Campion letter admits to inspiration

By PATRICK GOWER

New evidence has emerged to fuel the debate about the originality of celebrated director Jane Campion's screenplay for The Piano.

The Canberra Times has released correspondence by Campion in 1985 in which she says she was "inspired" by the novel The Story of a New Zealand River by Jane Mander when she prepared an outline of a film to be called The Piano Lesson.

In letters to John Maynard and his partner, Brigid Ikin, who bought the film rights to the book from the Mander estate in 1985, Campion wrote: "The first thing I ended up working on was The Piano Lesson, my inspiration from Jane Mander's melodrama, and you will see there is precious little of the original, but the inspiration was still there."

The Canberra Times article also revealed that a subsequent submission to the Australian Film Commission for The Piano Lesson by Campion showed several similarities to the plot of The Story of a New Zealand River.

Campion has refused to acknowledge any debt to the novel for her script for the film The Piano, for which she won an Oscar in 1994 for a "screenplay written directly for the screen."

In a letter to the Herald last week, Campion said that while she had been aware of the book, the script was an original work.

"I put a great deal of creative effort over many years into this work, as did many fine creative people. The awards that the film has received are a credit to us all, as well as New Zealand.

"The continuing uninformed speculation undermines the efforts of everyone involved."

The controversy resurfaced when the recently published Oxford Companion to Australian Film cited The Piano as being "based on the novel by Jane Maunder (sic), uncredited."

The Piano is New Zealand's most acclaimed film, and widely regarded as the picture that put the now-blossoming local film scene on the international map.

Auckland literary agent Ray Richards told the Herald that Campion paid $2000 "compensation" to Jane Mander's estate.

Mr Richards said the compensation was for "lost opportunity" to publish an edition of the novel to accompany the release of a film.

Mr Richards acted for the Mander estate in selling the film rights to Mr Maynard and Ms Ikin and in joint plans to publish the novel again.

"The film The River had been canned and the plans for re-publishing the book, which was to be a film edition, were canned too," he said.

"We got compensation for that. It was just tokenism really."

In the event, the book was republished in 1993 but Mr Richards said Campion's solicitors had never asked for a refund.

Mr Maynard and Ms Ikin received a script development loan of about $100,000 from the New Zealand Film Commission.

David Gascoigne, at the time the chairman of the commission, said that when it became aware of "possible" similarities between the two films, he approached Jane Campion's producer, Jan Chapman.

"She said my information was wrong and the creative inspiration for The Piano came from other sources."

Mr Gascoigne said that at the time the commission would have liked some portion of its investment in the John Maynard project refunded, but put its inquiries on hold in the interests of the film.

"Pushing that too hard would simply get in the way of its completion and any subsequent success of The Piano," he said.

"We just put it on hold, and that's where it's remained. I regard it as part of history really."