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David Remnick: Jane Campion's film, The Power of the Dog opens like a classic Western. This cattle being herded across the sweeping plains imposing mountains in the distance. We're on a ranch in Montana.

Phil Burbank: 25 years since our first run together, 1900 and nothing.

George Burbank: That's a long time.

Phil Burbank: Not too damn long.

David Remnick: The plot of the film isn't exactly a Western. It's an intense drama about two brothers, brothers who share the business but seem to be opposites in almost every way. It chronicles what happens when one of those brothers marries and brings his wife and her teenage son to the family home. Jane Campion is a true [unintelligible 00:00:55] with a highly personal style dreamlike, but often brutal. She's found mainstream success telling very idiosyncratic stories. The power of the Dog is nominated for 12 Oscars the most of any film this year, including Best Picture, and Best Director. Jane?

Jane Campion: Yes. Hi, David.

David Remnick: I spoke with Jane Campion last week. Well, this film is adapted from a novel from 1967 by Thomas Savage, why did this one hit home to you? You must go through stacks and stacks of novels, all kinds of source material that might make up a film and you don't--

Jane Campion: It's a brilliant novel. It's a forgotten unloved uncherished book but I think it's actually quite brilliant. You also feel the truth in it. This is almost something between a memoir and a fiction. The way he writes is so detailed and particular that you know he's lived it, you know this is lived experience, and it feels like something you can totally trust.

David Remnick: One of the things I assume you have to deal with is you're not only adapting from a particular novel. You're also either up against or aware of a whole tradition of Western movies in the history of American filmmaking. How did you view your film against all those many, many, many, either genre pictures, or John Ford pictures or that whole long and complicated tradition?

Jane Campion: I don't understand the whole of the long, complicated tradition but it is a very romantic genre that all of us everybody, me included have fantasies about. What I felt my allegiance to was Thomas Savage's particular story. Here I had someone who really did grow up in the West, who was irritated by the romance of the West and found it to be not showing the best of men sometimes, but the worst of them. He wrote a very particular tale. It's not trying to say, oh, this is the West but it is a counterpoint I think in a subversive one to the dominant, I suppose fairy tale of it.

David Remnick: Last week, the actor Sam Elliott, who's played a hell of a lot of cowboys in a lot of Hollywood movies went on a podcast Marc Maron's podcast. Maron asked him what he thought about Power of the Dog. Elliot really slammed the movie, he asked what a woman, a person from New Zealand knows about making Westerns, why you'd shoot in New Zealand. In general, criticized your portrayal of cowboy life. Do you have any response to that? Do you care?

Jane Campion: I love Sam Elliott. He's a wonderful actor. I understand that from his point of view of playing classical cowboys. Feeling like in some way, he and his cohorts own that genre, it must be disturbing. I have to point out that there were women in the West as well, they weren't all whores or whatever else. There were plenty of women that were watching and had very different points of view about how things were happening. Also that Sam, I don't know how old he is, but I'm sure he wasn't there in around 1925.

He sure as hell wasn't living on the ranch that Thomas Savage was living on or in his skin. I think it's that problem of a certain generation of men having problems accepting other people's points of view.

David Remnick: Now, your films are not always but usually centered around female leads. I don't know what the arithmetic is there, but it's more often than not. Here this is not the case, although obviously, Kirsten Dunst has a big role in this. Was that a particular interest in pursuing a more male-oriented story, or it was just by the by?

Jane Campion: It was the casualty of just falling in love with this book. It wasn't lost on me either, like, "Oh, my God, here we are my first male lead, and what a guy?"

[laughter]

I thought about a little bit because, I think being one of the few female directors out there for some time, I did used to feel very strongly that I needed to keep telling stories about women that meant something to me. I think with the advent of #MeToo Movement, that things have really changed, and they have really changed for the better. For a very long time, there was an extraordinary lack of equality for women in our industry. This systemic abuse didn't feel like an urgent problem or even a problem.

That change I feel. I feel it extremely, and I think it's involving a lot of women to do whatever they want to do. I think that they're going to feel this urgency that is producing some really interesting work from women that came about because of their support by both men and women. That dynamic shift in the industry, which is a bit like the Berlin Wall coming down.

David Remnick: It's that market, you feel it.

Jane Campion: The statistics are so stark. They tell the story anyway, but to tell it in a human way this is how I would recount it as someone who lived through it, who has been in the industry for 40 years. That the inequality was noted, but it wasn't urgent.

David Remnick: You had experience with Harvey Weinstein, which The New Yorker and the New York Times did a lot of reporting. You worked with him pretty closely on the piano, and were you--

Jane Campion: Well, I didn't work closely with him on the piano. No, he bought it when it was finished.

David Remnick: Did you have much contact with him?

Jane Campion: Well, I live in Australia and New Zealand and he lives in New York. I did work on Holy Smoke with him and it was a pretty horrendous experience.

David Remnick: How so?

Jane Campion: He didn't like the story, which was really not surprising if you think about it. When you think about what the Holy Smoke was about which is a young girl taking on a a man who fancies himself as a cult breaker but has a crush on the girl. The girl doesn't like him and fancies that she's going to teach him a bit of what it feels like to be a woman treated in that way. [laughs] Anyway, he really hated the film and maybe, God, I don't if it was because the film was actually bad or not. I think probably it's okay.

He wants me to change it and he really just screamed down the telephone at me, almost like a shark attack.

David Remnick: [chuckles] A shark attack.

Jane Campion: I can just remember saying to him, "Harvey why are you speaking like this? This is so uncivil. You can't talk to people like that. It's horrible."

David Remnick: That turned out to be the least of it almost.

Jane Campion: Well, I never actually suffered any sexual abuse from Harvey at all. He wasn't interested in me in that way but I just didn't it was so systemic, like it was happening to so many people.

David Remnick: Jane, I want to play a clip from the film. Your films often center around characters that have some quality that makes them, let's just say, hard to love. Phil Burbank is certainly that. He and some of the other farmhands are sitting down to dinner, and they're being served by a young man named Peter, played by Kodi Smit-McPhee. We'll hear Phil making fun of the way Peter is holding a napkin.

Phil Burbank: Now gentlemen, look, see that's what you do with the cloth.

Peter Gordon: It's really just for wine drips.

Phil Burbank: Oh. Got that boys? Only for the drip.

[laughter]

Now get us some food.

David Remnick: The thing is as the film progresses, you find some empathy in him. He changes somewhat. Where did you draw from in imagining Phil's character or is it all there in the novel written out for you?

Jane Campion: I think it's an alchemy between what was imagined and written by Thomas Savage and who Benedict is as an actor and a man, and his interpretation. I think Benedict can really open up in an extraordinarily beautiful way to his emotions. That if he wasn't able to do that, would be a very different portrait. I think he brings us into the dark trickly disturbed heart of Phil which is so lonely and vulnerable and yearning for a full life he can never lead because of who he is.

David Remnick: Benedict Cumberbatch sounds like an incredibly intense artist. You have formed over time very intense relationships with various leading actors.

Jane Campion: You say intense like it's a scary thing.

[laughter]

David Remnick: Well, I gather that he is very much of, in the modern sense, a method actor. What was the reality of that?

Jane Campion: Benedict is everything. He's very funny and he's very personable and he's very affectionate and warm-hearted. He and I agreed and I asked him to stay in character on the set because it's such a long way from who he is. It helped all of us to know that Phil was on set. He would argue with me as Phil about what we're going to do. He likes, I think, Ben to have dialogue that goes on. Like he's got a monologue in his head that goes on and then it becomes verbal. He verbalizes it and he starts to talk about the options, this, that.

He really is thinking of every possible variation that you could do on anything. I accompany him in this because it seems like something that is his process. Then after a while I go, "Let's just do it." [laughs]

David Remnick: Even when he's having lunch or talking with you about various parts of the film, and the cameras are not rolling, he's in character. He's not the posh Englishman that we know from red carpet interviews.

Jane Campion: Exactly, yes. We didn't have lunch together but we had many social events together. No one said he was Phil, and it really gave him that beautiful space to just not have to be the nice actor guy, celebrity that everybody wants a picture taken with. One of the requests that I had during rehearsal was that he every day said no and never said thank you for as many things as possible.

David Remnick: [laughs].

Jane Campion: He just lost all responsibility, politeness, which he said, actually, it was great freedom, thoroughly enjoyed it. [laughs].

David Remnick: You've had an astonishing career and you continue to make just amazing work. You've had big hits, you've won big awards revered by your peers, and you haven't had to make a Marvel movie yet.

Jane Campion: [chuckles].

David Remnick: I wonder if it feels that way to you. What's missing from the picture I just painted of your career? What have been the real obstacles and downsides?

Jane Campion: I am a loner and also a really sociable person. I really love working with colleagues and having fun. My idea about life is the best thing you can possibly do is laugh. I just love laughing. I love people who make me laugh, so the big hole is comedy.

[laughter]

It'd be really fun to be a comic or a comedian or make films that make everybody laugh and be able to sit there in the cinema and just hear people really have some belly laughs.

David Remnick: [laughs].

Jane Campion: I'd love to just be there while Ab Fab and all that lot do their stuff or the Bridesmaids' crew. I'd do anything just to be on those sets, because as I say I think that there's nothing more wonderful than laughing.

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David Remnick: Jane Campion, thank you so much.

Jane Campion: Thank you. Thanks, David.

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David Remnick: Jane Campion is the director and screenwriter of The Power of the Dog. It's been nominated for 12 Academy Awards and that ceremony, of course, takes place on March 27th. Next week, we'll present one of the most important rituals in cinema. We'll give out the coveted awards known as The Brody's, recognizing the most visionary films of the year according to the New Yorker's Richard Brody. I hope you'll join us.

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[00:15:26] [END OF AUDIO]

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