Best Western
INDISPENSABLE HOME ENTERTAINMENT
Almost a year on from her Oscar win for The Power Of The Dog, writer-director JANE CAMPION revisits her much-lauded drama
EDITED BY CHRIS HEWITT
Peter (Kodi Smit-McPhee) and Phil (Benedict Cumberbatch) ride out.
Jane Campion at work, as first assistant director Phil Jones observes.
IT WAS A hell of a comeback. The Power Of The Dog, Jane Campion’s first film since 2009’s Bright Star, bagged 12 Oscar nominations, with Campion winning for Best Director. Adapted by her from Thomas Savage’s 1967 novel, it is set in 1925 and swirls around rancher Phil Burbank (Benedict Cumberbatch), a closeted gay man who had a secret relationship with his mentor, Bronco Henry, and now, tortured and downright mean, takes out his pain and shame on those around him — particularly his brother’s wife Rose (Kirsten Dunst) and her son Peter (Kodi Smit-McPhee). It’s a beautiful, beguiling, intense and tender drama which, clearly, leaves a trail of superlatives in its wake.
With a new Campion-approved 4K master hitting Criterion, the director pulls up a chair in her New Zealand seaside home to talk to Empire while the trees sway outside. She’s taking a break from working on the new film school (funded, like The Power Of The Dog, by Netflix) she’s set up, for which she has selected ten participants, who will get paid to study there — it’s a dream project, she says, yet baulks slightly when we ask if she’ll be teaching. “I don’t think I’m much of a teacher. I would say I share practice. But when I share practice, I do it good,” she laughs. There can be no doubting that.