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one very messy scene in the film, of the dismembered body in the laundry, which made me a bit squeamish. We had a forensic expert in who showed me what he would do, using his own dia- logue, his own routine, his own gloves. He was very dry, very mat- ter of fact – I could never have imagined it was like that. The scene is as actual as we could get it. And much bloodier than I would have done it without him.”
Campion gives a big smile. She has the enthusiasm of a girl and the vernacular of an
Antipodean. Tall, with prominent features and fair hair, she’s possi- bly the most successful of all writer/directors in making the art- house crossover to mainstream and managing to balance it – and win awards (including an Oscar for The Piano) for it as well.
Her idiosyncratic filmography includes Sweetie, Angel at My Table, Henry James’ The Portrait of a Lady with Nicole Kidman, more recently Holy Smoke, with Kate Winslet and Harvey Keitel.
Campion, New Zealand’s best known director together with Lord
Of The Rings’ Peter Jackson, was born in Wellington in 1954. Her par- ents, an actress and a theatre director, had trained at the Old Vic in London and opened a theatre in New Zealand. She was the middle child of a rackety group of thespi- ans and accompanying nannies.
“My father and I used to oper- ate a Super-8 to record family events and I became the expert when I discovered how to splice film together the right way up,” she recalls. “My hero, or earliest influence, was Luis Bunuel because of his irreverent energy.”
Campion moved into acade- mia. After doing a BA in Anthropology in New Zealand she went travelling around Europe for a year and landed back at the Sydney College of Arts, graduat- ing with a Diploma of Fine Arts.
Although she made her first film as a kid with a Super-8 about a “woman driven mad by a cat pushing its poo around the room and two terrible schoolgirls”, she formally began filmmaking in the early eighties at the Australian Film, Television and Radio School.
Her first completed film, a short called Peel, about a piece of orange peel and a family argu- ment, won the Palme d’Or for short films at the Cannes in 1988.
From her earliest films she has always taken a very particular,
uncensored slant on what she observed, never shying off the stranger or abject elements of life.
Her first feature, Sweetie, about a woman with marital problems visited by her unbal- anced but exuberant sister, was made with a cast of unknowns in 1989 and won a heap of prizes.
The next, Angel At My Table, an adaptation of the autobio- graphical novels by disturbed Kiwi novelist Janet Frame and starring Kerry Fox, became an international hit.
“I love being a woman film- maker. Somehow men feel so guilty, they bend over backwards to help you,” she says without a qualm. “I suppose I’m trying to be an enfant terrible into middle age and so far, I have to report, I haven’t had much trouble doing it.
“I have to admit, though, writ- ing the screenplay for In The Cut was pretty scary. I was not happy doing it. I’d wake up hearing voices in my mind saying : ‘you’re pathetic’, ‘you’re full of shit’, ‘you’re a joke’ and sometimes I’d absolutely struggle my way into my day,” Campion confessed. But struggling is what filmmaking is all about.
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photo: Ronald Grant Archive photo: Ronald Grant Archive