The Power of the Dog is the first feature film Jane Campion has directed in 12 years. That it happened at all is down to her picking up Thomas Savage’s 1967 novel of the same name and not being able to put it down.
“I was actually thinking of retiring before I did this film,” she says, matter of factly, “but then I thought, ‘Oh man, this is gonna be a big one.’ I’d read the book and loved it and afterwards I just kept thinking about it. When I made a move to find out who had the rights, that’s when I knew it had got me. I needed to do it.”
Campion’s disillusionment with the mainstream thrust of contemporary Hollywood film-making is not new, but, of late, it seemed to have reached a tipping point. In the 00s, she didn’t make a feature film at all, instead co-directing two acclaimed series of the television drama Top of the Lake, starring Elisabeth Moss, finding it energising. “I loved the fact that you can explore complex and controversial work and the audience in their homes are totally up for it,” she says, “whereas with film it’s hard to do work like that, because as soon as some exec says they don’t understand it, you’ve lost the game. But, to be honest, I was so exhausted after Top of the Lake that I thought, ‘Oh my God, making a two-hour film seems like heaven.’”
The Power of the Dog certainly packs a lot into its two hours: filial tension, machismo, toxic masculinity, gaslighting, repressed homosexual desire and revenge, all played out against a 1920s western landscape and a way of life threatened by encroaching modernity – cities, trains and automobiles. Partially drawn from Savage’s experience of growing up in a troubled ranching dynasty in the vast cattle lands of Montana, the novel’s then daring homosexual subtext was all but ignored by contemporary reviewers.
In Campion’s film, it hides in plain sight, not least through her audacious casting of Benedict Cumberbatch, the most English of actors, as Phil Burbank, a hard-bitten cowboy with a mean streak and a vicious tongue. In her afterword to a recent reissue of the novel, the novelist Annie Proulx describes Phil as “one of the most compelling and vicious characters in American literature”. He is also one of the most complex: cruel and sentimental; macho and thin-skinned; college-educated and determinedly uncouth. “He’s torn apart with the pain of his inner self and a childish jealousy that drives his need to upset and hurt,” says Cumberbatch, who tells me he underwent Jungian psychoanalysis “to dig deep into my own psyche” as part of his exhaustive preparation for the role. Given the ferocity of his onscreen anger in certain scenes, it obviously worked. “Well, when you go that far into yourself, stuff surfaces,” he says mysteriously.
In one way, then, the film touches on familiar Campion terrain: the clandestine desires and longings of a troubled individual whose true nature is suppressed by the rigidly conformist values of family and community. In another, it is a radical departure for a director whose previous films have exclusively explored female experience, desire and self-expression. Apart from Ben Whishaw’s co-starring role alongside Abbie Cornish in Campion’s drama Bright Star, which traced poet John Keats’s doomed romance with Fanny Brawne, it is the first of her films to feature a male lead.
Was she at all intimidated by the uber-masculine world in which the story is set? “Oh, God, yes, right from the beginning!” she says, throwing back her head and laughing. “But I also knew from the moment I decided to do it that it was going to be a departure for me. That’s really what was so exciting about it. Plus, I don’t actually make conscious choices about what I’m going to do. It’s more that an energy comes up in me when I get inspired by something. I didn’t try to figure it out, I just go with the feeling.”
She pauses for a moment, deep in thought. “And, you know, the #MeToo movement probably had some bearing on my decision. It was such a powerful force that I think it opened up a whole different space to explore this kind of subject matter. It was like those women, young women mostly, had peeled away so many layers of the onion as regards masculinity, that it created a space for old warriors like myself to explore a very male story like this one.”
Has she actually noticed a cultural shift in the film business post-#MeToo? “Well, I think Hollywood is running really scared. Hollywood was the heart of it and I think it’s petrified because it does matter and it does count. It’s not fashionable to be misogynistic. It’s not going under the radar any more. It is the radar.”
How prevalent was that misogyny in her experience? “I don’t know for sure, but I did hear stories about Weinstein and from people I believed. A young woman told me a story and I was disgusted and just thought, ugh, what a creep, but I didn’t know how exploitative he was. I knew he was aggressive and unpleasant and it was like a shark attack when he got angry about something. He could cancel someone if he didn’t like you. If he thought they might say something about him, he would make it impossible for them to ever have a job. He could do that. That was certainly true.”
She pauses for a moment. “Look, I’m just so glad that’s over. It has cleaned up the toxicity in this business. And now we’re getting films like Promising Young Woman, which is, above other things, a great provocation to have in the world. We know things like that happen, but usually films stay away from that kind of material and now they are going for it. Women are going for it. They are sharing a tough reality. I’m loving it and I feel really excited about it.”
I meet Campion in a posh hotel near Whitehall, where both of us chat, masked and safely seated a few metres apart, in a vast and airy lounge. Even with her face half-covered, she looks formidable, with her mane of white hair and naturally inquisitive gaze, but, from the off, she exudes an easygoing charm and slyly irreverent humour. It is not hard to see why she elicits such devotion from actors used to more controlling directors.
“Jane creates a tribe,” says Kirsten Dunst, who shines in the film as Rose, a hardworking single mother who marries Phil’s more upright, taciturn brother, George, played by her real-life husband, Jesse Plemons. “You feel part of her family. She constantly wants to give you a hug but you also know you have to get down to the nitty gritty of your character. Jane has such an amazing creative curiosity about her characters – she wants to see all their ugly parts but also understand them.”
Campion, in turn, describes the actor as “a great pal to have on board”, citing her willingness to do “the in-depth work that really matters”. Until Rose arrives at the Burbank ranch, the brothers’ everyday lives and destinies are so entwined that they even share the same bed. Her unwitting disruption of their resolutely masculine domestic dynamic so incenses Phil that he wages a campaign of psychological abuse against her with terrible consequences for her marriage and her sanity. It is the even more unsettling presence of her defiantly effeminate son, the luminously beautiful and slightly sinister Peter (played brilliantly by Kodi Smit-McPhee), which shifts the narrative towards its much darker denouement.
Throughout, in a plot that at times feels overworked, it is the sustained mood that Campion creates in the wondrously elemental landscapes of her cinematic Montana – it was actually shot on New Zealand’s South Island – that impresses, alongside the powerful performances she draws from every one of her leads.
“Sometimes, actors arrive on set and they have their performances all figured out,” she says. “They don’t want to unpack it, they just want to film it as if they are the only person in the scene. That is just so disturbing to me.”
Campion’s pre-shooting preparation is famously rigorous. Dunst prepared by workshopping scenes that were not in the script as a way of further understanding her character’s inner life. At one point, she even found herself cleaning the director’s apartment. “Jane’s pretty untidy,” she says, laughing, “so it was hard work. Basically, she wanted to see if I could properly make the bed, set the table and wipe the floor with the kind of old-fashioned mop and bucket that Rose would have used.”
Dunst, though, had it easy. At Campion’s urging, Cumberbatch went full method for the duration of the role, not even slipping out of character on his days off. The director even introduced him as Phil to the crew on the first day of shooting. “Jane is incredibly generous,” says Cumberbatch. “She wanted to facilitate anything that would help me get inside a character that was so far away from my experience. She allowed me to go there and to go deep – not washing for a week, living in Phil’s clothes, getting the dialect right.”
Before filming began, Campion also suggested that Cumberbatch travel to Montana to immerse himself for several weeks in the ways of modern ranching. “I lived for a while with a cowboy called Randy and his partner, Jenn,” he tells me, still sounding enthused by the experience. “I learned how to ride and rope as well as how to whittle and play the banjo. I can even roll a cigarette with one hand.”
Although he omits to mention it, he also learned how to castrate a bull for a scene that will have many viewers watching through their fingers, if at all. (Savage actually begins his novel with the grisly ritual in one of the most graphic, and potentially off-putting, opening sentences in American fiction.) “I learned it all,” says Cumberbatch, “including the various peripheral skills that Phil has in his life, including rope-braiding and taxidermy. It all helped put armour on the character, but what Jane gave me, above all, was time, which is an incredibly luxury for an actor to have.”
The director and the actor bickered a lot on set about his character, but playfully and productively, with Cumberbatch sometimes insisting on small changes that, Campion says, made a huge difference to the character’s complex inner life. In one pivotal scene, she and her cinematographer, Ari Wegner, dispensed with the rest of the crew and filmed him alone in a wooded glade for a revealingly intimate interlude. In a moment of almost Lawrentian homoeroticism, he strips off and tenderly rubs his torso with a cotton scarf, a cherished memento of his ranching mentor-cum-idol, the late Bronco Henry, an invisible but powerful presence in the story.
“Oh, the scene with the scarf!” says Campion, sounding excited, when I mention it. “That’s something we actually made up and Ben helped me a lot in that. I initially thought Phil would have kept the scarf inside his shirt, but Ben said, ‘No, I think he keeps it inside his pants. That’s so much stronger.’ And he was right.”
* * *
Now 67, Jane Campion has always walked to her own offbeat rhythm, a sensitive, single-minded woman who has somehow managed to enter the predominantly male Hollywood mainstream while creating work that showcased difference: the otherness of loners, dreamers, outsiders, the misunderstood and mentally ill people, with all their rare beauty and their often brutally exposed “ugly parts”.
Born into a creative family – her parents founded the New Zealand Players theatre group – she studied anthropology at university in Wellington, before moving to London and enrolling at the Chelsea School of Art. In 1980, as much out of frustration with painting as anything else, she made a short called, Tissues, finding it so liberating that she began studying film at college in Sydney. Suddenly, her restlessness was assuaged.
“Film-making set me free,” she says. “Before I found it, I had a lot of energy, but I was lost as to how to express it or even be in the world. I found the challenge of making a film so exciting, it was as if I had found myself.”
She directed her first feature, Sweetie, in 1989, the protagonist an unstable young woman who daydreams of being an actor, but wreaks havoc on those closest to her with her destructive volatility. It was followed by An Angel at My Table, which traced the turbulent life of the author Janet Frame, who survived childhood poverty, mental illness and incarceration to become one of New Zealand’s most celebrated writers. The film was heaped with praise by critics and caused a small storm of protest at the Venice film festival, where it elicited a sustained ovation from the audience, but didn’t win the Golden Lion.
Suddenly, Campion was the name to drop in indie film circles, her female characters seeming to exist entirely in their own interior worlds, their off-kilter lives intimately observed and rendered with an almost daydreamy style that, by Hollywood standards, seemed almost transgressive. Kerry Fox, who shone as the adult Janet Frame in An Angel at My Table, was about to give up acting when she attended the audition for the film that changed her life.
“I remember being immediately impressed by this very stylish woman with a red beret and a fantastic bob haircut underneath, who lived in Sydney and was obviously very sophisticated,” she says, laughing. “But sadly she was not that impressed with me because I hadn’t bothered to read Frame’s autobiographies before the audition. I thought I’d blown it until she came around with a big bunch of yellow roses and said: ‘I’d really like you to play the role.’ I was actually speechless, because I thought the flowers were her way of apologising for not giving it to me.”
What was the young Campion like to work with? “Well, I remember that we rehearsed for a month and she really wanted me to be in character all the time, which is really not my style, so I just did it when she was around,” says Fox with a laugh. “What I loved about Jane was that she never thought she knew it all, like a lot of directors do. Instead, she worked with me and we ended up going deeper and deeper into the character. It was meticulous. She’s the most rigorous director I’ve ever worked with in terms of the minutiae of building a role – and the most loyal.”
In 1993, Campion made The Piano, which changed her life and remains her most revered film by many fans and critics alike. Watching it again, I’m stuck by how unsettling it is, both in its isolated New Zealand setting and its heightened atmosphere, and how eccentric its characters are: Holly Hunter’s strong-willed, musically gifted mute, Ada; Harvey Keitel’s oddball sailor with his tattooed face and obsessive nature. The US critic Roger Ebert wrote that it was “as austere and haunting as any film I’ve ever seen”, noting Campion’s ordinary ability to evoke “a whole universe of feeling”. It remains a touchstone of late 20th-century film-making and a totemic film for many female directors who have followed Campion.
“It was while watching The Piano in my early 20s that I decided to follow my growing desire to make films,” says Sarah Gavron, the British director of Brick Lane and Suffragette. “From the early image of the world refracted through the fingers of Ada, to the shot of her skirt billowing as she stumbles and sinks to the ground after the act of violence against her, I was stunned. I found the film deeply disconcerting, emotional, unlike anything else in cinema.”
The film’s success – it was nominated for eight, and won three, Academy Awards and she became the first female director to win the Palme d’Or at the Cannes film festival – pitched Campion into the big league, but also pointed up the shockingly patriarchal nature of the film business. At a celebration for the 50th anniversary of Cannes, she found herself standing on a crowded stage, the only woman among the 50 directors who had won the Palme d’Or.
“If it had been all male, they probably could have gotten away with it,” she says now, “but because there was one woman, the optics were just so shocking. And, you know, it was only later when I saw the photographs, that I thought, ‘This is so wrong. So wrong.’ And yet they were still saying things like, ‘What can we do – women aren’t making very good films?’ Or, ‘We just can’t include films just because they are made by women.’ It was the same old self-serving stuff from all the guys.” And, unbelievably, it continued for another 28 years until, this year, the French film-maker Julia Ducournau became the second woman to win the Palme d’Or.
“The industry certainly didn’t wake up over night, but Jane Campion contributed to a shift in the culture of film-making,” says Gavron. “For me, the way she talked in interviews about her process and how it intersected with her personal life somehow made me feel I had permission to try. It took the idea of being a female film-maker out of the realm of the unthinkable.”
Since her Cannes triumph, Campion has made five films, including her big-budget Hollywood adaptation of Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady, which starred Nicole Kidman and John Malkovich, and the controversial erotic thriller, In the Cut, the first of her films to draw almost across-the-board negative reviews, though, as she has been quick to point out, mostly from male critics. How much the mauling influenced her decision to take a break from directing is hard to say. By then, she and her husband, Colin Englert, who she had met when he worked as second unit director on The Piano, had divorced.
Campion’s first voluntary hiatus from film-making, during which she home-schooled her daughter, Alice, now a successful actor, lasted six years. Her most recent one – pace Top of the Lake – stretched to 12. I mention something she said in a recent American interview that intrigued me: “I’m looking at emptiness, that’s my dream.” What did she mean, exactly? She hoots with laughter. “Well, that’s totally the truth, but I was actually talking about meditation. To me, that’s probably what I love most. I’ve been doing it since I was about 20. I find it gives me an equanimity that’s very helpful to the creative process. If you are too anxious or panicky about things, that’s the real stopper for the creative flow. In my experience, you’ve got to trust processes you don’t even understand, in creativity and in life, because the brain is always a few steps behind the instinct.”
I ask if she has undergone a shift of consciousness as regards the medium that made her name and which she has done so much to re-energise? She thinks about this for a moment. “Well, I’m not thinking in terms of what’s next any more, that’s for sure. It’s more, if something takes my fancy, I’m going to do it. Is that a shift of consciousness? Maybe. I am certainly going to use my energies differently from now on. For one thing, I’m starting a pop-up film school, because I really hate how unequal education is for people with money and people without money. I really hate it.”
For the first time today, Campion sounds fiery. “It wasn’t like that for me,” she continues. “I had a very different experience growing up and I don’t see why that experience shouldn’t be the experience of people who are young now. It’s disgusting and we’ve got to care about it and do something about it. So I’m going to work for free and start this film school and Netflix are going to support me.”
Who knows, then, where Campion’s singular creative journey will take her next. What is clear is that the passion that fired her younger self has been tempered by age and experience. I ask her, in conclusion, if the challenge of making films has in any way dented her faith in film.
“That’s a hard one in a way,” she replies. “When I was young and starting out, making films was just so invigorating and it seemed to help me live in a good way. I felt I needed to do it. But over the years, that need has changed. I don’t really have it any more. I don’t need it for myself any more. So I’m just going to direct my energies in all sorts of different ways. I really don’t know how that’s gonna work out, but for me that’s exciting in itself.”
The Power of the Dog is in select cinemas on 19 Nov and on Netflix from 1 Dec
• This article was amended on 8 November 2021. Benedict Cumberbatch lived with a cowboy called Randy and his partner Jenn – not “Jane” as an earlier version said due to a mishearing of the actor’s words.
