How ‘The Power Of The Dog’ Writer-Director Jane Campion Explores “The Vulnerability, The Brutality, And The Fear” Of Toxic Masculinity
deadline.com“I have tennis elbow” Jane Campion says, stretching an arm out across the Zoom screen from her temporary Joshua Tree home. She’s in California for the release of her film The Power of the Dog—a Western set in Montana and shot in her native New Zealand.Despite what her repetitive strain injury might suggest, Campion is by no means Wimbledon-ready.
She has only learned tennis very recently during the pandemic and seems delighted by the humbling surrender of trying something new.“I just can’t tell you the excitement I felt one night when I was playing with my coach and I hit the ball over about five times in a row,” she says. “I was like, ‘Oh my God, that was great, I can’t believe I’m hitting it.’”But perhaps this gung-ho, game-on attitude provides some insight into who Campion is in a broader sense.
In 1993, she became the first woman in Cannes history to win a Palme d’Or, having written and directed her singular film The Piano, which also netted several Oscars, and made her the second woman ever to receive a Best Director nomination.As a young student starting out, she says, “I had a lot of energy and nowhere to put it.” Studying first art, then film, she turned to the Super 8 camera her theater-director dad taught her to use.
Suddenly, she was galvanized. “I was so excited by the process. That’s what I connected to, my energy. It was so palpably different.”But in an almost entirely male-dominated industry, the odds were stacked crushingly against her.
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