From Sweetie to The Piano, she has made some of cinema’s strangest, strongest films. So why has she switched to the small screen?
Jane Campion, one of the world’s great film directors, has had it with the movies. It is eight years since she last made a full-length feature (the Keats biopic Bright Star), and 14 years since her sexually explicit thriller In The Cut almost did for her career. Now she is having a Gloria Swanson moment: she’s still big, it’s just the pictures that got small.
Movies, she says, have become conservative cash cows. “The really clever people used to do film. Now, the really clever people do television. I’d been feeling, in the film world, that if you come up with ideas, and you share them, the first concern is: how is the audience going to react?” Television has reinvigorated her. “Cinema in Australia and New Zealand has become much more mainstream. It’s broad entertainment, broad sympathy. It’s just not my kind of thing. As a goal, to make money out of entertaining doesn’t inspire me. But in television, there is no concern about politeness or pleasing the audience. It feels like creative freedom.”
Continue reading...posted from The Guardian
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.