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| The Jane Campion interview
Publication: Other Articles
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We’re in a restaurant eating oysters. Jane Campion says to me, ‘What I am trying to do is to keep space for the unknown.’
Tall, healthy, with great presence, and a solid hold on reality, Jane Campion is a believer in energetic emptiness – maybe it’s her yoga training that keeps her mind as well as her body supple.
‘The unknown is frightening. If you spend all your time in front of the TV or on the computer, you can avoid your mind.’
For Campion, making movies isn’t about the managed thrills of mass-entertainment; it is about opening and allowing emotional space. Of course her movies are entertaining, and she is a great enthusiast of the cinema experience, but for her the experience is about connection not distraction. ‘My movies are for all those people that Hollywood doesn’t serve.’
Her outlook is European – inevitable in the Australian/New Zealand culture where she was brought up. ‘I was raised on Bunuel movies. My mother was an actress who wore a Chanel suit and took me to the cinema in Wellington to watch films I didn’t understand.’
The meaning may have escaped her but the long sensuous beauty of French films did not. Her cinematic eye, her feel for the rhythm and movement of film is utterly European. She tells a good story but she’s not plot-driven. She gives us real feeling but she’s not afraid of complexity.
IN THE CUT steered away from the mainstream misogyny of movies like Fatal Attraction or Basic Instinct, and went for the kind of sexual questioning we get in Cocteau or Genet. Choosing both classic and edgy, and shooting from porn flick to film noir made a sexy exciting mix that wasn’t used to distract the viewer, but instead to ask very uncomfortable questions about the nature of desire.
‘Sexuality is the great leveller. It’s democratic. You feel what you feel and the rules don’t make any difference.’
Jane Campion’s preoccupation with repressed desire and the struggle for identity is present in all her movies, but both IN THE CUT and BRIGHT STAR pushed the questions further, making knowing dependent on instinct and sensation, and locating feeling at the heart of the quest for the self.
When I ask her if the craziness of the modern world, with its endless distractions and disruptions, its daily narcotic of noise, its ceaseless movement, its casual porn, its deliberate triviality, make authentic desire of any kind impossible, she shakes her head and laughs at me.
‘Listen, the world has always been full of sheep. You want to be a sheep, ok, this is a democracy. But if you want to find your own way, this is the time to do it. It’s not harder to be yourself, it’s just more obvious that it’s hard – really hard. It’s always been hard. It was hard for Keats…’
We talk about Keats – and she’s right to say that it’s impossible to talk about Keats without talking about his love affair with Fanny Brawne. BRIGHT STAR is such a brave film because it suggests that relationships really are at the centre of life, for men as well as for women. This is not the Hollywood Boy Meets Girl, romance number; it’s the deep, difficult, dangerous, part shipwreck part redemption that happens through love – the world ripped open, re-made. ‘People are afraid of what comes through their senses – they avoid, they rationalise, but if we could feel more we would judge less. If we could feel more we would know more.’
That’s a radical agenda. Jane Campion is not gender-neutral. She works as a woman, and wants to address the world from a woman’s point of view. ‘The male-centric world is limited. They think it’s not, but we know it is…’
She always laughs when she says such things. She isn’t aggressive, she has a wonderful sense of humour, but she is very clear about the imbalances in the world. The way she sees it, women as women are only just being represented, and particularly in the movies.
But her movies have always been made for everyone, because whatever the gender differences, Campion knows that men and women separate or together, struggle with the same central problem:
‘The mind is a very difficult thing to manage. Stop the noise and what’s there? Your mind. What are you going to do with that?’
The long beautifully held shots in her movies work as mind-meditation. I don’t know if it is intentional, but like the classic French films she grew up on, Campion movies stretch internal space and time. BRIGHT STAR, with its still, sure, camerawork, subtly stitches up the tattered mind and gives us a mended place of quiet to experience the feeling of the film, and to reflect on ourselves. It is movie-making at a high level, because it assumes that movies can be more than crowd pleasers.
‘You can have the attention span of a pea, but when you experience loss or grief, Twitter isn’t going to help you. You will search for something meaningful. I almost think that we are designed to search for meaning, but for most people something has to trigger that search. And when you look, it’s important that there is something there to find – a poem, a novel, a film.’
I am reminded of her response when someone remarked that film-making is not a cure for cancer. Campion stood her ground and asserted the importance of a meaningful life, and that creativity is central to meaning.
She believes that completely – and that is the thing about Jane Campion - she believes in what she does, that it matters, and that life, for all its wit and warmth, pleasure and distraction, has to be taken seriously.
‘Sex, grief, love, loss, childbirth, getting older, facing death, how do we talk about these things, how do we live these things? Sometimes I have some answers, through the shape of the films I’m making. But even if I don’t have any answers I can frame the questions in such a way that…’
Someone comes over to the table to say how much he enjoyed BRIGHT STAR. The conversation reshapes itself. We’re back at the beginning, making space for the unknown.
PATHE PUBLICATIONS 2010
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