Los Angeles Times

How Jane Campion is handling ‘Power of the Dog’ accolades and why she feels less alone

Director Jane Campion accepts The Irving M. Levin Award for Film Direction at the 2021 SFFILM Awards Night at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts on Dec. 6, 2021, in San Francisco.

LOS ANGELES — Jane Campion is sitting cross-legged on a yoga mat in the bedroom of her Sydney, Australia, home in late February. Barefoot, wearing faded jeans, she rotates her laptop 360 degrees to give me the nickel tour before returning her laptop’s camera to the perfectly framed background she has chosen — an immense painting of kiwis by New Zealand artist Bill Hammond.

This is Campion’s workspace, more often than not, the place where, reclining on her bed, she’ll open up a plain, high school notebook (“those leather-bound ones give me the creeps,” she says, “like, what you’re writing is too important, so you can’t make mistakes”) and take pleasure in letting her imagination roam and see what comes from it. If she likes what she wrote, she’ll revise it and send it to an assistant who will type

You’re reading a preview, subscribe to read more.

More from Los Angeles Times

Los Angeles Times7 min read
Indie Creatures To The Core, David And Nathan Zellner Cut Their Own Path Through The Wild
A family makes their way through a woodland forest, eventually stopping to set up camp. They have something to eat, go to sleep and then get up to do it all over again. Except this isn't a family on a wilderness getaway. It's a group of shaggy, mythi
Los Angeles Times7 min read
In Ukraine's Old Imperial City, Pastel Palaces Are In Jeopardy, But Black Humor Survives
ODESA, Ukraine — On a cool spring morning, as water-washed light bathed pastel palaces in the old imperial city of Odesa, the thunder of yet another Russian missile strike filled the air. That March 6 blast came within a few hundred yards of a convoy
Los Angeles Times2 min read
Kendrick Lamar Responds To Drake In New Diss Track 'Euphoria'
LOS ANGELES — Kendrick Lamar is having his say. Again. A week and a half after Drake dropped two songs in which he insulted the Compton-born rapper — diss tracks Drake released after Lamar attacked him last month in the song "Like That" — Lamar retur

Related Books & Audiobooks