[ad_1]
Campion was born in New Zealand’s capital Wellington to classically educated parents who run a professional theater company. She grew up surrounded by artists while bubbling with creative energy that she didn’t know where to put. Actors came to the rehearsal house with her mother, Edith, a stage star; Campion staged plays at school, inspired by her father, Richard, a respected director. She burned with passions, eventually earning degrees in anthropology and painting (the latter of which took her to Australia, via the Sydney College of Art). Before even getting her second degree, however, she was drawn to film, completing her first short film, Tissues, in 1980. “Until I was about 24, I didn’t get it,” Campion says of her artistic spark. She saw the potential for “layers” in cinema, broad and complex expressions like she saw in “big movies”.
The short films directed by Campion in the early 1980s show a director of immense curiosity and courage, and are charged with erotic energy. Discipline exercise: bark (1982) plays out as a roadside psychological thriller between a father, his sister and his son. A girl’s own story (1984) wryly explores the sexuality of teenage girls in repressed suburbia; Kidman, 14, was cast, but she passed it on, in part because the script called for her to kiss another girl. (Kidman has since said it’s one of her few career regrets.)
Campion’s work proved polarizing. “I got a bit of a crappy review that I was really angry about,” she says of the short. “I wasn’t used to feedback, unsolicited and unmuzzled.” But her uniqueness remains undeniable. Cora won the 1986 Palme d’Or for short film at Cannes, giving Campion enough exposure to land a feature film. She had realized that her films were not for everyone, especially in such a male-dominated field; she knew they could range from broadly appealing to deeply weird, and she had the confidence to foresee a diverse career. For his debut full-length, Campion took the leap: “I realized this was the moment to make my wildest track yet.”
The resulting film, dear, announces itself accordingly: it’s loud, ugly, scathing and brilliantly, a terrifyingly sharp portrait of a young woman wading through a chaotic family life and her own delusions. Scene by scene, she acts according to her own strange logic, reveling in the mystical. It remains one of Campion’s personal favourites.
She was already planning her next film, Angel at my table until the time Cutie screened. Still, the divided critical response stung Campion, even if he knew he was less accessible and more personal. “Some critics just hated it,” she says now. In Cannes, where Cutie launched, Campion spent the day crying in her suite at the Carlton Hotel after sampling the reactions. “I was really stunned. If I wasn’t in pre-production on An angel on my table now, I don’t think I would do another film,” she says. “It was so bittersweet. Maybe women don’t grow up with the same toughness in the dressing room that boys do – they seem almost immune to criticism. I wish I had a little more of that in me.
Such vulnerability would surprised me a few months ago: Jane Campion’s films are defined by a certain nervous fearlessness. But such is her depth of feeling. As I got to know her, I saw an artist brave enough to trust her instincts – and braver still to feel, fully, whatever came next.
After the widely acclaimed Angel at my table Campion made The piano. She had the idea for the breezy epic about a mute Scottish woman (Holly Hunter) moving to New Zealand with her daughter (Anna Paquin) and navigating a complicated love triangle before making dear, but she felt she was not yet “mature” enough to handle the scope of the story. She was smart to wait. Radically attuned to female desire, yet produced on a scale more familiar to mainstream cinema—lavish period sets, a captivating score, stunning natural scenery—the $7 million film was a success, grossing more than $40 million worldwide and won the top prize at Cannes (making Campion the first woman to achieve such a feat). At the Oscars, Campion became the second woman ever to be nominated for Best Director and win Best Original Screenplay.
This is where, for many, Campion’s legacy begins. Several women in the industry tell me The piano it was seminal to them. “I was about 16 when I saw the piano, and I’ve never seen anything expressed like that,” says Oscar nominee Maggie Gyllenhaal, whose directorial debut, the lost daughter bowed out last December. “To me, so much of filmmaking feels fundamentally masculine…but when we’re honest with ourselves and working from our subconscious, I think the work looks like that.“
[ad_2]
Source link