One of the foremost female directors in the business returns to tell the story of the woman behind John Keats. Jane Campion tells DONALD CLARKEabout taking time out, reading poetry and discovering embroidery
JANE CAMPION knows how to take possession of a room. She claims to be feeling a little drained by jet lag, but she still manages to scatter bushels of busy charisma about the furniture. Tall and chiselled, her long grey hair tied back in a ponytail, Campion stomps over to the air-conditioning unit and begins twirling the dials.
“Is it hot? Are you hot in here?” she asks and, after allowing just enough time for my acquiescent nod, strides off to open the window. “Twenty-six degrees it says. Air conditioning is supposed to keep you cool.”
Even if you weren't aware that Campion was the director of such distinguished films as The Piano, An Angel at My Tableand, now, Bright Star, you would sense that she was a person of some substance. Looking a tad older than her 55 years, she speaks like somebody who expects to be listened to and she demands that every lazy question be clarified.
That’s a good way for a director to be.
The last time we met, shortly before the release of her weird, poorly received US thriller In the Cut, Campion was threatening to retire to a hermitage in her native New Zealand. She intended to eat berries, contemplate the stars and shake the detritus of film-making from her pelt. That was five years ago, but she doesn't look like a person who's spent the last half-decade in a cave.
“No. That didn’t happen,” she laughs. “But I did do a serious retreat into the wilds of New Zealand. I did go into the bush to test my hermithood. I stayed there for four or five days. It was a great adventure: no running water and so on. I felt I could have been at home there. But, you know, it’s awfully nice to talk to people from time to time.”
Nonetheless, she still managed to keep the director’s megaphone at a distance for several years. As she describes it, she wanted to discover if she had done everything she “needed to do in film”. She paid attention to her teenage daughter. She enjoyed reading and reflecting. She drank a lot of coffee. Eventually she happened upon a biography of John Keats and, intrigued by the details of the poet’s romance with Fanny Brawne, a Hampstead neighbour, began musing upon a return to film.
Starring Abbie Cornish as Fanny and Ben Whishaw as Keats, Bright Starmanages to shake off many conventions of the standard literary biopic. For a start, the focus is firmly on Brawne. By spending time examining the heroine's work as a seamstress and clothing designer, Campion subtly comments on the limited outlets for cultural expression available to 18th-century women. Keats's friends either ignore the woman or treat her as an impediment to his creative progress.
"I was always terrified of poetry," Campion explains. "It wasn't poetry that brought me towards this story; it was my ignorance about it. I hit 50 and decided to educate myself about it. I read a biography of Coleridge and then I found Andrew Motion's book on Keats. I could not believe that I hadn't heard of this great love story before. It was like Romeo and Juliet, only it was true."
Featuring gorgeous shots of idyllic meadows shimmering before the nearby London skyline, Bright Stardoes find time to offer visual expressions of Keats's romantic verse. But the film is most notable for its efforts to reclaim Fanny Brawne from those academics and historians who have dismissed her as a frivolous diversion.
“Yeah. There are all these scholars and academics who felt he might have squeezed one more poem out if only he didn’t have that stupid girlfriend – this girlfriend who loved him and who he loved. I doubt that Keats felt that way. It seems to me that she was still one of the great things that happened to him.”
Fanny emerges as another in the series of strong, eccentric, individualistic women around whom the director has constructed her films. The daughter of an actress and a theatre director, Campion attended art college in London and Australia before stumbling into the Australian Film Television and Radio School in the early 1980s.
Her first feature, Sweetie(1989), followed the tribulations of a troubled girl and her uncomprehending family. A year later Campion won new levels of fame with An Angel at My Table, a dramatisation of memoirs by New Zealand author Janet Frame. Then came quasi-mainstream success with The Piano. That strange, spooky film, starring Holly Hunter as a mute 19th-century immigrant, won Campion the Oscar for best original screenplay and assured her a place somewhere near (if not quite at) Hollywood's top table.
It is worth noting that, unlike so much of the Antipodean generation that preceded her, Campion remained in Australasia for the opening act of her career. In the 1960s, the likes of Germaine Greer and Clive James all fled for London as soon as they could afford a ticket. A decade later, as Gough Whitlam’s government brought new energy to Australian culture, film-makers such as Peter Weir, George Miller and Gillian Armstrong felt able to remain in the Southern Hemisphere (for a while at least). Jane followed their example.
“That’s true. But we knew that we would never have been given work if we came to England or America. As people from Australia or New Zealand, we knew that we had a better chance at home. Also, I’d been to arts school in Chelsea and I just felt there was a real confusion about the way forward in England. In Australia and New Zealand we had none of that navel-gazing nonsense. We just went head and did it.”
Moving into short films at the beginning of the 1980s, Campion was swimming in same waters as those directors – Weir, Miller, Bruce Beresford – who managed to establish something a little like an Australian new wave. One imagines this was an exciting time and place to begin flexing your artistic muscles.
“There was a feeling of generosity towards the end of the Gough Whitlam years,” she says. “We had a brilliant film school in Sydney and they trusted the students. We were a bunch of weirdos who were trusted to do what we liked. That would never happen now. Everything inspired us.
"I remember going to see George Miller's Mad Maxand thinking wow! I could never make a biker movie, but the lesson was do what it is you do to the best of your ability."
Campion stayed true to that maxim as she delivered that excellent initial swathe of gems. For a while it seemed she could do no wrong with the critics. Originally made for television, An Angel at My Tablesomehow managed to become an international success on the big screen.
“That amazed me,” she says. “They wanted to put it on at the Sydney Film Festival and I wasn’t keen on the idea. In fact I fought hard to stop them. Then, when it was shown, the projector broke twice. I thought that was a sign. But at the end the response was extraordinary. I had never experienced anything like it.”
In the years after The Piano, however, Campion did lose her way somewhat. Her adaptation of The Portrait of a Ladymanaged to make a penny-dreadful melodrama out of Henry James's famously dense psychological novel. Holy Smoke, a tale of indoctrination featuring Harvey Keitel in a dress, was a confused muddle, and In the Cut, a psycho-sexual thriller starring Meg Ryan, seemed positively deranged.
Perhaps the few years in the wilderness have done Jane Campion some good. Though imperfect in many ways, Bright Starlooks like the work of an auteur back in firm control of her material. Unlike Holy Smokeor In the Cut, the picture is very acute and precise in its focus.
Campion seems to believe that the project has had a positive effect on her own life. Inspired by Fanny Brawne, she has even taken to the art of embroidery.
“You look at the work they did and you see the detail and the time it took. It’s actually very moving. You look at these stitches and you realise that, for these women, that was the scope of their world. I did start sewing pillowcases and so forth for friends. It’s very soothing.”
Yet Jane Campion – a garrulous person of no small ambition – was never going to be satisfied with such a limited scope. Bright Starhas brought her back into the world. Now let's see what that world makes of it.
“Yeah, you never know what wave you’ll catch – a small swell or a big fat one that will carry you all the way to the shore.”
What an appropriate metaphor for someone born under the Southern Cross.
Bright Staropens next Friday
