Inside Jane Campion’s Cinema of

Tenderness and Brutality

In “The Power of the Dog,” her first movie in 12
years, the filmmaker ventures into the American
West — and the inner worlds of cruel, complicated
men.
Everything about Jane Campion indicates what she is: the most decorated female filmmaker alive.Ruven
Afanador for The New York Times

Everything about Jane Campion indicates what she is: the most decorated
female filmmaker alive.Ruven Afanador for The New York Times

Jane Campion believes in rigorous preparation. When directing a film, she

works sometimes for years to ready the environment — and herself.
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 went to visit the ranches in
Montana where Thomas Savage, who wrote the novel on which the film is
based, grew up. She sent Benedict Cumberbatch — who stars as Phil, a
vicious, hypermasculine rancher — to Montana as well, to learn roping,
riding, horseshoeing, whittling, banjo and bull-calf castration.

But in rehearsals, her approach tends to be more oblique. For “The Power
of the Dog,” she gathered the actors for a few weeks to hike, improvise
and do exercises. They ate together, cooked together or just sat in rooms,
in character, not talking. She asked Cumberbatch to write a letter as Phil
to Phil’s dead lover, Bronco Henry. Then she had him write back as Bronco
Henry. 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. Campion
normally doesn’t dream much, but soon she began having the same
nightmare over and over. She was riding a black horse, beautiful and
skittish, down a steep, narrow pathway along the face of a cliff. As they
went farther down the trail, she realized that the path was vanishing into
nothing, that the horse’s hooves would inevitably hit an angle too sheer to
support their weight. We’ve got to back up, she thought. But the horse,
too frightened and not yet trusting her, wouldn’t listen. It pressed forward,
toward the vanishing point.

Oh, this is certain death, she thought, and she woke up.

“Of course Jane Campion’s dreams are so rich in imagery,” Cumberbatch

joked on the phone. “Sexual, fantastical, spiritual, just exploding orchids of
blood. Whereas I’m dreaming that I can’t quite climb the tree.”
Campion was more self-effacing. “Your dreams are inscrutable to yourself
for a good reason,” she told me when we met in New York. “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.

Campion tends to seek eye contact, and she is quick to ask fourth-date
questions. (During our walk, she asked whether I liked being married,
really wanting to know. She is divorced and a bit skeptical of the
institution.) She laughs raucously and frequently, and she inserts impish
comments into every conversation in her clipped New Zealand accent.
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.

Campion’s work is both ethereal and brutal. 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. For another
movie, she wrote a scene in which poor, sweet Meg Ryan cradles her
sister’s decapitated head.

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.
There is often someone missing or just out of sight. The action sometimes
seems to proceed according to dream logic, both bewildering and
inevitable. The films are radiant and even psychedelic in their detail, so
intense in their gaze — at the back of a neck, the twitch of a curtain, the
color of water — that they seem transmitted directly from the
subconscious or directly into the subconscious. They come back to you at
odd times, like a puzzle your mind keeps trying to solve.

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. She started writing it when she
was 31 or 32, an ode to Emily Brontë, a longtime hero. (She told me she
admired Brontë’s “fierce independence” and her ability to create “a
character like Heathcliff out of her imagination, with no experience of men
whatsoever personally.”) In the film, Holly Hunter plays Ada, a mute
Scottish woman who communicates her emotional life by playing her
piano. Ada arrives in New Zealand with her young daughter to marry a
man she has never met. Her husband takes her to live in a forest and sells
her piano. When he learns that she has fallen in love with the piano’s new
owner, he cuts off one of her fingers so she can never play again.

“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. Her films — and her one foray into prestige television, “Top of the
Lake” — have in common a series of traumatized heroines in confrontation
with terror, desire and the sublime. Domestic spaces are full of intimacy
and danger; sex blows life wide open in starshine or devastation; the
threat of violence glimmers around the edges of daily life, irradiating it.
Campion’s work is both ethereal and brutal. Ruven Afanador for The New York Times

While there are consistent themes running through Campion’s work, she
seems resistant to repeating herself. She works only when she wants to,
on the stories she wants to tell, in precisely the way she wants to tell
them. 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.

“The Power of the Dog” is another departure: an American Western, set in

the 1920s. The Western is an unexpected choice for Campion. 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. Much has been made of the fact that it’s also her first project
centered on a male leading actor. (She waved this off. “They obviously
haven’t met Benedict,” she joked.)

Like many of Campion’s films, “The Power of the Dog” dramatizes a clash
between the masculine and the feminine — Phil’s own sense of manliness
is bound up with emotional remoteness and animosity toward softness.
He is a classic American cowboy, skulking around in enormous sheepskin
chaps, though he lacks the instinct for chivalry that’s sometimes a
hallmark of that type. He hates and terrorizes Rose (played by Kirsten
Dunst), 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. The film is full
of inversions and queerness — Phil, it turns out, is a sensualist and
attracted to men, and the boy, it turns out, has more violence in him than
we think.

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. “I couldn’t stop thinking about the themes in the book,”
she told Sofia Coppola onstage at the New York Film Festival this year.
She was also impressed with the opening scene, in which a rancher
castrates a bull. “I just went, Oh, my God. OK, so we’re neutering
masculinity. That’s pretty interesting, right off.”

Even Campion’s softest works have a touch of, as she once described it,
“what was nasty, what isn’t spoken about in life.” In the director’s
commentary for her first feature-length film, “Sweetie,” she describes an
urge that has shaped her oeuvre, one that is on display in new ways in
“The Power of the Dog.” She wanted to make work, she said, about what
“has always been on those margins of what’s acceptable … what we as
wild creatures really are, as distinct from what society wants us to buy
into.”

When she writes, she often sits on the great island of her bed and does
nothing else. One reason she liked the Jungian dream work, she said, is
that the analyst’s language matched some of her own philosophy. “She
says it’s like throwing chum out, seeing what surfaces,” she said. This is
what writing feels like for her. “It’s an amazing moment when you realize
there’s a channel. In my case it was just like sitting down for four hours.
That was it. Something comes to you. You write. You don’t read, you don’t
use the phone, you don’t do anything else, because then the psyche
starts to trust the time.”

“So many writers have an aversion to just sitting down and waiting,” I said.

Campion nodded and then paused. “I think it makes them afraid.”

When she is not working, Campion divides her time between Australia
and New Zealand. 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 drafts by hand into large,
cheap notebooks. Anything more expensive, anything “fancy,” makes her
nervous.

She makes all her notes on paper, which she then stacks into piles and
saves. 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. “I just draw little expressions on their faces, or just the feeling
of the work. I’m thinking about the feeling while I’m drawing.” All directors
have a way of “bringing the work inside,” she said. She takes the drawings
to set as references for the director of photography.
She picked up her habits of careful preparation after overworking herself
so aggressively on one of her first short films that she landed in intensive
care. 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.
She got bronchitis, which worsened the asthma she has had since
childhood, “and then I just couldn’t breathe.” It took most of a year to fully
recover.

“I’m a little bit like a machine,” she said, smiling. “Like, if it can be done, I
will do it. I will do it as best as can be done by me. I can’t stand if I’ve got
an idea how to improve something not to do it.”

Anna Paquin and Holly Hunter in “The Piano.”Everett Collection

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. But Campion knew that if a
seven-minute film wrecked her so completely, she would need a different
way of working. “I thought, God, if anyone finds out I’m in the hospital
trying to make a seven-minute film — it’s actually nine with credits — no
one’s ever, ever going to hire me!”

So she undertook a mission to come down into her body. “I really noticed
that if I got panicky or in my head about things — I don’t know if you’ve
ever had that experience.” She looked at me with a little grin.

“Once or twice,” I said.

She burst out laughing. “You just can’t think at all! It’s just the most
horrible frightening feeling. Your mind is frozen. So, I had to learn to bring
my energy down. Down into the body.” She did yoga every day for about
20 years. Now she meditates an hour most days. She knows she has to
sleep full nights when shooting and have reasonable workdays. She has to
be grounded and relaxed and strong. “It’s really strange having a really
strong will and yet a fragile — ” She paused to look down at her arms and
legs. “These bodies are fragile. And you have to learn to listen. And make
friends with that.”

If as a screenwriter Campion is interested in uncovering what lies hidden

from our conscious minds, as a director she is interested in presence. “If
you’re watching on set and you’re in your head,” she told me, “you can’t
actually feel the impact of what they’re doing, the actors. And you’re the
only person who’s looking from that point of view.” She half-gestured,
opening her palms outward slightly, squaring her shoulders. “You’ve got to
be relaxed, like an audience would be — just relaxed and open. 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.

“I’ve never worked so much in parallel with the director on a project to

create a character,” Cumberbatch said. “I’ve had support before, for sure,
and a great deal of attention and love, but never somebody who wants to
understand — and deeply understand — a character at the same time as
an actor going through his process.”
Benedict Cumberbatch and Jesse Plemons in “The Power of the Dog.”Netflix

“You really are working on your trust relationship between you and the
actors,” Campion told me. “You’re creating a situation where they feel
relaxed and confident that you are with them, that you’re never going to
judge them or go against. You’ll just try in every way to help.”

A result is a quality of unguardedness in the performances so acute it’s

almost painful to watch. In “Bright Star,” for example, Abbie Cornish and
Ben Whishaw, as Fanny Brawne and John Keats, are so brimming with …
something that they can be sitting on camera doing practically nothing
and you are just about brought to tears.

Campion said that she wanted, in that film, to convey to the actors “that
it’s OK to do nothing. 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. “I just felt …
nothing. I felt sort of sick.” So she waited, offering no real notes, no
expression, just having them do little tasks, like write a letter. “No
encouragement,” she said, laughing, “because I kept wanting them to look
for something else.” The actors, confused, would try again and again,
getting first nervous, then frustrated, then bored. Eventually, they would
give up on pleasing her, or doing much of anything, and something would
happen. “I would just wait till I was interested in them, and then go, Oh!
Something true is happening here. I would say: ‘I’m really interested in
what you’re doing right now. Where are you right now?’ And they started
to get it.”

Campion had mentioned she was fascinated by horses, and I suggested

to her that the tactic she was describing with her actors — give no
feedback until they do what you want, and then praise; let them slowly
learn, through comfort and encouragement, what they are supposed to do
— resembles the method many people use to train horses.

She shrugged. “Well, we are animals.”

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. At one point, she takes
Kidman in her arms and rocks her slightly from side to side. Elsewhere, we
see her soothing Shelley Winters, who seems to be somewhere between
panicking and throwing a tantrum. “Will somebody pull my socks up?”
Winters complains, and Campion stoops to do it herself.
Nicole Kidman in “The Portrait of a Lady.”Alamy

In each of our conversations, Campion brought up the subject of

tenderness. “Tenderness is very important to me,” she said, sort of
hesitating.

“Why is that your word,” I asked, maybe the third time it came up.

“Because it is what brings me to my vulnerability, I guess. And I feel like

that’s probably a hard place for me to go to, and it is the place where I feel
most touched by life. I guess it’s the leading edge, you know, of my
experience.”

“Tenderness” is not the first word I think of when I consider Campion’s

work. I cannot shake the image of the title character in her first feature,
“Sweetie,” shoving porcelain horse figurines into her mouth and chewing
them until blood spills out of her smile. But after a while, the tenderness
starts to emerge. 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. Tenderness may not be the first thing you see in a Campion film, but it
is fundamentally what she’s painting with.

This is especially true in “The Power of the Dog,” where tenderness and
brutality amplify each other painfully. 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. Where there is tenderness, something is
unguarded. Tenderness invites a moment of suspense: Care or real hurt
can happen next. Campion’s gift is showing the chaotic mix of wounding
and care in human activity, and how the terrifying moment of being
opened to both possibilities is an experience of the sublime.

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. Phil terrorizes Rose without being anywhere near her.
Strains of his banjo floating down the stairs mock her as she plays the
piano. His gaze, judgment, even the smell of him seems to be everywhere.

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. On one occasion, she whipped Jane until there were welts on her
back. At first, both girls kept silent about how they were treated. “It was
like this secret world, this secret dark world that was parallel to life. She
was with us from when I was about 5 until 10 or 11. And there was just no
getting away from it.”
She paused a moment before continuing. “We were really little, and it was
a lot to carry when you’re really little. But it did make me think, That’s how
I understand the terror of Phil. I would always know where she was in the
house.”

I asked if she or her sister ever told her parents about the abuse.

“Yes, we did.” She has a vivid memory of standing with her sister outside
her parents’ room, getting ready to go in and tell them about the nanny.
She balked at the last minute. “I just can’t bear that they may not do
anything about it. I couldn’t live with that. I could live with — you know …”
She swallowed. “But I couldn’t bear that they would be told and then they
wouldn’t act. I don’t know, I was probably 6 at the time. 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.

Campion’s gift is showing the

chaotic mix of wounding and
care in human activity, and
how the terrifying moment of
being opened to both
possibilities is an experience
of the sublime.
They lived with the nanny for another five or so years, until she died. Anna
and Jane refused to go to her funeral. Over the years, they tried to
convince their parents what it had been like for them, and they were never
quite believed.

Campion describes her parents as loving but fundamentally absent during

her childhood. The Campions were an important couple in New Zealand
theater. They became founders of the first professional touring company
in the country, the New Zealand Players, shortly before Jane was born.
Richard Campion was a director, and Edith was one of the great New
Zealand actresses of her generation. In 1959, she was awarded the M.B.E.
for her theatrical work. 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.

Edith appeared in an early film of Campion’s, “An Angel at My Table.”

(More than two decades later, Campion’s daughter, Alice, had a lead role
in “Top of the Lake.”) Campion remembers her mother as delicate,
sensitive and witty. When her children were young, she turned to writing,
eventually publishing a collection of short stories and a novella. She
encouraged Campion’s creative pursuits, but she was also moody and
remote. 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. What were mothers like?

Campion told me about the day that her mother took her out of school for
a dentist appointment. “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. “I tried to do all sorts of amazing things —
somersaults and handstands, to entertain her, to get her attention — but
she still looked off into the distance. It probably was depression. I
remember she had an egg on her lap, and it just … rolled off.”

There was a time when Campion was so bewildered and persuaded by her
mother’s despair that she told her she would understand if she wanted to
die. “It really scared me to be close to her complete lack of hope,” she told
an interviewer in 1995. 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.

Campion said that feeling vulnerable is harder for her than for most
people: “I associate it with fear.”
“You’re so averse to feeling vulnerable,” I said, “but tenderness is the core
of your work!”

“Well, if it didn’t have much meaning for me, it wouldn’t matter,” she said.
“It’s got power. And really, my attention decides: What do I pay attention
to in the world? Can you fake that, really? Can you really fake attention?
Attention is love.”

In October, I met Campion in Paris. She had just come from the New York
Film Festival and then the Lumière film festival in Lyon, where she received
the Prix Lumière. (In September, she also won the Silver Lion at Venice,
one of the top honors a filmmaker can achieve.) We exchanged emails as
she arrived in Paris. How was Lyon? I asked. “Lyon was a mosh pit where I
became very briefly a rock star!” she wrote. 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. (I
had wanted to watch YouTube together; she demurred.) As we got settled
at our table, I asked her how she was dealing with the outpouring of
emotion from women who seem so invested in successes, and she threw
up her hands. “Defense and denial,” she joked. “I’m a New Zealander; we
don’t do this sort of stuff. It’s something you can go to jail for, thinking too
much of yourself.” She shot me a smile. “I mean, I try to listen to them. To
some extent they’re giving their testimony.” She has spent a long time
being one of the only women at the forefront of her field, a mantle she
took up with ambivalence. (A second female director, Julia Ducournau,
finally received the Palme d’Or this year.) Once, after “The Piano” came
out, a woman working in a pharmacy approached Campion and told her, in
a quivering voice, that seeing the film was the most amazing experience
of her life.

“And I was, like, quipping,” Campion said. “And then I just saw how I hadn’t
received it, and how shattered she looked for not being heard with
respect. And I learned something from her, that she really needed me to
hear it in a better way than I was doing.”

It has gotten easier over the years to feel comfortable with what her work
means to the world. 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.
After Campion visited Proulx during her research for “The Power of the
Dog,” the two kept up their correspondence. “The 60s and 70s can be
pretty good years,” Proulx wrote. “One is still agile, nothing major
crouched on the bedposts at night; and one’s sense of judgment and
understanding is probably at maximum power. You ‘get’ most situations
with a depth and understanding unknown to the more youthful. But some
of the gilt wears off in the 80s and you tend to see the hard rusted iron
under the fancy metals.”

Jane Campion, right, on the set of “The Power of the Dog” in New Zealand.Netflix

Campion, still in her 60s, is in the former state — feeling very much at the
height of her powers. 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.
She is starting a film school in New Zealand, where filmmakers will study
for free under her and a few other friends. (Onstage at the New York Film
Festival, Sofia Coppola volunteered to teach as well.)

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. The museum was collaborating on a joint exhibit with the nearby
Rodin Museum, so there were sculptures from various parts of Rodin’s
career. We stood together for a bit in front of “The Thinker.”

“There’s definitely a brutish quality to the muscularity, isn’t there,” she

said quietly after a minute.

I agreed. “Doesn’t it look like his head is kind of too small for his body?”

“Like a kind of Neanderthal,” she said.

“Exactly.”
“Poor guy. Seems puzzled, like he can’t figure it out.” She chuckled. “It’s
actually quite moving.”

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. She preferred them to the big bronze casts. They were of
children’s faces, or women, emerging from the stone with a hazy,
dreamlike quality. These pieces were so different from Rodin’s more
famous sculptures of men, in which every muscle and vein was
articulated. It was incredible, she thought, taking more pictures, how you
could get that kind of softness out of marble.

Jordan Kisner is the author of the essay collection “Thin Places.” She
last wrote about the scholar and theorist of domestic labor Silvia
Federici. Ruven Afanador is a Colombian-born photographer in New
York known for his black-and-white portraits with a focus on
contrasts. His most recent exhibition was at the National Museum of
Colombia in Bogotá this year.