Jane Campion followed ‘Bright Star’ with a move to TV and ‘Top of the Lake’
Technically speaking, Jane Campion hasn’t released a film since 2009’s “Bright Star.” But as far as she’s concerned, she never stopped making movies.
Yes, “Top of the Lake,” which ran on Sundance in 2013, and its follow-up, “Top of the Lake: China Girl,” premiering next month, are both TV miniseries. And yet the critically praised projects have an inexorably cinematic quality that perhaps explains why they were screened , at the Sundance and Cannes film festivals, respectively.
Campion is famously the only woman to win the coveted Palme d’Or at Cannes and one of just four women ever nominated for a director Oscar. So what led her to the small screen after such a distinguished film career?
As Campion has said elsewhere, she was making “Bright Star,” a modestly budgeted film she’d struggled to get made in a difficult financial environment, and had an epiphany when she stumbled on an episode of HBO’s “Deadwood.” Her previous picture, the erotic thriller “In the Cut,” had been released six years earlier after a fraught development process to largely negative reviews.
“I thought film started to feel a bit conservative,” Campion said recently by telephone. “You know you’ve always got to be careful like, ‘What was the audience gonna think, was the audience gonna come?,’ you know? And I think it was really killing off a lot of originality and playfulness. In television or in the series world, the audience is very quick, very clever.”
While she’s using the same equipment and working with some of the same collaborators — editor Alexandre de Franceschi and composer Mark Bradshaw are among those who worked on both “Bright Star” and “Top of the Lake” — Campion says she has “the most freedom as a storyteller” in television.
Still, don’t rule out a return to the big screen. After making two lengthy miniseries, “A film seems very contained, very nice,” she says.
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