Jane Campion (director)

Last week, we featured the first part of a profile by Trevor Hogg on screenwriter-director Jane Campion, hosted at the wonderful cinema U.K.-based website Flickering Myth . The second part of the profile posted today - well worth the read. Here are some highlights re Campion's latest movie Bright Star : To create her latest film Bright Star (2009), Jane Campion had to overcome a natural dislike for a particular style of writing. “I had a mental problem, an aversion to poetry. It goes back decades.” The major source material for the director was a book authored by Andrew Motion about English poet John ... Read Full Story

A few weeks back, I was fortunate enough to make the acquaintance of Trevor Hogg who contributes to a great UK-based blog Flickering Myth Movie Blog . Trevor, who lives near Toronto, sent me a note about the first part of a profile he's posted on FM here : I thought you might be interested in profile on an Oscar-winning writer who was also the second woman to be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Director - Jane Campion ( hopefully Kathryn Bigelow will become number four ). Part Two will arrive on Dec. 30th. The profile is excellent and reminds us that ... Read Full Story

Bright Star (2009) Director/Screenwriter : Jane Campion By Roderick Heath Jane Campion is a puzzle to me. She rose out of Aussie cinema in the late 1980s with something of the reputation of a firebrand and a new breed of woman director. Her international hit The Piano (1993) was a kind of mash-up of college-level lit studies, feminist theory, and perfervid Victorian melodrama, with its half-defined metaphors for control of the female voice and the often bartered nature of erotic desire, scored through with a weird variety of emotional and sexual masochism. Those notes were something that recurred in her execrable adaptation of The ... Read Full Story

Dear colleagues, friends & students, As the director of The Florida State University Film School's Torchlight Program I am thrilled to have been asked to present a Sneak Preview of Jane Campion's "Bright Star" at Florida State University through this program and my relationship with the distributor. On Thursday, September 24th at 7 P.M. The Torchlight Program will proudly present an Apparition Release of a Jane Campion (Academy Award winning screenplay for "The Piano") film, "Bright Star". Seating will be first come first serve as we are expecting record attendance at the Askew Student Live Center (SLC), 942 Learning Way, Tallahassee, Florida 32306-4172. Special ... Read Full Story

Bright Star director Jane Campion believes in throwing her actors in at the deep end. Abbie Cornish had not met her co-star Ben Whishaw before they worked together on rehearsals for the story of poet John Keats and Fanny Brawne. Campion explained she had learned a thing or two about on-set chemistry:”I had a situation on The Piano where when I told Holly [Hunter] that [Harvey Keitel] was going to be playing Baines; she just howled down the phone. She’d heard things – that he’s very difficult, that he was rude to women. If I’d applied that rule of ‘Let’s [ Read More ] ... Read Full Story