Page 12 - 23_Bafta ACADEMY_Om Puri_ok

academy profile
fear and desire
Jane Campion describes her latest film In The Cut as “hot noir”. Marianne Gray takes the pulse.
10
“It is a film
with dark-
ness around
it but there
is a lot of
affection and
a lot of love.
We wanted
the primary
feeling to be
rife with the
sensuality of
a hot
summer...”
In 1996 I read the novel of In The Cut by Susanna Moore in one sitting,” says director Jane Campion. “I liked the structure and the machinations and saw it as a New York 70s-style detective thriller. A good, tough story told with brutal honesty, like Klute was.”
Campion is in London to talk about her new film, co-produced by long-time friend, Nicole Kidman. The 47th London Film Festival’s Gala Opener, it stars Meg Ryan, like we have never seen her before, as a New York City East Village English teacher who wit- nesses the prelude to a homicide.
The pieces in her jigsaw of feel- ings about the homicide change when a detective (Mark Ruffalo) comes to question her. Beyond the mystery of the murder there begins a different sort of emotion- al investigation.
As the trailer says: “every- thing you know about desire is dead wrong.”
“I loved the film Seven and teased the original backers it was going to be like Seven,” says Campion with a laugh, “but the script didn’t work out that way so we had to rethink some of it. The producers were set on a Seven kind of film and we had moved away into a relationship story, so we had to cut the budget which created a chain of reactions and made the film far more streety and gritty and Taxi Driver-ish.
“I wanted it to look a bit like Taxi Driver. I looked back to those wonderful 70s films and their observations of purity and city poetry. I also used Klute as a key visual reference point. Those films of the 70s sort of redefined, for me, the genre of noir films.”
The role Meg Ryan plays, Frannie, was originally going to be taken by Kidman, but her job commitments didn’t permit and Ryan auditioned for it, in the pres- ence of Kidman who had already chosen Ruffalo for the male lead, Detective Malloy, when she had been penned in for Frannie.
“I think some people could find it quite a cold film, but it only
Photo above: Director Jane Campion; opposite page l-r: a scene from The Piano; In The Cut stars Mark Ruffalo and Meg Ryan; Kate Winslet in Holy Smoke
has a cold surface. Underneath it is hot with everyone is searching to satisfy their own desire,” explains Campion.
“It is a film with darkness around it but there is a lot of affection and a lot of love. We wanted the primary feeling of it to be sensual, rife with the sensuality of a hot summer, not the cold noir you would have seen in the 40s or the 70s. This is a hot noir!
“I tried to make it organic with the story told by feel. I didn’t want my cast to make ‘indications’ like gasps of horror or assertive hand movements. I wanted it to be feelings rather than actions and used references which, when put together, work to tell the story. I wanted it to have the effect one
gets from poetry: you don’t try and figure it out, you go with what remains within you, the words and rhythms.
“Violence has no attraction for me and I have kept it so there is no violence on screen, just a lot of blood. I really hate violence. Even in one of the stunts, when Meg Ryan’s character gets hit by a taxi, I was in torment in case the stunt person had really got hit. I thought she was dead as she was just lying in the road but she was just wait- ing for me to shout ‘Cut!’. When I did she got up and walked off and I was so relieved!
“It is much easier to toss blood around than show violence. As a female we know about blood and that sort of thing. There was