Campion thriller a cut above

Sex, blood and bad language can't obscure the skill with which Jane Campion directs against type on neo-noir thriller 'In the Cut', says PETER CALDER

It's now or never, Jane Campion says. She's in town for just a day and a half. Tonight she'll greet the old friends who make up most of the guest list for the premiere of her new film. Tomorrow, she has promised to her father.

She's got no time for an interview, she says. So I set my tape rolling at a small press conference at SkyCity. It's peopled by a polite line of bemused and largely silent Asian journalists and a couple of reporters doing spots for network television. These last are young women about the age of Anna Paquin, who won an Oscar for her child role in Campion's biggest hit, The Piano, and they can't wait to ask the director the really important questions like,"What do you think about The Lord of the Rungs? Are we better than Australia now?"

There's little evidence they've even seen the film, whose posters are plastered across the wall behind Campion, so they'll make a backdrop on even the shortest clip to make it to air.

The film, In the Cut, is a neo-noir murder thriller set in New York. There's a lot of blood and a lot of very explicit sex. And, one of the two main characters being a macho homicide detective, there's a lot of swearing.

Dad and Mum won't mind, of course, even though they've both (they were born on the same day) just turned 80. Richard and Edith Campion founded this country's first professional theatre, the New Zealand Players, in the 1950s, so they're arty enough to be broadminded - even if Mum has recently sworn off swearing herself.

She's too frail to travel to the premiere and will see the film later on DVD. "She'll love it," says Jane, and bursts out laughing before adding "because I made it".

Four-letter words are a modern cinematic staple, of course. "Contains offensive language" is the commonest of the censor's routine warnings. But it's not the detective's profanity that earned the film its R18 rating.

Based on Susanna Moore's 1995 cult erotic thriller, it's the story of Frannie Avery (Meg Ryan), an isolated and slightly frumpy writing teacher who meets hardbitten detective Malloy (Mark Ruffalo) as he is investigating a series of grisly murders of young women.

He hardly seems like her type. She studies street slang as a detached academic pursuit; for him, it's a native language, and most of his vocabulary is well-worn enough not to require linguistic analysis. But - even as clues begin to mount up that Malloy may be the perpetrator of the crimes he's investigating - Frannie finds herself drawn into a dangerous (not to say athletic) liaison with him.

Although Campion says the film is a change of direction for her ("I hadn't done anything that was remotely in the thriller genre before and that's what appealed to me about it") it has something in common with The Piano and Portrait of a Lady - and even, to some extent, the unholy Holy Smoke. All films about women exploring their sexual limits, treading the fine line between desire and danger.

"Most women are interested in love, romance and sex," says the director. "I am too - although not only that; the Janet Frame trilogy wasn't just about that. I guess I'm encouraged - by my own being - to explore the things I'm interested in."

The film, which Campion has described elsewhere as "a modern love story", is "about a sexually explosive relationship that comes out of a dead life".

"Love is so often so obscured by romance that you can't even see the person you're with because of the projections and hopes that you put on your partner."

In The Cut is undeniably a dramatic change of direction for Ryan, the button-nosed sweetheart of romantic comedy whose most outre on-screen act so far has been feigning a noisy orgasm in a restaurant in When Harry Met Sally.

Campion admits she was slightly taken aback when she heard Ryan was interested in the role.

"I didn't really know who she was as an actor," she says. "But she was in between films, working with [Actor's Studio guru coach Sandra Seacat] and Sandra approached me and said Meg was doing some great work and would be willing to audition.

"Meg hadn't done a lot of straight dramatic work, but I was really impressed by how much work she had done on the script and how she had taken on the story. So I auditioned her and she was the best person."

The unblinking intimacy of the film's sex scenes are a testament to the work of a director who excluded all but key crew from the set and, some reports had it, even offered to get undressed for the shots. It tallies with stories told by actors who have worked for her and routinely give glowing reports of her skills.

"Yeah, I'm the horse-whisperer of actors," she says, erupting into laughter again. "It's simple, really: you build a very good trust relationship with them and you can't do that except in the obvious way, by being trustworthy.

"And you need to love actors. A lot of directors don't really like actors. They pay an enormous amount of money to them to guarantee their film will get up and then they have a built-in resentment about it.

"We paid hardly anything to our actors," she says, a reference to the film's slender $12 million budget, "but they did it because they wanted to be in the project."

Pestered by one of those television reporters to talk about Peter Jackson's Oscar success, Campion is effusive.

"But it's a credit to the New Zealand Film Commission, too," she says, "which has really been pretty tireless in giving people like Peter Jackson and myself the early opportunity to take our films to a world forum.

"I think [the success of The Lord of the Rings] can be seen as a payoff to the Government and the people of New Zealand for that artistic investment. And it's great - as long as New Zealand films are still being made here and we don't just become a killing fields for Hollywood schlock."

For all that she was born and raised here, Campion is one of those New Zealand achievers the Australians can legitimately claim. She learnt her craft and made most of her films there - even The Piano was an Australian film, made with French money; An Angel At My Table, the trilogy of films based on Janet Frame's autobiography, was her only truly Kiwi picture.

So she has more reason than most to mourn the writer's passing at the end of January.

"I met her when I was just a [film] student and asked if she would consider me as someone to direct her autobiography - there was only one book out then - and she was very gracious. She asked me whether I could wait till the three books got out and reapproach her.

"I was at home in Sydney when I heard. Everybody that was involved in the Janet Frame project rang each other up when we heard. She changed our lives."

* In the Cut is out now.