keitel’s quiet obsession with Ada (played by Holly Hunter) to the pained rage of Ada’s cuckolded husband, played by Sam Neill. In Campion’s work there’s always that kind of slow slip into dark places, crevices and folds with exposed pale skin, and a darkly charged eroticism.

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Campion has said before that you can’t really put a man and woman in a room without there existing something unspoken, based on an inescapable and guiding premise within her work: boys and girls get separated at puberty and have to find a way to come back together again as adults.

“The opposite sex is a kind of muse that makes both men and women weaker and stronger; it’s a place of ultimate vulnerability,” is how she puts it. “You have to put love and surrender ahead of strength, and I think that’s a really important dance.”

Nicole Kidman in the 1996 film, The Portrait of a Lady.

Nicole Kidman in the 1996 film, The Portrait of a Lady.


When The Piano won the Palme d’Or, it was Sam Neill who stepped up to accept the prize on Campion’s behalf. She couldn’t be there because she was giving birth, the product of her 1991 marriage to Colin Englert, an assistant director on The Piano, whom she divorced in 2001. Tragically, their baby boy, Jasper, died 12 days later. In 2004, she told The Guardian newspaper that there was a point at which she felt she would never get past her grief: “In a way, it is everything: it is human life. The reality of that is very clear to you, because you are sitting there holding a dead baby.” Unable to do anything much for months, Campion picked herself up to join the publicity tour, and returned from that tour, six months later, pregnant with her daughter, Alice. “I was so lucky.”

More movies featuring central female characters eventually followed: “There were so few people doing that … that I felt if I stopped, it would be quite a betrayal.” She did stop in a way, though, taking five years off after Holy Smoke! (1999) and In the Cut (2003) to spend more time with then nine-year-old Alice, returning in 2009 to make Bright Star, about the last years of the life of poet John Keats.

Her womanhood, then, has been something to navigate and negotiate throughout her career, starting all the way back on her first projects, wrangling male crew members who were by turns belligerent and belittling.

Campion in 1994, after winning the Oscar for screenwriting for The Piano.

Campion in 1994, after winning the Oscar for screenwriting for The Piano.Credit: Getty Images

“It’s enraging to feel that – as a woman – you don’t get the opportunity or chances to lead a life as men do,” she says. “When I was young, there were so few women directors that it was hard to believe they actually existed.” Gillian Armstrong’s success with the landmark 1979 Australian period drama, My Brilliant Career, was encouraging of course, and people tell Campion all the time that her successes created the same ripples. But the only true temperature change Campion ever saw was the arrival of the #MeToo movement – a “fairytale time” in which women were finally believed and men finally fired. “Women’s film also used to be a category of its own – a kind of ghetto – but that’s not the case any more, and that’s where really heartening change has occurred. People are interested in films with more emotional sensitivity or depth or character examination – it’s not all just violence – and I think that’s changing everything.”

“Women’s film also used to be a category of its own – a kind of ghetto – but that’s not the case any more, and that’s where really heartening change has occurred.”

Jane Campion

Of course, there’s still a veneer of industry sexism to overcome, and sometimes overt displays, too, such as the recent criticism of The Power of The Dog from Hollywood’s resident pretend cowboy Sam Elliott – “What the f--- does this woman know about the American West?” – to which Campion responded: “I’m sorry, he was being a little bit of a B-I-T-C-H.”

I’m curious to know whether Elliott’s dismissive comment stunned her. “Not at all. I like Sam Elliott and think he’s a good actor. Sometimes people provoke people into comments – you feel a bit charged up and say something silly – I’ve done it myself. But he’s apologised, so I don’t really take it to heart. I mean, clearly he’s not a cowboy. He’s an actor, so it’s all a bit of a nonsense.”

Benedict Cumberbatch, at left, and Jesse Plemons play brothers in 2021’s The Power of The Dog, which snared Campion her second Oscar.

Benedict Cumberbatch, at left, and Jesse Plemons play brothers in 2021’s The Power of The Dog, which snared Campion her second Oscar.


Jane Campion likes to say that creativity is shy – “inspiration only visits relaxed places” – so she puts a great deal of effort into creating such worlds. She picks her rehearsal space carefully, favouring old church halls over anodyne offices. She gives time for rehearsal, too, often three weeks, which she says “is a shock for a lot of actors, because that just doesn’t happen ... their preparation time is often taken up with costume-fitting and make-up”. She gets the entire cast to discuss scenes and then improvise them first, before actually running through the script.

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She also talks to the crew, establishing rules that are sometimes unpopular, but also necessary – “Please don’t catch anyone’s eye”, for instance, and “Please don’t try to make friends with the actors during shooting time” – lest those interactions draw anyone out of character. Campion points to Benedict Cumberbatch’s complicated and cruel cowboy, Phil Burbank, from The Power of the Dog, and how they decided he would remain “Phil” while on set. Cumberbatch, she says, is a hugely obliging person, the opposite of Burbank, who never obliges anyone. “Phil would never say ‘please’, or ‘thank you’, or even ‘yes’,” Campion says. “Benedict had to get used to that and allow it into his body, this different way of being, and I guess it’s that thing where you actually need to take that seriously.”

Her dad and mum were a director-and-actor partnership, teaching Campion a fondness for that dynamic, but she’s also wary of the performative thespianic voice, preferring a more natural cadence and grounded gestures, embracing awkwardness and not “swimming in fakesville”.

Sam Neill once said that working with Campion was “like having a big safety net under me”, which she believes is simply the result of people reading your positive intentions. “You just show up as who you are, and maybe you’re a bit wobbly, but mistakes are part of the game,” she explains. “It’s the spirit of play, and you’re playing at a high level with a lot of very good toys.” Once those conditions and connections are established, she can relax a little. She doesn’t picture specific scenes in her head beforehand. Her films are thus living, breathing “monsters” that prompt her to lie awake at night, wondering what they eat and when they’ll sleep. “If you look with too much energy at what you’re trying to do,” she says, “you don’t see what’s actually there.”

Campion on the set of The Power of The Dog with Benedict Cumberbatch; she asked the actor to remain 
in character while on set.

Campion on the set of The Power of The Dog with Benedict Cumberbatch; she asked the actor to remain in character while on set.

Campion identifies with protagonists who cross rubicons and flout conventions – “freaks” filled with struggle and conflict and inconsistencies they can’t reconcile – and hopes her audience will, too. Take someone like the author Janet Frame, whose writing emerged to international acclaim following psychiatric hospitalisation, electroconvulsive treatment and a scheduled (then cancelled) lobotomy. Her vulnerability on screen, says Campion, somehow releases our own. “Her look was so unpoetic – she was kind of chunky and stocky and not as elegant as the other girls in the class, who she would look at longingly. She touches your heart and when a character touches your heart, it’s very powerful,” she says. “They’re avatars, in a way, for our own experience. We’ve all got our own fuzzy red-haired person inside of us who doesn’t feel attractive.”

People sometimes have a tendency when receiving the equivalent of a lifetime achievement award to feel as though the band is playing them off the stage in the middle of their acceptance speech, but Campion is honoured by her upcoming retrospective, in part because she knows she’s still at the top of her game. (After all, her latest Oscar statuette is only a year old.)

“I feel like I’m at the height of my capacities and I like that feeling,” she says. “It’s nice, as an older person, to know that all the wisdom means something. When you’re a beginner, you’re so bold, because you don’t know that things can go really wrong. And then there’s the part in the middle, where you’ve realised things can go wrong, so you protect yourself. And then when you get older, you realise you can’t protect yourself, and you have to be out there, and there’s a calmness in that.”

“I feel like I’m at the height of my capacities and I like that feeling. It’s nice, as an older person, to know that all the wisdom means something.”

Jane Campion

She won’t watch the full filmography that audiences will enjoy, quoting director Paul Thomas Anderson (Magnolia, Boogie Nights), who said that old movies are basically like a bunch of past relationships you don’t really want to revisit. But Campion is nonetheless thrilled to be part of next month’s Sydney Film Festival which, as a student, was the highlight of her year. She remembers attending, whenever she could, to watch film critic David Stratton interviewing guests “almost ceremonially, like a high priest”. She’ll be doing a Q&A with Stratton in Sydney on June 10. “I asked for David,” she says, “because he is a serious cinephile – generous and thoughtful and honest – and in many ways, you make your films for these people.”

I wonder what words of wisdom Campion will impart to that audience, which is likely to include young filmmakers. Any specific encouragement or caution from what she’s learnt? It turns out, she shares such advice daily through a two-year film school program she’s running right now in New Zealand. Financed by Netflix, the course has 14 students, who are relishing the opportunity and soaking up her advice.

“I think it’s incredibly important to meet lots of people, to try to write things all the time – to read short stories and understand them, learn to use a camera, to focus, to edit, and get some buddies and come up with your own ideas and be a lover of cinema,” she says. “But really, filmmaking works well for people who are like me, with too much energy for anything else. Film can take everything you’ve got to offer, and then some.”

Campion is increasingly drawn back to her homeland, particularly the wildness of Central Otago on the South Island – an “elemental thing” whereby she feels almost healed working in the region. That setting stands in for Montana in The Power of the Dog, and in the hands of Australian cinematographer Ari Wegner (who received an Oscar nomination for her work on the Western) the foreboding horizon is almost a character itself.

Campion’s daughter, Alice Englert, right, starred alongside Nicole Kidman in Top of the Lake: China Girl.

Campion’s daughter, Alice Englert, right, starred alongside Nicole Kidman in Top of the Lake: China Girl.

“I do love landscapes,” says Campion. “And from being young in New Zealand, I always found the bush to be incredible – full of delights and secrets, and the sense that being inside it was like being underwater.” It was also the perfect setting for the first series of Top of the Lake, her small-screen triumph. A tiny town within a moody, dark, wet and bushy patch, hidden away in the deep, forgotten recesses of the world, seemed ideal for a murder mystery but also as a place to explore “the invisibility of older women” – those in a commune called “Paradise”, who Campion describes as the “unlovable, unf---able, unwantable”.

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The second season of the show – Top of the Lake: China Girl – starred her daughter Alice Englert, as a rebellious 17-year-old at war with her parents, and was set within the grimy concrete corners of Sydney. “I’m very much an Australian, too,” Campion adds, smiling, and brushing her long white hair from an angular face that’s framed by big, thick, black tortoiseshell glasses. “I do feel like I’m one of the true Antipodeans, with one foot either side of the Tasman.”

She has lived in Australia since she was 25 – 44 years, with several stints working and holidaying in New Zealand and overseas – and has never been interested in establishing a base in Hollywood. Right now, she’s in her “home away from home” on a hill above Pukerua Bay, looking north-west, and the sheeting rain outside is leaking into the room through recently renovated windows, and that makes her laugh (again). Her vision drifts beyond nearby Kapiti Island to an enraged Cook Strait, but she isn’t looking any further ahead than that, with no screenplays or films in sight.

“I’m using my energies differently now,” she says. “I’m the sort of person who does realise that there are chapters in life, and that I’m heading up to the last chapter, or maybe I’m in it already, and I have this very vivid feeling of how amazing it is to be alive.

“Maybe when you’re young you do things and maybe now I should be doing nothing, just reaching up, being a channel, and taking it all in.”

To read more from Good Weekend magazine, visit our page at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and Brisbane Times.

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