Becoming Jane

Jane Campion says she's not a verbal person and opts for gestures to communicate with receptive actors. Photo / AP

The week before we met, Jane Campion, publicising her new film Bright Star at the Cannes Festival, grumbled about the "old boy network" of the Hollywood studios, lamented the lack of opportunities for female directors and declared with righteous gynocratic outrage: "After all, women did give birth to the whole world!"

When I read the remark, I crossed my legs in self-preserving alarm. Was I due to interview Gaia, Magna Mater, the antipodean incarnation of Mother Earth? Even Harvey Keitel, cast by Campion as a tattooed wild man in The Piano and a sexually predatory guru in Holy Smoke, once admitted to a certain superstitious dread when discussing her: "Jane Campion is a goddess and I'm a mere mortal. I fear being struck by lightning bolts." Keitel later diplomatically muted his account of the weather she generates and called her "a warm breeze, at play".

Waiting for Campion in a London hotel suite, I listen for rumblings of thunder next door, where the divinity was being photographed. I needn't have worried. She breezes in playfully, just as in Keitel's description, and grimaces about the ordeal of having to be scrutinised by someone's camera: "I always come out looking like an albino gorilla."

In person, Campion is neither gorilla nor goddess. The breeze derives from her quirky humour and the mercurial play of expression on her face; her greying hair and her black clothes suggest severity, but the woman herself is a riot of frank, flushed emotion.

"I found myself sobbing," she says about reading John Keats' letters to Hampstead seamstress Fanny Brawne, on which Bright Star is based. A minute later, Campion suppresses a scream as she remembers the delays on the film's set as wardrobe assistants fiddled with the Regency bows and hooked bodices worn by her cast: "It was like being in casualty; there was always another fashion emergency being wheeled in. I yelled, 'Just use Velcro!"' She lets loose a peal of hilarity that Keitel might have called Olympian. "Oh, I love a tantrum," she admits.

Campion's heroines are adventurers whose self-discovery sets them at odds with conventional reality. Sweetie is about a fat fantasist who comically terrorises her suburban Sydney family, An Angel at My Table about the painful growing-up of eccentric New Zealand writer Janet Frame.

In The Piano, a colonial wife in 19th century New Zealand preserves her autonomy by speaking only through the music she plays, while The Portrait of a Lady shows an American heiress being captured and destroyed by old, corrupt Europe. In Holy Smoke, a young woman who finds enlightenment in an Indian cult is vindictively de-programmed, normalised by force.

Bright Star, nominally about Keats, is an addition to her portraits of ladies, women and girls. Its centre is Fanny Brawne, regarded by many Keats biographers as a minx who trifled with the dying poet but seen by Campion as one of the 19th century's unsung female martyrs, able to express herself only through her needlework. "She had to be content," Campion says, "with a life made up of very small things. Back then, women just waited for men and sewed or mended while they were doing so. I got myself into the mentality by learning to embroider pillow slips."