Forgive Jane Campion for showing up a few minutes late. It’s been five months since she was last in Sydney, and she’s reacquainting herself with the city she’s loved for more than 40 years. A few days ago, she joined her friend Nicole Kidman—whom she’s known for, again, 40 years—on a long walk around nearby Centennial Park. This morning, she had a swim at the famed tidal pool of Wylie’s Baths, then went out for breakfast. “Sydney is such a divine city,” the New Zealand native says over Zoom, a twinkle shining through her glasses. “I’m experiencing it all over again.”
It’s also been five months since Campion and I first met over Zoom. That early August morning, she sat in the exact place she is now—the striking painting by Kiwi artist Bill Hammond behind her, the cup of coffee in hand—for her first interview about her first film in more than a decade, The Power of the Dog. I told her I liked the film, and she sighed with relief before sneaking in a smile. “That’s so nice to hear,” she’d said. “You do feel like, after a while of working in the vacuum of your own brain, you have no idea.” This one meant a lot to her, and in her experience, the world didn’t always care.
This time, the world did. The Power of the Dog took Campion to Italy, then New York; London, then France. A riveting and wrenching study of loneliness, masculinity, and repression set in ’20s Montana, it’s 2021’s most decorated movie—winner of more best-picture and director awards than any other title and positioned for a strong showing at the Academy Awards. (It’s nominated for 12 Oscars, more than any other film.) This marks the crowning moment for a generation-defining filmmaker. Backed by an aggressive Netflix campaign, Campion, 67, has flown around the world for screenings, tributes, and celebrations, the kind of treatment reserved for legends of the medium.
As Kidman puts it to Vanity Fair, this is Campion’s “victory lap.”
Campion is enjoying herself, certainly. She’s giddy about competing with directors she admires, like Paul Thomas Anderson. She’s grateful to be connecting with audiences for a film she worked so hard on, that she’s so proud of. But the Campion I met five months ago, curious as to whether her work would be embraced at all, still comes through. “Look, I love this film myself—I don’t think it’s perfect or anything, but it does do something, it’s got some strength, it’s a little mysterious and hypnotic,” she says. “But I’m surprised by how many people enjoy that complexity.”
That’s to be expected. After all, she’s been fighting to be understood for most of her career.
Campion was born in the New Zealand capital of Wellington to classically trained parents who ran a professional theater company. She grew up surrounded by artists while bursting with creative energy she didn’t know where to place. Actors came over to the house for rehearsal with her mother, Edith, a theater star; Campion staged plays in school, inspired by her father, Richard, an esteemed director. She burned through passions, eventually getting degrees in anthropology and painting (the latter of which brought her to Australia, via Sydney College of the Arts). Before even securing her second diploma, though, she’d been drawn to film, completing her first short, 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, sweeping and complicated expressions like she saw in the “big movies.”
The shorts Campion directed in the early ’80s signal a filmmaker of enormous curiosity and boldness and were charged with erotic energy. An Exercise in Discipline: Peel (1982) plays like a psychological thriller between a father, his sister, and his son, set on the side of a road. A Girl’s Own Story (1984) wickedly examines teen girls’ sexuality in repressed suburbia; a 14-year-old Kidman was cast, but she passed on it, in part, due to the script’s call for her to kiss another girl. (Kidman has since said this is one of her few career regrets.)
Campion’s work proved polarizing. “I got one slightly miserable review, which I was really pissed off by,” she says of that short. “I wasn’t used to feedback, unsolicited and unmuzzled.” But her singularity remained undeniable. Peel won the 1986 Short Film Palme d’Or at Cannes, which granted Campion enough notoriety to land a feature. She’d figured out that her movies were not for everyone, particularly in such a male-dominated field; she knew they could range from the broadly appealing to the deeply weird, and she had the confidence to foresee a varied career. For her feature debut, Campion took a leap: “I realized that this was the time to do my wildest piece.”
The resulting movie, Sweetie, announces itself accordingly: It’s loud, ugly, caustic, and brilliant, a terrifyingly sharp portrait of a young woman wading through a chaotic family life and her own delusions. Scene by scene, it operates under its own bizarre logic, reveling in the mystical. It remains one of Campion’s personal favorites.
She was already planning her follow-up movie, An Angel at My Table, by the time Sweetie screened. Yet the divided critical response stung Campion, even if she knew it was less accessible and more personal. “Some critics just hated it,” she says now. In Cannes, where Sweetie launched, Campion spent a whole day crying in her suite at the Carlton hotel after sampling reactions. “I was really stunned. If I had not been in preproduction on Angel at My Table already, I don’t think I would’ve made another film,” she says. “It was so bitter. Maybe women don’t grow up with that locker-room toughness that guys have—they seem almost immune to criticism. I wish I had a little bit more of that in me.”
Such vulnerability would have surprised me a few months ago: Jane Campion movies are defined by a certain nervy fearlessness. But such is her depth of feeling. As I’ve gotten to know her, I’ve observed an artist brave enough to trust her gut—and braver still to feel, fully, whatever follows.
After the widely acclaimed An Angel at My Table, Campion made The Piano. She’d had the idea for the windswept epic, about a mute Scottish woman (Holly Hunter) relocated to New Zealand with her daughter (Anna Paquin) and navigating a complex love triangle, before making Sweetie, but felt she wasn’t yet “mature” enough to handle the story’s scope. She was smart to wait. Radically attuned to female desire while produced on a scale more familiar to mainstream cinema—lush period trappings, a sweeping score, extraordinary natural scenery—the estimated $7 million movie was a success, grossing more than $40 million worldwide and winning Cannes’s top prize (making Campion the first woman to achieve such a feat). At the Oscars, Campion became the second woman ever nominated for best director and won best original screenplay.
This is where Campion’s legacy, for many, begins. Several women in the industry tell me The Piano was seminal for them. “I was about 16 when I saw The Piano, and I’d never seen anything expressed in that way,” says Maggie Gyllenhaal, the Oscar nominee whose first film as a director, The Lost Daughter, bowed last December. “To me, so much of filmmaking feels fundamentally masculine…but when we’re honest with ourselves and we’re working from our unconscious, I think the work looks like that.”
Kirsten Dunst, who costars in The Power of the Dog, remembers the iconic, harrowing scene where Hunter’s Ada gets her index finger cut off. “That look in her eyes, I can hearken back to it immediately—it got viscerally implemented into my soul,” Dunst says. “I knew that Jane was the ultimate in directing female performances…. That kind of acting is the goal.”
Hunter says of working on The Piano, which won her a best-actress Oscar: “It had an unfathomable impact on me as a person.” She’s worked with all kinds of directors for whom gender didn’t play a role, but Campion “manifests that female point of view. Her movies could not have been directed by a man. When you see them—it’s just a cellular thing that comes through in her stories.”
The Piano had a seismic cultural impact, but her next three movies—The Portrait of a Lady, Holy Smoke!, and In the Cut—flopped with critics and at the box office. They found Campion experimenting with the female perspective in a more provocative, less polished manner, and it seemed as if nobody cared. “Things were pretty tough at that time for women,” she says. “We had a little flare-up in the ’70s and ’80s when things were a bit more out there, and then it was like, ‘Well, you had your go, now no one wants to hear from you.’ ”
But look at those “disappointing” movies now. In the Cut, from 2003, is a psychosexual thriller starring a fascinating Meg Ryan as an English teacher caught up in the search for a serial killer. The movie’s contours confounded because this sort of crime story, told in a violently sensual vein, felt different—transgressive. “I think men found it a little scary,” Campion says with a grin. A few years ago, she introduced a special In the Cut screening in London and was taken aback by the enthusiastic crowd. As with much of her less celebrated work, the movie has undergone a thorough revisitation, its subversions at last acknowledged and praised. The film critic Josh Larsen reevaluated In the Cut in a review last fall, writing, “Like many, I misjudged this Jane Campion outlier when it first came out.”
She could have used such sentiments back then. Campion lost interest in getting movies made, as she’d spent too much time pushing back against an industry she perceived as increasingly conservative. In the 18 years between In the Cut and Power of the Dog, she released just one feature film, the acclaimed but small Bright Star, and found greater enjoyment working in indie-driven television with her award-winning series Top of the Lake, starring Elisabeth Moss as a haunted small-town detective. She didn’t know if she’d ever make another movie.
I ask if she’s feeling any déjà vu now—wondering if the attention she’s getting for Power, with the adoring fans and glowing reviews, has brought her back to her Piano days. Campion pauses and her voice goes soft. Shortly after she took The Piano to Cannes, her son Jasper (then less than two weeks old) passed away. “I just couldn’t do anything; I was stunned by the grief experience, and I just couldn’t work,” she says. Her next major appearance wasn’t until 10 months later, when she made a teary acceptance speech at the Oscars. By then, she was a few months pregnant with her daughter, Alice, now 27. She remembers scrambling to find an outfit that’d hide her stomach.
“It’s the most humanizing experience I’ve had,” Campion says of losing a child. “You feel solidarity with everybody else that’s expressing grief. You can never turn your head away from somebody who’s suffering because you really know that it’s a club.” I note that this intense kind of empathy is tangible through all of her films, especially as she and they have evolved. “I really hope so,” Campion replies. “I think most of my work comes from that part of me, which is, I’m not really in control of emotion or anything else. It’s a sort of psyche truth.”
Actors say that Campion is playful, patient, and warm. “When you walk onto her set, you feel incredibly safe and taken care of, and like the story you are telling in the scene that day is the only thing that matters,” says Moss, who’s begun directing herself. “Jane has an incredible ability to create space for the actors on set. That’s the number one thing I learned from her as a director and have taken and used every day I am directing—probably more than any other thing I’ve taken from any director.” Hunter verifies all this for me: “She’s not at all afraid of what she doesn’t know.… And in all of the ‘not knowing’ you also feel like Jane knows. She wants to explore, she wants to go out there and see, ‘What could happen?’ But at the same time, if you fall, you’re not going to die.” Kidman, another lifelong friend of Campion’s who top-lined The Portrait of a Lady, puts it more simply: “I’m just completely wowed by her.”
Campion attributes her skill at working with actors to her mother, who helped her with a role in The Trojan Women back in her school-play days. “I got to experience how she empowered me,” she says. “That was one of the really important senses I had, looking for ways to empower people into their own strengths. Once they get there, they’re flying. They show you things you can’t imagine.”
Thirteen years ago—when Campion made her last movie, Bright Star—no woman had won the directing Oscar. #MeToo had not reached Hollywood. Netflix was better known for competing with Blockbuster for the DVD rental market than for streaming Oscar contenders.
Enough has changed in the intervening years to lure Campion back to making movies. Thomas Savage’s 1967 novel The Power of the Dog—which now includes an afterword by “Brokeback Mountain” author Annie Proulx proclaiming it a hidden Western classic—hinges on the dynamic between Phil Burbank, a macho rancher of a mercilessly cruel bent, and his new sister-in-law, Rose, whose mere presence brings out his vicious side. Rose’s son, Peter, comes to live with them in the story’s back half, at which point the brutal study of human nature kicks into a new gear. Peter arrives determined to protect his mother from Phil’s tormenting but strikes up a heated connection with Phil—two outsiders in a world offering a rigid definition of manhood.
Campion saw the potential for something rich, thorny, and finite, for an honest-to-God film. Netflix offered a budget north of $30 million for her to adapt the book. It’s the only time she’s received such a large commitment in the 25 years since her first post-Piano project, The Portrait of a Lady. The industry was treating her differently. Campion felt different making it too: “There was something going on in me. Maybe it was the #MeToo movement, giving me that extra confidence to stretch, and I think being a bit older. You’ve got this extra bit of wisdom, just being on the planet longer.”
You could call the Power shoot, which took place early in 2020 in rural New Zealand, a kind of victory lap in itself—a legendary filmmaker back home, in command of her craft, with everyone around her in awe. Benedict Cumberbatch, who plays Phil, gives a performance unlike any in his career: repugnant, incandescent, then exquisitely tender. He tells me he’d never felt in “parallel” with a director like he was here; Campion encouraged him to go Method during production, to a degree he’d never experienced. They even did “dream work” together with a Jungian coach, plumbing their subconscious selves as they endeavored to shape the character. Cumberbatch recalls shooting one scene, where Phil rages and screams helplessly, and feeling out of control himself. “Jane was like, ‘Something’s happening, I’m not going to say anything—you just carry on doing what you’re doing,’ ” Cumberbatch recalls. “She gives you the tools to get to feeling like you’re connecting to the person in body and spirit.”
Dunst, who does deeply affecting work as Rose, had been wanting to work with Campion for more than a decade. The experience did not disappoint. “She knows when she’s got it or not, and you trust her because she’s Jane Campion,” she says. “My goal a lot of times was just to make Jane happy. When I didn’t get a note, I was like, ‘Thank you!’ When you work with someone epic like that, you just want to make them proud.” (Cumberbatch, Dunst, Jesse Plemons, and Kodi Smit-McPhee are all Oscar-nominated for their performances in Power.)
For someone who has spoken, worryingly, of being “run over” by capitalism in the past, Campion’s getting into bed with one of the freest spenders on the block might raise eyebrows. Campion says she needed what Netflix offered to make the movie correctly, and no one else came close to that number. “It’s still one of their cheaper films,” she says with a knowing grin, ruminating on the fact that fellow 2021 Netflix Western The Harder They Fall was reportedly made for $90 million. “For a first-time [feature] filmmaker, that’s amazing.”
Netflix has truly invested in The Power of the Dog, at least, and Campion seems to be allowing herself to enjoy the overwhelmingly positive response to the film. In October, she became the first female director to win the prestigious Prix Lumière in Lyon. (Times may be changing, but she’s still the one ending a lot of these dreadful streaks.) “I’m really moved—I’m a New Zealander, we don’t do emotion about ourselves,” she said in her acceptance speech. “I’m going to get arrested when I get home for having a big head.”
A month later, I watched Campion at her Academy Museum retrospective. She could barely take a step at the reception without an attendee stopping her for selfies, or to gush about how much her work has meant to them, or just to parse Power’s delectable twist. Later in the season, she met up with Guillermo del Toro, who told her Power represented a major “leap forward” in her art. Paul Thomas Anderson has cheered the film too. “That really gave me a thrill,” Campion says with a giggle.
For now, Campion looks relieved and energized to be home, taking the whirlwind of her time away into stock. She tells me about the first time she saw The Power of the Dog really “work,” having just refined the final third of the film. The viewing remains vivid for her. She settled into a “pretty nice little cinema,” along with a few collaborators. She watched it all the way through, eventually reaching the ending. She saw that big pan across those enormous hills, signaling the turn to night—to Phil and Peter’s climactic scene in the barn, so heavy and fraught and suffocatingly sexy. Her whole body tensed up. Her feet tingled. This, she realized, was what movies were supposed to do. “I was feeling things I’d never felt before,” she tells me. Never? Not with any of her other films? “No. Never.”
The world felt it too.
HAIR, DAREN BORTHWICK; MAKEUP, PETER BEARD. PRODUCED ON LOCATION BY ARTIST GROUP. PHOTOGRAPHED EXCLUSIVELY FOR V.F. BY JAKE TERREY IN ALEXANDRIA, NEW SOUTH WALES, AUSTRALIA. FOR DETAILS, GO TO VF.COM/CREDITS.
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