Becoming Jane

The week before we met, Jane Campion, publicising her new film Bright Star at the Cannes Festival, grumbled about the "old boy network" of the Hollywood studios, lamented the lack of opportunities for female directors and declared with righteous gynocratic outrage: "After all, women did give birth to the whole world!"

When I read the remark, I crossed my legs in self-preserving alarm. Was I due to interview Gaia, Magna Mater, the antipodean incarnation of Mother Earth? Even Harvey Keitel, cast by Campion as a tattooed wild man in The Piano and a sexually predatory guru in Holy Smoke, once admitted to a certain superstitious dread when discussing her: "Jane Campion is a goddess and I'm a mere mortal. I fear being struck by lightning bolts." Keitel later diplomatically muted his account of the weather she generates and called her "a warm breeze, at play".

Waiting for Campion in a London hotel suite, I listen for rumblings of thunder next door, where the divinity was being photographed. I needn't have worried. She breezes in playfully, just as in Keitel's description, and grimaces about the ordeal of having to be scrutinised by someone's camera: "I always come out looking like an albino gorilla."

In person, Campion is neither gorilla nor goddess. The breeze derives from her quirky humour and the mercurial play of expression on her face; her greying hair and her black clothes suggest severity, but the woman herself is a riot of frank, flushed emotion. "I found myself sobbing," she says about reading John Keats' letters to Hampstead seamstress Fanny Brawne, on which Bright Star is based. A minute later, Campion suppresses a scream as she remembers the delays on the film's set as wardrobe assistants fiddled with the Regency bows and hooked bodices worn by her cast: "It was like being in casualty; there was always another fashion emergency being wheeled in. I yelled, 'Just use Velcro!"' She lets loose a peal of hilarity that Keitel might have called Olympian. "Oh, I love a tantrum," she admits.

Campion's heroines are adventurers whose self-discovery sets them at odds with conventional reality. Sweetie is about a fat fantasist who comically terrorises her suburban Sydney family, An Angel at My Table about the painful growing-up of eccentric New Zealand writer Janet Frame.

In The Piano, a colonial wife in 19th century New Zealand preserves her autonomy by speaking only through the music she plays, while The Portrait of a Lady shows an American heiress being captured and destroyed by old, corrupt Europe. In Holy Smoke, a young woman who finds enlightenment in an Indian cult is vindictively de-programmed, normalised by force.

Bright Star, nominally about Keats, is an addition to her portraits of ladies, women and girls. Its centre is Fanny Brawne, regarded by many Keats biographers as a minx who trifled with the dying poet but seen by Campion as one of the 19th century's unsung female martyrs, able to express herself only through her needlework. "She had to be content," Campion says, "with a life made up of very small things. Back then, women just waited for men and sewed or mended while they were doing so. I got myself into the mentality by learning to embroider pillow slips."

The film's triumph is to make Fanny's demurely stoical routine more moving than the agony of the tubercular Keats, played with raw sensitivity by Ben Whishaw; its study of thoughts that go unvoiced and desires that are never satisfied made me understand what Keats meant when he said that he believed in "the holiness of the heart's affections".

The domestic interiors of Bright Star are monastic cells for the women imprisoned in them. Outside, the light-suffused landscapes seem to pulse.

"I was thinking of Monet's haystacks," says Campion. "They're just lumps, but they have the sun inside them, they vibrate. Images like that can't help but be moving."

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Campion is the most emotionally generous of filmmakers. The opening shot of An Angel at My Table is her primal scene and it coaxes each of us to disinter our earliest memories. The camera looks up at a looming shadow, an indistinct form with the sun behind it. The shape rocks to and fro, then leans down; it extends arms that might belong to a seraph compassionately embracing the world. Lying on grass as pristinely green as that in Eden, a baby stares at this figure that bends down from the sky. A maternal voice says: "Come on, darling, come on!"

Next we see the baby's feet, tottering with brave independence through the grass. This is how Campion operates - protecting, encouraging, then retiring into invisibility to watch her dependents take their first steps.

Hence her skill at directing children. Anna Paquin won an Oscar for her astonishing performance as Holly Hunter's manipulative daughter in The Piano; Edie Martin, with no experience of acting, is even more touching and truthful as Fanny's wide-eyed young sister, Toots, in Bright Star.

"She was wonderful," says Campion, "but because she was such a baby she got frightened, she'd say she had tummy aches. I calmed her down by showing her how to create a bubble for herself. It's easy; you stretch out your arms and that excludes all the people who are making you nervous. My job was just to help her to relax and be herself. I told her to forget about the camera, then I left her alone."

Directing Abbie Cornish as Fanny, Campion played the mother who resigns herself to an offspring's newfound freedom and cuts the cord. "Abbie bonded with Fanny straight away and if I disagreed about something she'd insist she knew better. So I just said, 'Okay, the character's yours.' I suppose some men would be allowing in the way I am, but Abbie told me she'd never had this kind of empathetic connection with a male director. For me, being a director is about watching, not about telling people what to do. Or maybe it's like being a mirror; if they didn't have me to look at, they wouldn't be able to put the make-up on."

A documentary on the DVD of The Portrait of a Lady shows how Campion patiently mothers her cast. Nicole Kidman, distressed during a scene of marital strife with the scary John Malkovich, is soothed in a whispered confabulation, with Campion drying her tears. When the raddled, querulous Shelley Winters seems to forget what film she's in, Campion is as patient and tactful as if she were taking care of an elderly relative with dementia.

"Performers are so vulnerable. They're frightened of humiliation, sure their work will be crap. I try to make an environment where it's warm, where it's okay to fail - a kind of home, I suppose."

Campion's 14-year-old daughter, Alice, serves as her household muse, a touchstone of veracity like the ingenuous, trusting Toots; she was almost an unofficial consultant on Bright Star. "Keats didn't keep Fanny's letters, so when I was writing the script I wondered how I'd be able to get her voice. Whenever I was unsure, I thought, 'How would Alice react?' She has the same kind of personality, always flying off, fantastic emotional ups and downs, yet very tender and kind under it all. I'll show you, we should get her in here." She strides into the adjoining room to collar Alice, who accompanies her everywhere.

Following some mumbled negotiations, she returns alone, and recites the lament of parents everywhere: "Alice can't come, she says she's busy. Actually, she's on the phone."

With more seasoned performers, Campion adopts the shorthand of suburban housewives who swap recipes over the back fence. Kerry Fox, so heart-wrenching as the bewildered adolescent in An Angel at My Table, has graduated after two decades to the status of wise matriarch and plays Fanny's mother.

"I've known Kerry so long that I can just dial her up. It's like baking a cake: I'll say, 'That needs to go on the back burner for 45 minutes at 300C' and the result is always perfect."

The culinary metaphor is revealing. Along with the usual battalion of gaffers, grips, best boys, propsmen, crowd marshals, trainee runners and suppliers of artificial snow, the credits of Bright Star list a home economist, the gloriously named Katharine Tidy, who ensured that the pots and pans in the Regency kitchens were authentic.

"I'm a slow cooker," Campion adds, sustaining the analogy. "I took four years off after In the Cut because I wanted to see who I'd be without work. I even tried being a hermit in the wilderness in New Zealand. I stayed in a warden's hut 2 hours off the Routeburn Track through the fiords on the South Island. It was early winter, so there was no electricity or running water. I lasted about five days!"

Preparing to direct The Piano, Campion rehearsed unbossy, non-belligerent behaviour with the second-unit director, Colin Englert, Alice's father, to whom she was then married. Over the years, she has found ways of communicating that rely more on sympathy and semaphore than on analytical dissection. "What Keats wrote about negative capability was very helpful - it explained the way I work, staying in the mystery, not intellectualising.

"That's how it was with Ben Whishaw; we didn't talk, we kept the head out of it. I used a kind of sign language to show him what I wanted. It doesn't always come across. I once had an actor say to me, 'Jane, can you please use verbs?' That night I wrote down a list of verbs that might come in handy on the set when I needed to explain myself. It can be frustrating, but I'm not a verbal person."

Was that, I wonder, a disqualification for making a film about a poet?

Campion laughs or, rather, guffaws in her boisterous, self-mocking way.

"Well, Janet Frame's a writer, though in my film you only see her writing in the last minute! And Meg Ryan's character in In the Cut is a creative writing teacher. But that stumped me: I thought, 'I just don't know anything about this.' On the way to work, she reads the poems pasted up above the seats on the New York subway and I realised I didn't understand poetry either. So just to create a diversion and a delay, I picked up a biography of Keats. That's where I found the answer; he said he wanted a life of sensations, not thoughts, and I understood that I was trying to photograph sensations.

"That came back to me when I was writing Bright Star at this holiday bach I have in Australia. I took my flask of coffee out to the paddock and I was reading Keats' poems when a horse sidled up and very quietly stuck its nose in the bag I had beside me, to see if there was anything worth eating. It was so delicate, it took such care not to disturb me or damage the bag. I just froze as this enormous, strong creature nuzzled me and tried to work out what I was doing and whether I had anything to give it. Well, you can see that I'm still a country girl!"

It was a truly Keatsian moment, like the passages in his letters or poems when he watches an owl or a hare and speculates about their feelings and the consciousnesses inside their fragile heads. The cast of Bright Star includes a cat, so alert and slyly intelligent that I wonder whether it had an agent, and Whishaw's Keats is equally feline. "When I saw him," Campion says, "I thought, 'Oh you're beautiful, like a cat.' He had the wrong colouring for Keats, he's not blond, but I couldn't alter that. You wouldn't dye a cat's fur!"

The epiphany with the horse clarified the challenge Campion faced. She had, she tells me, "to make that tenderness visible on film - but how?"

Action is the hormonal fuel of films made for and by men: we watch Matt Damon running, Jason Statham driving cars, Tom Cruise jumping out of planes. Campion, for all her grounding in physical sensation, has more abstract concerns. She asks questions like those with which Keitel confronts Kate Winslet in Holy Smoke: "Why do people believe in God? Why do they believe they're in love?"

Tantalised by such speculations, she often eliminates action altogether. An Angel at My Table skips Janet Frame's suicide attempt, In the Cut elides the climax when the heroine kills the cop who menaces her, and Bright Star leaves out Keats' death, making Fanny's response to the news the emotional climax of its story.

Campion is interested in images, not events, and at her finest she composes a pantheistic poetry that is made of light. The drowning of Holly Hunter's piano is the best-known example, while In the Cut begins with a petal shower in a Manhattan spring, miming the defloration that is the film's subject. "That just happened. The wind picked up and we were quick enough to film the blossom falling. We couldn't credit our luck."

There's a similar but gentler moment in Bright Star, when a fluttering curtain suggests the respiration of nature, briefly agitating the closeted, corseted Brawne house. "I was desperate for that to happen, but I refused to use a wind machine. And the air outside was so still. We got sick of waiting and shot it anyway - and then, just at the right moment, the curtain quivered. I seem to be good with winds, even though I wouldn't pretend to be directing them."

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I remember Keitel's description of Campion as a friskily spontaneous breeze. "I'm someone who loves to play," she says. "I make films so I can have fun with the characters." At the very least, she is a breath of fresh air, reinventing an art staled by commercial cynicism.

During our conversation, she describes herself as "a visual person". But New Zealanders are modest to a fault and I'd prefer to call Campion a visionary.

On the set of Bright Star, she told Whishaw that for her poetry means "openness to the divine"; her films open us all to that possibility that such a realm might exist. Observer

Bright Star opens in New Zealand on January 21.

JANE CAMPION

1954 Born in Wellington,
1975 Graduates with a BA in Anthropology from Victoria University
1979 Studies painting at Sydney College of the Arts
1981 Enrols in the Australian Film, Television and Radio School
1992 Marries Colin Englert, with whom she has one child, Alice, in 1994

Career

1982 Directs the short film Peel, awarded the Palme D'Or at Cannes in 1986
1983 Wins an AFI award for her short Passionless Moments
1989 Directs her debut feature, Sweetie, which wins three Australian Critics Awards
1990 An Angel At My Table wins a slew of international awards
1993 Wins the Palme D'Or at Cannes and three Oscars for The Piano
1996 Directs The Portrait of a Lady
1999 Co-writes Holy Smoke! with her sister, Anna
2003 Writes and directs In the Cut
2009 Writes and directs Bright Star

She says: "I'm not committed to niceness. I'm committed to seeing what's there."

They say: "It's her best movie. I got caught up in the seriousness of the poetry, and I don't mind the chaste stuff." Quentin Tarantino on Bright Star