Jane Campion; All Fire

Cosmopolitan, France

November 1999

He had come to Cannes to talk about "Bad Lieutenant", exactly one year before "The Piano". He was gracious, nothing more, until Jane Campion's name landed in the conversation. Rumor was that he was filming with the genius director of "Sweetie" and "An Angel at my table" (?). Suddenly his face lit up: "Jane Campion is a goddess!" declared an ecstatic Harvey Keitel.

She laughs, a little embarrassed, when someone tells her this love declaration by the one who is considered the real tough guy of American movies.

Her fiery sari, enhanced with golden threads, hits you like a slap in the face on this foggy Paris morning. Jane Campion talks about "Holy Smoke", her fifth movie, with a maternal tone: "It's a wild child, I have to protect him, make sure that he doesn't lose his bad manners". A concern that will comfort old fans, a little shaken by the unexpected formality of "Portrait of a Lady". Especially disappointed by the absence of notorious bad manners which gave all their strength to early Jane Campion movies: the crazy sis in "Sweetie" naked in the mud (but we still wonder who the craziest of the two was), the magnificent roaming and hard headedness of the writer Janet Frame, without forgetting Ida, deaf by choice, hard working student, and her dog whom was greedily licking a palm at the same moment when Harvey Keitel the teacher put his head under her dress. "When my sister saw the movie she cried out in horror and told me I was revolting.

Then, with "Portrait of a Lady", we thought we had lost Jane Campion and her bad girl obsessions. She who knew how to manipulate our cortexes where it bothers us the most, or to take us to territories that we know just too well and which existence we'd like to forget. Those disgusting phantasms, forgotten with care, hidden with guilt, that she keeps praising qualities of. "Sleeping people make me sad. I like people who ask questions, who are looking for something. I'm not interested in telling the story of an ideal beautiful young girl who has no problems. Simply because this young girl is a creation of the mind. She doesn't exist." The English adjective "weird" is the best to qualify her taste of the bizarre and/or disturbing. But, to the contrary of a David Cronenberg, as an example, Jane Campion is never morbid. Her movies like the general human type, especially women. Without making her either one of those directors, active in a stupid evangelism which would systematically give the bad parts to men. No Jane Campion is active in sensitivity. She gives beautiful parts to women by showing them like they are, for real. Of course, it can get on your nerves and can even be disturbing, at first. Then she reassures us and takes us nicely by the hand to make us finally accept what we are, not perfect, capable of mistakes, sometimes even lost, to come to the surface again just by being ourselves. It's true more than ever with "Holy Smoke", her fifth movie, written with her sister.

It is an idea that came to her in a plane bringing her back from India. The story of a young girl traveling to India, with her best friend, who falls for the charm of a guru. Ruth is mad, charmed, mystified, in other words, she has fallen in the hands of a cult, at least that's what her friend says, back in Australia. Something has to be done. Her parents decide to call a professional deprogrammer, once the girl is brought back home by the excuse that her father is very ill. It's in this head to head, between Ruth and the deprogrammer, that the Jane Campion movie takes off to a more intriguing and "campion-like" path. The story of the cult is closed and the movie focuses on the strong arm between a very young and very beautiful girl, and a mature man, sure of his charm, whose job is to turn the world over.

"It's a story about power, of course. OK, men lead the world, we can't deny it but they can't control what's in my heart. One is often saddened seeing friends fall for impossible people. One can try to understand what happened, but there just seems to be no valid reason. This mystery is precisely what interests me in love." We can guess that Jane Campion will push the limits of this strange adventure between a professional seducer, who has everything which moves falling for him, and a young girl full of the certitudes of her tender age. To realize this, the director chose the best actors: Harvey Keitel and Kate Winslet. About Harvey Keitel she says: "He's a real tough guy, the bravest and cutest there is. He has a very macho side and a very feminine one at the same time. He's just got it. And above all, Harvey is a very sexy man."

As to Kate Winslet one can only admire her determination to be an actress above everything, even though after "Titanic" she could have calmly settled to be Rose movie after movie. "You know", explains Jane Campion, "most young female actresses are asking to work on powerful parts. Kate is scared of nothing, that's her motto. If I were her, I would be scared. One day on the set, I asked her what she was scared of in life and she answered: 'Honestly, I can't see anything.' I insisted, 'And sharks, Kate? Are you afraid of sharks?', 'It depends she replied.'" Jane Campion, for one, is not scared to say that she admires these characters because they go to the end of their voyage.

A voyage she'd never make, "I would be too scared. Through my movies and my heroes, I have many lives at the same time, I inherited Ida's hard headedness, sometimes I wanted to slip like Sweetie because I was feeling so bad, but I come out of it with one dominating feeling: compassion. I also gain an open mindedness and comprehension."

Every movie of Jane Campion has an autobiographical part. Maybe that's how you recognize an authentic author, this way to inject art into a universe. Seeing her curriculum vitae, you will say without a doubt that this girl was born to make movies: her father being a theater director and her mother an actress. And a childhood at the end of the world, in Wellington, in this New Zealand land of Maoris and volcanoes where she saw the light of day in 1954. A childhood free, bordered by parents, nuts about their work, but considering movies a minor art. The family moves to Sydney, and Jane, who doesn't really know what she wants to do, takes a psychology major, then anthropology, followed by Art, where she thinks a while about becoming a painter (seeing this biographical detail makes her use of beautiful images, which define her movies, less surprising). This is precisely when her movie button gets pressed by a little manual explaining how a Super 8 camera works. In 1975 she applies to the Film and TV School of Sydney and realizes her first short film which she still considers today to be her best movie, the only one she is proud of.

Without taking away from her talent one has to point out that Jane Campion comes out at the right time. In the middle of the 70ies, Australian moves had indeed good wind: George Miller's "Mad Max" already had the success we all know and there was Peter Weir too. In one word, the economic climate was good. In 1986, Pierre Rissient, emissary of the Cannes movie festival and connoisseur of Australian movies chose Jane Campion's first three short movies. Her talent does not let her down and she wins the golden camera for "Peel" already a weird family story. In 1989, she comes back with "Sweetie" and wins the silver lion in Venice for "An angel at my table", Janet Frame's biography, one of her favorite writers, the Jane Campion way. Finally in 1993 it's the consecration and the golden leaf for "The Piano". Nice long string of awards.

She says that the character Ruth woke her up: "She reminded me what kind of young girl I was. Like her, I had experiences with men older than me and like her I had no idea of what was happening to me. I was flattered, but I didn't understand anything. Today I tell myself, if men of my age put as much energy into seducing women of their age, they would probably win in rediscovering who they really are themselves. Generally, like Ruth, I hated hypocrisy. Today, I am more mature, I learned about the benefits of compromise. But this passion of honesty and justice that young people have,0 we have to respect it because it helps us to stay honest and to always want more and help those who suffer. Today, I want to work with teenagers and I am planning on working on a script-writing class this year. Not because I suddenly discovered the teacher in me but because I think it's essential to let your creativity speak." Decidedly, Jane Campion is an ally you shouldn't forget. Because she understands us down to the letter: she takes us with it. To make it short, she's a friend.