Jane Campion
Late in 2017, Jane Campion, one of the most celebrated directors in cinema history, was addressing an industry conference in her hometown, Wellington. The 63-year-old spoke of Hollywood’s erupting sexual-harassment scandal, Campion having worked – and fallen out – with infamous producer Harvey Weinstein during the making of Holy Smoke! (1999). Dame Jane, as she’s hailed in New Zealand, called the ongoing scandals a ‘fairytale time’, celebrating the fact that the movie biz’s old-boys’- network was falling apart before our very eyes. ‘Women are being believed and the men fired. This is breathtaking. I have never seen anything like this solidarity and call to action in my life,’ Campion said. ‘The more we speak out, the less it will happen.’
Campion has long been one of the world’s most visible, celebrated female filmmakers, but also one of its most outspoken. In 1990, she said: ‘To deny women directors, as I suspect is happening in the States, is to deny the feminine vision.’ Throughout her career – from her oddball feature debut, Sweetie (1989), to the Oscar-winning triumph The Piano (1993), the critically-reviled-then-critically-revived serial-killer film In the Cut (2003) and her beloved TV series, Top of the Lake and Top of the Lake: China Girl – she has made films of a distinctly feminine vision, her works standing out in a perennially macho movie world. ‘Psychologically, women are forced to look at the world through men’s eyes,’ Campion has said.
I wanted to put the other point of view: what it felt like to be a woman expressing yourself, being free, doing your human stuff in what is a pretty patriarchal society.
Making films, the work of directing, has little to do with gender, she has offered. ‘But women are going to tell different stories – there would be many more stories in the world if women were making more films.’
Campion was born in Waikanae, north of Wellington, in 1954. Her mother was an actor, and her father, a stage director, Campion growing up in the world of the theatre. Her love of cinema flowered early: ‘Film-makers were my companions and they helped me grow up,’ she has recounted. ‘I was so inspired. [Luis] Buñuel, [Wim] Wenders, [John] Cassavetes: they made me feel connected to the world.’ Yet, initially, she didn’t throw herself into filmmaking – instead travelling through Europe, attending Chelsea Art School in London as a painter. The hold of the patriarchy was, in the 1970s, still strong. ‘I just thought, in the most unconscious fashion, that women don’t have those sorts of careers,’ admits Campion, ‘[that] if you’re a talented woman you support a talented man.’
It was while studying at the Sydney College of the Arts that she finally made her first short film, (1980), a black comedy about a family dealing with the arrest of the father for child molestation. While studying at the Australian Film Television and Radio School in Sydney, Campion made her second short, (1982), another study of family dynamics that would, eventually, win the Palme d’Or for Best Short Film at the 1986 Cannes Film Festival. It marked the start of her long-running presence at Cannes. In 1993, her third feature, , won the Palme d’Or, the festival’s highest honour, Campion becoming the first ever – and thus far, only – female director to win the award (which, even then, she shared with China’s Chen Kaige, for ). In 2017, she returned to Cannes not with her latest feature film but a TV show, . It was the seventieth edition of the festival, and when there was an on-stage celebration of the filmmakers who’d previously won the Palme d’Or, the visual was glaring: Campion, surrounded by a sea of male auteurs. ‘Too long! Twenty-four years!’ she said, at Cannes, of her lone place in this lineage. ‘And before that, there was no one. It’s insane.’
