In Contention

Tag: In the Cut

  • INTERVIEW: Jane Campion

    Jane CampionJane Campion’s laugh comes as a rather lovely surprise: full, throaty and often directed at herself, it betrays a personality more robust, mischievous even, than one might surmise from her fragile, often solemn films. It’s a disconnect she cheerfully acknowledges, and credits in part to her collaborators.

    “As a filmmaker, it helps me to be around young people,” she says, referring to the unusually youthful cast and crew of “Bright Star,” her exquisite meditation on first love, nature and poetry – via the star-crossed affair of John Keats and his teenaged lover Fanny Brawne.

    “People in their twenties can be quite moody and quiet, and not in a bad way – they know how to be alone with their thoughts. People my age tend to blab on a bit without thinking, like I’m doing now.”

    She laughs again. If that’s a frequent occurrence over the course of our phone conversation, it could be because Campion is as relaxed and content as she has ever been in her career. Her first feature since 2003’s harshly-received erotic thriller “In the Cut,” “Bright Star” has placed the New Zealander back in critics’ good graces, even if it looks increasingly unlikely to emulate the Oscar success of her 1993 breakthrough “The Piano.”

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  • NYT gets down with ‘The Wrestler’

    The New York Times has been a veritable piñata of goodies these past few days. In addition to the return of the Carpetbagger, they are treating us with a double-shot of “Wrestler”-related interviews, one with relative newbie screenwriter Robert D. Siegel, and of course, a massive profile of man-of-the-hour Mickey Rourke.

    I’m not sure what it is about Rourke, but he clearly brings out the best in journalists. His interview with Kris was, I think, one of the most inspired to have graced these pages, and this vast NYT piece follows suit. With none of the affectations that often come with overly PR-directed interviews, he exhibits the kind of open, candid sense of self that can only come with having got both the sweet and the fuzzy ends of the lollipop in his career; he’s one of the few movie stars around today who not only has interesting stories to tell, but is actually willing and able to tell them.

    As usual, this one’s full of nice incidental tidbits, whether he’s admitting that “Harley Davidson and the Motorcycle Man” is the only film he regrets making (really? So “Wild Orchid” was okay, then?), or offering sage advice on dog-parenting. (On being told that peanut butter and bacon isn’t really a suitable diet for his beloved pug Loki, he shoots, “She’s sixteen years old … she can have whatever she wants.”)

    But the meat of the interview comes when he confronts his own career collapse, rationalising it in a surprisingly lucid and moving way:

    I resented all the money and what came with it, the way people treated me in a special way. I didn’t know how to play the game. Nobody told me it was a business. I thought my acting talent transcended the business of films. I never had a game plan for my career. I didn’t have the tools for that. If I would have been educated enough, I might have avoided a lot of pain. So I became arrogant and self-destructive. I fought everyone ’cause I thought that was a kind of strength, but it became my weakness.

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