RIDE WITH THE DEVIL
It’s been a dozen years since Jane Campion last directed a feature film, the sensuous John Keats biopic Bright Star. Since then, she created and oversaw two seasons of the brilliant Kiwi murder-mystery Top Of The Lake, but even she began to “reminisce” about making another film. “Two hours… I think it’s such a beautiful length to communicate something,” she says. “There’s such a sort of discipline and rigour to it. So I yearned for the idea of doing something carefully and beautifully again.”
It’s day one of the Venice Film Festival, and the silverhaired Campion is sitting with on the sun-drenched Excelsior Hotel terrace. By the eleventh day, she will be back on the Lido to claim the Silver Lion for Best Director for , an exquisite odyssey to rival even her Cannes-winning masterpiece . Adapted from Thomas Savage’s 1967 novel, it’s a 1920s Montana-set tale of two cattle-rancher brothers and the woman who comes between them.
