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A cut above

November 7, 2003

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Jane Campion is bowing out of the movie business for a while, but she hangs around long enough to discuss her latest film with Helen Barlow.

Jane Campion's screen adaptation of Susanna Moore's bestselling In the Cut, with its explicit sex scenes and altered ending, has polarised international critics, as her films so often do. Audience members simultaneously cheered and booed at Sweetie's Cannes festival screening in 1989. The Venice response to The Portrait of a Lady in 1996 and Holy Smoke in 1999 was lukewarm, and although In the Cut's recent Toronto film festival reception was more favourable, with many critics hailing it as her best film since The Piano, the film had its fair share of detractors.

Always teetering on the edge of controversy with her unflinching vision, Campion, strangely enough, can't always take the heat, and looks tired as we talk in London's Dorchester Hotel.

A week earlier, Campion's good friend and The Piano star Holly Hunter (discussing her upcoming film Thirteen) had told me Campion was about to retire. This turned out to be a slight exaggeration - but then maybe not.

"Yeah, I am (retiring)," admits the forthright New Zealander. "I'm taking four years off. Maybe more, but no less," she says, stressing the no less. "I've got a nine-year-old daughter and I want to spend more time with her and just do some different things. I'll actually have some fun with my friends and have some time for myself."

Campion, who lives in Sydney, will spend her regular holiday periods in her "hut" in the New Zealand wilderness. She also plans to make a short film for the United Nations.

"A number of film directors from around the world have been asked by the United Nations to do something targeting one of their initiatives, and my film is about the environment and preservation of wilderness," she explains. "So I'm keen to do that in our end of the world, New Zealand or Australia, but probably New Zealand."

As if we couldn't tell from her previous films, she has a strong connection with nature.

"I'm absolutely in love with the wilderness. For me it's of real spiritual value."

Campion's spirituality greatly informs her cinema. She's keen to have her characters transform, to be liberated, to go places they might not have been. And her actors, too. Who else could have cajoled tough-guy Harvey Keitel to strip for the camera and - more importantly - be sexy and sensual in The Piano? He even came back for more in Holy Smoke.

Now, America's sweetheart, Meg Ryan, has embraced the Campion vision. The In the Cut star greatly reduced her fee, jokes how she had "a cubicle" for a trailer, and says the movie had a profound effect on her.

"Making this movie has changed me," Ryan says. "It's been one of the big, huge influences on my life. It was extraordinarily satisfying, the most satisfying film experience I've ever had, and I'm really proud of the movie, too.

"Being around the example of Jane, the kind of woman that she is, the kind of truth-teller that she is, her whole spiritual relationship to her art, everything about it just took me aback. I was happy every single day just to watch how she negotiated her day - how she found her shots, to how she treated people, to how happy the crew was to be there. She had collected a lovely bunch of people who were interested in serving an idea, a story and a director."

Set in New York's East Village, In the Cut is dark in tone and colour, and presents the usually chirpy blue-eyed, blonde Ryan as a sexually repressed, brown-haired, brown-eyed creative writing teacher, set against Mark Ruffalo as a decidedly crude homicide detective.

But what makes this erotic detective murder-mystery fascinating is its premise: that a woman witnessing a sexual act is aroused by what she sees, and then experiences a sexual awakening with a man, a detective, who is possibly a murderer.

Adventurous at heart and determined to break cultural and sexual taboos, Campion includes scenes that are unconventional for mainstream movies. She has dialogue concerning the clitoris, a nude post-coital scene of Ryan and Ruffalo, and - perhaps most boldly - she starts the film with a soon-to-be-murdered woman performing fellatio, a scene sure to be abridged for the American release - even if the penis is fake.

"I'd never ask an actress to suck dick," Campion says with some conviction, then lets out a huge laugh. "Generally they'd do anything to get a job, and I don't think that's necessary."

It was necessary, however, for Ryan to partake in some highly erotic sex scenes, very tastefully filmed.

"Meg's a very independent person with extremely strong views," Campion says. "I wouldn't even dream of asking her to do something she didn't want to do - she was just there for the story, like all actors. That's what they're about; they want to reveal themselves for the character. We had no boring, endless long discussions about it. It was just happening, and that was it."

What has got fans of the novel up in arms is not the film's sex, but the ending. What is different about Campion's version is that Ryan's Frannie gets another chance, while in the book she doesn't.

"I didn't want to end it like the book," explains the director, "and we never would have found the financing to do it that way. While Susanna and I really love each other, we're different people. I'm an optimist and a survivor; I'm interested in redemption and survival, but she's kind of a sadder person, more fatalistic, from a different (older) generation, and I think more inclined towards female self-sacrifice than I am."

Campion is delighted with the film. She insists her escape from filmmaking has nothing to do with her time making In the Cut.

"It would have to be one of the all-time classic, incredible, pure, good experiences of my career," she says. "Everyone was excited, everybody was on board, everyone was putting everything they knew into it, and it felt like a story that could take it.

"And we were in one of the most fascinating cities in the world at a time (a year after the September 11 terror attacks) when it still felt a little dangerous to be there. It was a city that was still grieving, and it was an incredible atmosphere."

Her next task is to consider the American cut of the film, but Campion is confident there'll be little scandal.

"I think by the time they see their version it's going to be pretty hard for them to create scandal out of it," she says with a laugh. "They'll know something (sexual) has happened in the opening scene, but it's that sort of film language where you only just get to see enough."

In the Cut opens next week.

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