Acclaimed writer, director and producer Jane Campion sat down at the London Film Festival to reflect on her impressive career.
With over four decades of award-winning films under her belt, it was fascinating to hear Jane Campion reflect on her failures more than her successes in a screen talk held at this year’s London Film Festival.
As she reminisced about her career, Campion earnestly admitted the reason for her success: “I’ve learnt to be a great failure.”
Filmmaking, Campion summarised, is having “the determination to fix the problems in your film” and embrace the “sweet and sour”. She emphasised that “it’s so important to accept that sourness and have it as part of the process.”
Therefore, filmmakers don’t relish in the success of their film she disclosed, their self-belief doesn’t always grow with every award-nomination (and Campion has had many) as they “know how many times they’ve failed” before the film has even hit the big-screen. She credits failure and feedback for how she learnt how to make good films.
During her time at the Australian Film, Television and Radio School, Campion began working on short films and remembers the embarrassment of the first version of her award-winning short Peel. She screened the short to her class, but it ran too long and missed the emotional mark she was aiming for. Campion joked that the others thought it was a failure or that she was wasting her time, but she kept refining it. In the end, she said, “I learnt everything about how to make a film and how not to make a film on Peel.”
Peel went on to the Cannes Film Festival along with three of her other short films, though that experience was also a disappointment. In fact, Campion went so far as to say that her first film screening at Cannes was “the worst day of her life” as the subtitles bled between the films, leaving the shorts unreadable. Peel even cut out twice.
The Oscar-winning picture The Piano was written by Jane Campion
It was, in her eyes, a failure and it pained her to remember that most of the audience walked out. Yet Peel went on to win Campion the prestigious Short Film Palme d’Or at the festival.
It seems that it’s never about the awards or the acclaim, but the process for Campion. She can’t distinguish the success without remembering the painful failures that happened before or after the film. Campion is still hungry to learn and improve even after Oscar award-winning films such as The Piano. Most significantly, she’s clearly passionate about sharing her knowledge with new filmmakers and is even planning to launch a pop-up film school in New Zealand, the first of its kind for the country.
The fact that Campion appreciated (and could remember in detail) her failures emphasised the significance that these experiences have had on shaping her career. After all, she admits that feedback is help, “but you can only take so much at a time.” She advised new filmmakers to seek out honest feedback as “very few people will tell you the truth about your work”.
She added: “say [to your friends] be brutal you have to tell me what you do like and what you don’t. You have to try and build muscles to hear that feedback as feedback is brutal, every time you hear it you think I’m never going to be good enough. You kind of have that attitude of, like, I mean, it’s help, feedback is help.”
Campion’s new film, The Power of the Dog, starring Benedict Cumberbatch
To balance out the painful truths that come in feedback, Campion added that “love is [also] so important in this process, having people who support you around you” for those difficult moments.
The final secret to her success or mastery of failure is simple: to trust yourself and find your filmmaking style. “It’s the same kind of advice I gave myself,” she said, “try and discover what you love and why you love it and then you try and do it yourself, is the way to do it. Not to put things out before their right… Trust yourself.”
Campion is one of a small number of female directors to be nominated for Best Director at the Oscars, in her case for The Piano, which was also voted the best film by a female director in a 2019 BBC Culture Poll. As a woman who has championed female-led films, especially at a time when no one else was, Campion set out to challenge her male counterparts as they portrayed women as either an innocent angel or a shunned, angry woman and she proclaimed that “this is not a prescription of a life of a woman.”
She cited her “rebellious art brain” for her desire to create films with difficult themes and her critical approach to adapt numerous novels such as The Portrait Of A Lady (1996) and The Power Of The Dog (2021).
She’s not stopping either. At 67 years old, Campion is still committed to developing her craft by dipping into “creative pools” and taking a “psyche journey” with actors to find the heart of her films. In brief clips of The Piano and Peel, it’s clear to see that motifs and minute moments of physical expression in her films can capture layers of a character that could never be surmised from words.
When asked about the future of film, as The Power Of The Dog launches on Netflix in December, Campion said cinema is “still kicking”. Cinema is an “embodied experience” she explained, you can remember everything down to what you were wearing. Whereas at home, Campion admits “everything blurs into the same thing” unless it’s something exceptional such as Succession.
Netflix has given The PowerOf The Dog a “corridor for a cinema release” but ultimately the gap is widening as streaming giants are able to finance more expensive projects such as her new spectacular film.
The Screen Talk took place on Monday 11th October 2021 at the London Film Festival
