The action sometimes seems to proceed according to dream logic, both bewildering and inevitable. There is often someone missing or just out of sight. They are so densely layered with visual metaphor, so flush with archetypes and symbols, that they operate like their own semiotic systems. For another movie, she wrote a scene in which poor, sweet Meg Ryan cradles her sister’s decapitated head.ĭespite the grim realities faced by her characters, her films often resemble allegories or myths - or, actually, dreams. This is a woman who conceived of a television show that deals with incest and pedophilia but set it in the most transcendently beautiful place in the world. She has the drape of fine, silver hair you might associate with a mystic, but everything else about her - the square, chunky black glasses and understated, monochromatic outfits - indicates, aesthetically speaking, what she is: the most decorated female filmmaker alive, an auteur in the lineage of Luis Buñuel, François Truffaut and Pedro Almodóvar.Ĭampion’s work is both ethereal and brutal. She is divorced and a bit skeptical of the institution.) She laughs raucously and frequently, and she inserts impish comments into every conversation in her clipped New Zealand accent. (During our walk, she asked whether I liked being married, really wanting to know.
“They’re keeping secrets from the mind, you know?” We were walking west in Central Park on one of those glowing days in late September that look like the set of some movie - not a Campion movie, maybe a Nora Ephron.Ĭampion tends to seek eye contact, and she is quick to ask fourth-date questions. “Your dreams are inscrutable to yourself for a good reason,” she told me when we met in New York. Whereas I’m dreaming that I can’t quite climb the tree.”Ĭampion was more self-effacing. “Sexual, fantastical, spiritual, just exploding orchids of blood.
“Of course Jane Campion’s dreams are so rich in imagery,” Cumberbatch joked on the phone. Oh, this is certain death, she thought, and she woke up. It pressed forward, toward the vanishing point. But the horse, too frightened and not yet trusting her, wouldn’t listen. As they went farther down the trail, she realized that the path was vanishing into nothing, that the horse’s hooves would inevitably hit an angle too sheer to support their weight. She was riding a black horse, beautiful and skittish, down a steep, narrow pathway along the face of a cliff. Campion normally doesn’t dream much, but soon she began having the same nightmare over and over.
She asked Cumberbatch and Jesse Plemons, who play brothers, to waltz together, to help them learn intimately how the other’s body smelled, felt and moved, visceral qualities that boys who’ve grown up together would know.Ĭampion also tried something new: She went to see a Jungian dream analyst out of Los Angeles, hoping to more deeply connect with Phil’s psychology, and she suggested Cumberbatch do the same. Then she had him write back as Bronco Henry. She asked Cumberbatch to write a letter as Phil to Phil’s dead lover, Bronco Henry. They ate together, cooked together or just sat in rooms, in character, not talking. For “The Power of the Dog,” she gathered the actors for a few weeks to hike, improvise and do exercises. She sent Benedict Cumberbatch - who stars as Phil, a vicious, hypermasculine rancher - to Montana as well, to learn roping, riding, horseshoeing, whittling, banjo and bull-calf castration.īut in rehearsals, her approach tends to be more oblique. She went to visit the ranches in Montana where Thomas Savage, who wrote the novel on which the film is based, grew up. Before she began shooting her new feature, “The Power of the Dog,” she returned again and again to the mountain range in New Zealand she had chosen as a location, checking what the light was like at different times of day, in different weather, across seasons. When directing a film, she works sometimes for years to ready the environment - and herself.
Babcock, likes him.Jane Campion believes in rigorous preparation. Sheffield, which is complicated by the fact that his partner, C.C. There is sexual tension between her and Mr. She becomes quite attached to the children, named Maggie, Brighton, and Grace, and becomes great friends with the butler, Niles. She is mistaken to be applying for the job of nanny to Maxwell's three children and is hired for that purpose. This takes her to the home of Maxwell Sheffield, a rich, English, widowed Broadway producer.
She ends up selling cosmetics in Manhattan. The Nanny: The Complete First Season ( TV) (1993-1994)įran Fine, a whiny, nasal-voiced Jewish woman from Queens, has just been fired from her job and abandoned by her boyfriend.