Before she began shooting her new feature, “The Power of the Dog,” she returned again and again to the mountain range in New Zealand she had chosen as a location, checking what the light was like at different times of day, in different weather, across seasons.
She asked Cumberbatch and Jesse Plemons, who play brothers, to waltz together, to help them learn intimately how the other’s body smelled, felt and moved, visceral qualities that boys who’ve grown up together would know.
Campion also tried something new: She went to see a Jungian dream analyst out of Los Angeles, hoping to more deeply connect with Phil’s psychology, and she suggested Cumberbatch do the same.
“Of course Jane Campion’s dreams are so rich in imagery,” Cumberbatch joked on the phone.
“They’re keeping secrets from the mind, you know?” We were walking west in Central Park on one of those glowing days in late September that look like the set of some movie — not a Campion movie, maybe a Nora Ephron.
She has the drape of fine, silver hair you might associate with a mystic, but everything else about her — the square, chunky black glasses and understated, monochromatic outfits — indicates, aesthetically speaking, what she is: the most decorated female filmmaker alive, an auteur in the lineage of Luis Buñuel, François Truffaut and Pedro Almodóvar.
This is a woman who conceived of a television show that deals with incest and pedophilia but set it in the most transcendently beautiful place in the world.
Despite the grim realities faced by her characters, her films often resemble allegories or myths — or, actually, dreams. They are so densely layered with visual metaphor, so flush with archetypes and symbols, that they operate like their own semiotic systems. A cat is never just a cat.
Campion is probably best known for “The Piano,” from 1993, for which she was the first woman to win the Palme d’Or at Cannes and the second female director to be nominated for an Academy Award; the film also won her the Oscar for best original screenplay.
“The Piano” offers a blueprint to Campion’s creative preoccupations: the feminine confronting the masculine in exchanges marked by both violence and desire; the use of landscape to evoke psychological states; mothers and daughters; family units struggling with feelings of love, alienation and betrayal.
After “The Piano,” Campion made the sexual, somewhat campy “Holy Smoke!” before moving on to an experimental, psychological adaptation of Henry James’s “The Portrait of a Lady.” Her next two films after that were “In the Cut,” a gory, erotic thriller about a woman who starts sleeping with a cop she begins to suspect is serially murdering and dismembering women, and “Bright Star,” a film about Fanny Brawne and John Keats that is pure Romanticism.
Not because it’s an archetypally masculine film genre — Campion has often been the lone woman in male-dominated spaces — but because it’s her first feature in which the protagonist is the violent figure, as opposed to the violated.
He hates and terrorizes Rose , the sensitive woman his brother has married and brought to live in their shared home, as well as her son, an excruciatingly willowy, delicate teenager whose walk alone is an affront to the ranch hands.
Campion read Savage’s “The Power of the Dog,” which was published in 1967, for fun, not thinking initially of adapting it for film, but the story stayed with her.
One reason she liked the Jungian dream work, she said, is that the analyst’s language matched some of her own philosophy.
She likes walking, especially walking tours, as well as the Brontës, the short stories of Lucia Berlin and YouTube, where she has spent more time than she wants to specify.
She likes to draw and storyboard while she’s thinking through a scene — she studied painting at art school, in her 20s, before switching to filmmaking.
She had been staying up all night to prepare for the next day’s shoot, working long days and existing in a more or less constant state of stress.
I will do it as best as can be done by me.
The student film that made her sick, “Peel,” was eventually screened at Cannes, where it won the Palme d’Or for best short film, making Campion the first New Zealander to win that distinction.
“It’s really strange having a really strong will and yet a fragile — ” She paused to look down at her arms and legs.
You’ve just got to watch and then figure, Where’s my attention? If my attention wanders, I know it didn’t work.” Without being calm, focused and in the moment with the actors performing, she can’t do what she sees as her primary job, which is to sense whether the moment feels right.
“You really are working on your trust relationship between you and the actors,” Campion told me.
A result is a quality of unguardedness in the performances so acute it’s almost painful to watch.
That that’s presence, and that’s actually richer than all the pretending in the world.” She described how all the actors came to rehearsal with their pretty accents and period-piece formality.
A documentary about the making of “The Portrait of a Lady” shows Campion speaking softly to a frustrated, weeping Nicole Kidman as they work through an emotionally fraught scene.
“Because it is what brings me to my vulnerability, I guess.
It’s a bit like the experience of looking for a long time at a portrait and then realizing, as you look, that the reason the portrait makes you feel so much is the way the painter worked with the negative space, the shadows, the things you don’t immediately know you’re looking at.
There’s the castration, the cruelty, the extremity of suffering, but there’s also the gentle way a teenage boy’s hands shape the paper flowers he likes to make; Dunst’s trembling lip and the soft way she dances with her husband in the sunset on the day of their marriage; the nakedly sensual, gentle scene of Phil lying in the tall grass, communing with a lost lover by trailing the dead man’s scarf so that it caresses his face and body; the way he begins to make room for the boy whose paper flowers he mocked.
One of the eerier achievements of “The Power of the Dog” is how precisely it captures the way the fear of violence can seep throughout a house, and a life.
Campion didn’t realize the depth of her personal connection to the material until late in the process — “a lot later,” she said, “until I remembered about some stuff in my own childhood.” When she and her sister, Anna, were young, and their brother was a newborn, their parents hired a nanny, “a really disturbed woman,” who abused and terrorized them.
“We were really little, and it was a lot to carry when you’re really little.
I feel really bad now that I didn’t support her, but that was the reason.” Anna went in alone and came out a few minutes later, shaking her head.
Over the years, they tried to convince their parents what it had been like for them, and they were never quite believed.
But it was a troubled household — Richard was engaged in a series of affairs, and Edith suffered from depression, which led her to multiple suicide attempts and several stays in institutions throughout her adult life.
When Campion was little and visited friends’ houses, she would interview the mothers, trying to get a sense of their schedules, their habits, what they did.
“We didn’t do very many things by ourselves together, so I was very excited to show her where I hung my coat.” After the dentist, they had a picnic in a park, and Campion could sense that her mother’s mind was elsewhere.
At university, she decided to study structural anthropology, examining the ways humans use myth and social structures to resolve the fundamental oppositions of existence: life and death, light and darkness.
“Well, if it didn’t have much meaning for me, it wouldn’t matter,” she said.
There were a huge number of women at the festival, many of whom came, it seemed, because they wanted to see a female filmmaker awarded the Prix Lumière for the first time.
Our plan was to have a long lunch and then go to the Picasso Museum.
“And I was, like, quipping,” Campion said.
She pulled up an email from one of her own heroes, Annie Proulx, who wrote an afterword to a 2001 edition of Savage’s novel.
She doesn’t know if she’ll make another film, but for the first time in a while she feels energized and inspired to keep working.
After lunch, we zipped around the Picasso Museum for half an hour while she waited for a friend and his week-old baby, whom she was eager to meet.
She had been showing me photos of a few of the marble Rodin sculptures she admired, and she pulled me over to look at a few similar pieces on display nearby.