Campion was born in the New Zealand capital of Wellington to classically trained parents who ran a professional theater company. She grew up surrounded by artists while bursting with creative energy she didn’t know where to place. Actors came over to the house for rehearsal with her mother, Edith, a theater star; Campion staged plays in school, inspired by her father, Richard, an esteemed director. She burned through passions, eventually getting degrees in anthropology and painting (the latter of which brought her to Australia, via Sydney College of the Arts). Before even securing her second diploma, though, she’d been drawn to film, completing her first short, Tissues, in 1980. “Until I was about 24, I didn’t get it,” Campion says of her artistic spark. She saw the potential for “layers” in cinema, sweeping and complicated expressions like she saw in the “big movies.”
The shorts Campion directed in the early ’80s signal a filmmaker of enormous curiosity and boldness and were charged with erotic energy. An Exercise in Discipline: Peel (1982) plays like a psychological thriller between a father, his sister, and his son, set on the side of a road. A Girl’s Own Story (1984) wickedly examines teen girls’ sexuality in repressed suburbia; a 14-year-old Kidman was cast, but she passed on it, in part, due to the script’s call for her to kiss another girl. (Kidman has since said this is one of her few career regrets.)
Campion’s work proved polarizing. “I got one slightly miserable review, which I was really pissed off by,” she says of that short. “I wasn’t used to feedback, unsolicited and unmuzzled.” But her singularity remained undeniable. Peel won the 1986 Short Film Palme d’Or at Cannes, which granted Campion enough notoriety to land a feature. She’d figured out that her movies were not for everyone, particularly in such a male-dominated field; she knew they could range from the broadly appealing to the deeply weird, and she had the confidence to foresee a varied career. For her feature debut, Campion took a leap: “I realized that this was the time to do my wildest piece.”
The resulting movie, Sweetie, announces itself accordingly: It’s loud, ugly, caustic, and brilliant, a terrifyingly sharp portrait of a young woman wading through a chaotic family life and her own delusions. Scene by scene, it operates under its own bizarre logic, reveling in the mystical. It remains one of Campion’s personal favorites.
She was already planning her follow-up movie, An Angel at My Table, by the time Sweetie screened. Yet the divided critical response stung Campion, even if she knew it was less accessible and more personal. “Some critics just hated it,” she says now. In Cannes, where Sweetie launched, Campion spent a whole day crying in her suite at the Carlton hotel after sampling reactions. “I was really stunned. If I had not been in preproduction on Angel at My Table already, I don’t think I would’ve made another film,” she says. “It was so bitter. Maybe women don’t grow up with that locker-room toughness that guys have—they seem almost immune to criticism. I wish I had a little bit more of that in me.”
Such vulnerability would have surprised me a few months ago: Jane Campion movies are defined by a certain nervy fearlessness. But such is her depth of feeling. As I’ve gotten to know her, I’ve observed an artist brave enough to trust her gut—and braver still to feel, fully, whatever follows.
After the widely acclaimed An Angel at My Table, Campion made The Piano. She’d had the idea for the windswept epic, about a mute Scottish woman (Holly Hunter) relocated to New Zealand with her daughter (Anna Paquin) and navigating a complex love triangle, before making Sweetie, but felt she wasn’t yet “mature” enough to handle the story’s scope. She was smart to wait. Radically attuned to female desire while produced on a scale more familiar to mainstream cinema—lush period trappings, a sweeping score, extraordinary natural scenery—the estimated $7 million movie was a success, grossing more than $40 million worldwide and winning Cannes’s top prize (making Campion the first woman to achieve such a feat). At the Oscars, Campion became the second woman ever nominated for best director and won best original screenplay.
This is where Campion’s legacy, for many, begins. Several women in the industry tell me The Piano was seminal for them. “I was about 16 when I saw The Piano, and I’d never seen anything expressed in that way,” says Maggie Gyllenhaal, the Oscar nominee whose first film as a director, The Lost Daughter, bowed last December. “To me, so much of filmmaking feels fundamentally masculine…but when we’re honest with ourselves and we’re working from our unconscious, I think the work looks like that.”
