Kiwi Women Lead Cultural Renaissance
Once upon a time New Zealand cultural values were based on the unholy trinity of rugby, racing and beer. Then the marketing concepts – clean and green; 100% Pure – were added to the…
Tag Archives: Jane Campion
She’s a Huge Fan of Her Mother Jane Campion
Alice Englert, the actor and daughter of New Zealand screenwriter, producer and director Jane Campion, talks choosing passion over cash and whether her mum makes sexy films with the Guardian’s Alex Godfrey. She’s only 19…
Close up with Cinematographer Stuart Dryburgh
Acadamy Award-nominee New Zealander Stuart Dryburgh is interviewed in the August issue of American Cinematographer magazine as part of the “Close-Up” section of the publication which each month features a member of the American…
Top of the Lake Receives Eight Emmy Nods
New Zealand director Jane Campion mini-series Top of the Lake has received eight Emmy nominations, including Outstanding Miniseries of Movie, Outstanding Writing for a Miniseries and Outstanding Directing in a Miniseries. The New Zealand-shot…
Ada Would Not Have Surfaced Says Campion
Jane Campion has revealed she wanted a bleaker ending for The Piano, with the character of mute Ada McGrath, played by Holly Hunter, drowning with her beloved instrument. It is one of the most…
New Zealand’s Answer to The Killing
Jane Campion’s television series Top of the Lake, “set in the staggeringly beautiful landscape of the South Island”, has been called New Zealand’s answer to The Killing. Obstreperous and tunnel-visioned, detective Robin Griffin has…
Vivid Encounters with Insects in Glass Wings
“It takes just four lines for ‘Alumnae Notes’ to transport us first to the schoolgirl in 40s New Zealand and then to her literary exile in London: ‘Beautiful Ataneta Swainson is dead….
Why Hollywood is Staying in New Zealand
“From James Cameron’s organic farm to Emmy contender Top of the Lake, the idyllic island nation continues to thrive 12 years after Frodo and Co. put it on the movie location map,” The Hollywood…
Sookie Grows Up and Accepts Her Fate in New Season
New Zealand actress Anna Paquin, 30, features on the June cover of Manhattan magazine. Paquin tells the publication about the new season of cult show True Blood, in which she stars as…
Jane Campion, ‘Child of Cannes’, Announces Festival Winners
NZ Film Director Jane Campion headed up the Short Film and Cinefoundation Jury at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival. Campion and her jurors awarded the Best Short Film Palme d’or to Safe, directed by…
Cannes Award for Campion
Director of award-winning film The Piano, Wellington-born Jane Campion, 58, will be presented with the Carrosse d’Or from the Society of Film Directors at the Cannes Film Festival in May. Campion will be…
Strength to Strength
“Early signs suggest will bend toward something even more mysterious, beautiful, unsettling and satisfying than the mysterious, beautiful, unsettling, satisfying thing it is from the start,”…
Everything is Not What it Seems
“It is typical of and visualise a pregnant 12-year-old girl walking into it up to her neck, the central image of what…
Campion Returns a Champion
New Zealand director Jane Campion makes a ‘haunting’ and near-perfect return to TV production, according to Andrew Pulver, The Guardian’s Film Editor. Campion’s return to high-end TV film-making comes with her directing the first…
Class Written All Over It
“New product from Bright Star director Jane Campion is always welcome,” the Guardian says about the New Zealander’s six-part television series, Top of the Lake, which is showing in the Berlinale Special section at…
Campion a Cannes Jury President
Oscar-winning director Jane Campion has been named Short Film Jury president and head of the Cinefondation at the 66th Cannes Film Festival. Campion has strong ties with the festival, winning the short film Palme…
Our Dark Side
Jane Campion’s seven-part miniseries Top of the Lake, which was shot in and around Queenstown, premieres on the Sundance Channel in the United States on 18 March. “It’s the most comprehensive documentation of modern…
Talent Embedded in Genes
Up-and-coming actress Alice Englert, 17, the daughter of New Zealand film director Jane Campion (“similar talents seem to be embedded in her genes”), stars in Ginger & Rosa, “an evocative and beautifully shot portrait…
Big and Small Comparisons
In an appearance at the Mipcom conference in Cannes, New Zealand director Jane Campion explained that she was attracted by the creative freedom in television, in comparison to film. Campion was at Mipcom to…
Talking of The Small Screen
Palme d’Or and Oscar-winning New Zealand director Jane Campion will attend the international television market MIPCOM next month in Cannes, France to talk about her first small-screen foray, the new series Top of the Lake….
Settling the Score
“Jane locked me in a hotel room with a piano and said she wouldn’t let me out until I’d finished,” British composer Michael Nyman, explains to the Guardian about his task to complete…
On Set with One Beautiful Caster
New Zealand-born actress Alice Englert, the daughter of Academy Award-winning film director Jane Campion, stars in Warner Bros.’ supernatural thriller Beautiful Creatures, a film adapted from the first book of the Caster Chronicles series,…
Campion Directs Madmen Star
Wellington-born film director Jane Campion has written and will direct a Sundance Channel seven-part miniseries starring Madmen actress Elisabeth Moss, called Top of the Lake. Campion wrote the script with Gerard Lee of Sweetie…
On the Small Screen
Filmmaker Jane Campion has been commissioned by the BBC to work on a television series thriller set in New Zealand called Top of the Lake. The series will follow the disappearance of a five…
Familial trail-blazer
New Zealand director Jane Campion’s daughter Alice Englert, 16, has her sights set firmly on a career in music rather than film writes Kristie Lau for The Sydney Morning Herald. “I love my mum…
Improbable classic
Director Jane Campion’s 1993 film The Piano is considered a “classic” of the cinema by the Times which examines the merits of the film starring New Zealand actress Anna Paquin, Holly Hunter and Harvey…
Meeting of minds
New Zealanders director Jane Campion, 55, and actress Kerry Fox, 43, tell The Independent on Sunday how they both came to meet. Fox recalls: “I walked into the audition for An Angel at My…
Poetic challenges
Bright Star director Jane Campion, 55, says she was always terrified of poetry. “It wasn’t poetry that brought me towards this story; it was my ignorance about the subject. I hit 50 and decided…
Antipodean partnership
Director Jane Campion’s Bright Star is “almost certain to be among this year’s leading Oscar contenders” and, according to The Times’ Tom Charity, “one of Campion’s best films, on a par with The Piano,…
Spontaneous breeze
“In person, Campion is neither gorilla nor goddess,” writes Guardian correspondent Peter Conrad. “The breeze derives from her quirky humour and the mercurial play of expression on her face; her greying hair and her…
Cinematic claims
New Zealand-born director Jane Campion’s 1993 film The Piano is included in Vogue Australia’s 50th Anniversary edition featuring alongside Picnic at Hanging Rock, Strictly Ballroom and Lantana as examples of “seminal moments in Australian…
Fox treads the boards
Wellington actress Kerry Fox stars in the Andrew Bovell play Speaking in Tongues on at Duke of York’s Theatre in London. Fox plays Jane, who witnesses a possible crime and struggles with her decision…
Preoccupation with Love
Jane Campion’s Bright Star, which recently opened in New York, won much praise at Cannes, some from unlikely sources. “I’m not really into poetry,” said Quentin Tarantino, who also said he believes Bright Star…
Cannes call to arms
From this year’s Cannes Film Festival, director Jane Campion urged her female counterparts — which number only 6 per cent — to “put on their coats of armour” and take on the “old boys’…
Celebrating women
Director Jane Campion, 55, the only woman ever to have won the Palm d’Or award at Cannes for her movie The Piano, is returning to the French film capital with her latest, Bright Star,…
Gold-plated Memories
Directors Jane Campion and Peter Jackson, as well as actor Russell Crowe — who also hails from Wellington — feature in a Los Angeles Times Oscar winners photo gallery of New Zealand and Australian…
Demanding justice
Wellington actress Kerry Fox plays a prosecutor at the International Criminal Tribunal in thriller Storm, a film set in Bosnia with a suspected Serb war criminal on trial after three years in detention. The…
Rogue takes orders
Wellington actress Anna Paquin, 25, will star as Sookie Stackhouse in HBO drama True Blood, to air in the US in September. Paquin, who won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress in Jane…
Campion on Frame
Jane Campion writes about her encounters with creative compatriot Janet Frame in The Guardian this month. The NZ-born filmmaker brought Frame’s life story to an international audience with her acclaimed film An Angel at…
Campion speaks out for women in film
Jane Campion has spoken out about the lack of female filmmakers while being honoured for her own achievements at the Cannes Film Festival. The New Zealander was one of 35 high-profile directors – the…
Keats Inspires New Campion Film
The doomed love affair between English poet John Keats and his neighbour, Fanny Brawne, is to be the subject of a literary biopic written and directed by Oscar-winning NZ filmmaker, Jane Campion. Keats and…
The people’s Campion
Jane Campion has been lured out of self-imposed retirement for a very worthy cause. She joins fellow directing luminaries Robert Altman, Jodie Foster and Gaspar Noe in contributing to an 8-part feature film outlining…
Brothers in arts
An opinion piece in the Age asks: “Why don’t Australian and New Zealand arts sectors cooperate more?” The lengthy article examines the difference between the two nations in regards to arts funding, profiles the…
Black sheep and proud of it
Jane Campion discusses love, Hollywood, and women directors with Harpers & Queen. “Jane Campion seems to have the wrong name. ‘Jane’ is one of those names that belongs to girls who play skipping-rope, while…
Let’s Talk About Sex
“Jane Campion has made an incredibly sexy movie, and she knows it.” Further cinematic exploration along the edge of the erotic, In the Cut debuted at September’s Toronto Film Festival, stirring up as much…
Making the cut, taking a break
Jane Campion has been welcomed back by cinema critics and audiences after a 4 year break between films, with her harrowing thriller/love story, In the Cut. USA Today describes the film as…
Euphoria Against the Odds
The world premiere of Jane Campion’s An Angel at My Table was listed as one of the 50 greatest moments in the Sydney Film Festival’s first 50 years of running in a Sydney Morning…
Best supporting instrument
LA Times names The Piano as one of the instrument’s most memorable cinematic tributes in the history of film. “In a category of its own is Jane Campion’s modern-day classic The Piano… [Campion is one who…
The Piano
Jane Campion’s The Piano seated in esteemed company in The A List: The National Society of Film Critics’ 1 Essential Films, edited by Jay Carr.
Campion cuts Kidman
New Zealand director Jane Campion nabs red-hot Nicole Kidman for upcoming In the Cut.
Reel Pianos
The Piano, Jane Campion’s “hard to ignore” and “genuinely strange” masterpiece is the star in Jerusalem’s Festival of piano-films – celebrating the filmic attraction of tormented pianists.
The purloined piano?
The Piano secured Jane Campion as a major director and catapulted her from the art-house to the multiplex, but the Oxford Companion to Australian Film recently cast doubt over the originality of the screenplay for…
The Piano plays on
Holly Hunter, who played a mute Scottish widow in Jane Campion’s The Piano (1993), muses on the unexpected success of the movies. “It was a $5 million movie in New Zealand, and it ended…
Anna’s new rhythm
Vanity Fair profiles the maturing of Kiwi actress Anna Paquin, from precocious Oscar winner in Jane Campion’s The Piano, to upcoming roles in Bryan Singer’s blockbusting sci-fi flick X-Men and Cameron Crowe’s 70’s rock…
New Zealand Wilderness a Hit with Big-budget Filmmakers
Ever since Jane Campion brought the surging savage West Coast of Auckland’s Karekare beach and the rain-soaked bush to the world in her award winning film The Piano nearly a decade ago, more and…
Jane Campion is a model profile of a working artist
Anthropologist, artist, and award winner, internationally acclaimed New Zealand director exercises an organic approach to her craft …
