Jane Campion: Interviews

Conversations With Filmmakers Series

by Jane Campion

In outstanding films that are sharply focused on unusual women Jane Campion has gained worldwide admiration and respect. This New Zealand director first attracted international attention with her 1989 film Sweetie, an acerbic study of two sisters in a wildly dysfunctional family. She followed this in 1990 with the television miniseries An Angel at My Table, based on the autobiography of New Zealand author Janet Frame. Subsequently released in theatres, the film chronicles the early trials of the young writer. Poor, timid, and physically awkward, Frame was misdiagnosed as schizophrenic and was scheduled for a lobotomy, but her success as a writer enabled her to escape this fate and won her fame and acceptance. In 1993 in yet another story about an extraordinary woman, Campion made the award-winning film The Piano. It starred Holly Hunter as the Victorian mail-order bride who refuses to speak Arriving in New Zealand with her young daughter, the young Scottish widow confronts isolation in the wilderness and communicates only via her piano until she finds real love in her husband's neighbor, played by Harvey Keitel. Campion next adapted Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady, starring Nicole Kidman as Isabel Archer, a young American heiress seduced by a decadent pair of expatriates living in Italy.In this collection of interviews Campion speaks of these films that have given women a revival as a strong screen presence. Campion tells of her early life in Wellington and of her training as a filmmaker in the 1980s at the Australian School of Film and Television. She speaks of those who have influenced her style and her experiences in making movies.Campion received the Academy Award forBest Original Screenplay in 1993 and was the first woman director to win the Palme d'Or at Cannes.

216 pages, Hardcover

First published April 1, 1999

About the author

Campion was born in Wellington, New Zealand, the daughter of Edith, an actress, and Richard Campion, a theater and opera director.[1] She graduated in Anthropology from Victoria University in 1975, and with a painting major at the Sydney College of the Arts in 1979. She started making films in the early eighties at the Australian Film Television and Radio School.
Her first short film, Peel (1982) won the Short Film Palme d'Or at the 1986 Cannes Film Festival, and other awards followed for the shorts Passionless Moments (1983) and Girls Own Story (1984). Sweetie (1989) was her feature debut, and won international awards. Further recognition followed with An Angel at my Table (1990), an autobiographical and psychological portrayal of the poet Janet Frame. International recognition followed with another Palme d'Or at the 1993 Cannes Film Festival for The Piano,[2] which won the best director award from the Australian Film Institute and an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay in 1994. At the 66th Academy Awards, she was the second woman ever to be nominated best director.
Campion's work since that time has tended to polarize opinion. The Portrait of a Lady (1996), based on the Henry James novel, featured Nicole Kidman, John Malkovich, Barbara Hershey and Martin Donovan. Holy Smoke! (1999) teamed Campion again with Harvey Keitel, this time with Kate Winslet as the female lead. In the Cut (2003), an erotic thriller based on Susanna Moore's bestseller, provided Meg Ryan an opportunity to depart from her more familiar onscreen persona.
Campion was an executive producer for the 2006 documentary Abduction: The Megumi Yokota Story.
She has a daughter named Alice (b. 1993).

Reviews

[Maria]

*So far, so bueno