Our Bright Star

BY DENISE MCNABB

ONE COULD be forgiven for thinking Jane Campion has an age obsession. Not in a negative way. She revels in being 55 and drops it into the conversation frequently – a punctuation mark as if to say she has got this far in life and it's treating her exactly how she wants it.

The effervescent take on her years may have something to do with her latest movie, Bright Star, a potent and romantic tale about the ill-fated love between penniless and dying poet John Keats and his young, perky neighbour, Fanny Brawne. Keats died suffering from tuberculosis at the age of 25 in Rome.

Then again, the age thing could be just hormones, says Campion, laughing raucously.

"Whatever it is, I love it. I am very aware of my age. I don't think there has ever been a better time," she says with unbridled enthusiasm. "You are just that little bit freer from all your fears and desires, more relaxed, and you can be more true to yourself.

"Life is amazing – it's only thoughts about it which are horrible."

She considers it a job just being human "with your mind raining on you all day long".

"I don't have to work, but working with people you love is a really lovely way to fill in your time."

Campion's time spent on Bright Star has turned out to her total satisfaction. The film was chosen to open last year's New Zealand International Film Festival in Auckland.

"Some people think it is my best film ever and some like to argue whether or not it is my best, but I think it is my best," she says. "It is a quiet film because it's measured and focused."

The Guardian's film critic, Peter Bradshaw, described Bright Star as an intelligent film, "defiantly and unfashionably about the vocation of love".

Campion says she never reads reviews but is touched by the word intelligent as opposed to intellectual.

"Many people just loved the script, but there was still a lot of doubt about whether this was the right time for a story like this," she says.

"If you are lucky enough to do a film really well, one that is well cast, and you have the vision for it and you do it beautifully and people love it, then it becomes attractive. That sounds so boring, I know, but it is really fresh. It feels so now."

Campion, the Kiwi film director with a string of world-acclaimed movies to her credit, is relaxed, happy, unplugged. She is on a promotional circuit to talk about the making of the movie in just eight weeks in Britain and Rome during the winter and spring of 2008.

She says the young poet's love letters to Fanny, captured in Andrew Motion's biography on Keats, moved her to tears.

"I was aware of Keats' poetry but I don't like poetry and was trying to do something about it," she says. "This is about the power of love stories. It's a rich adventure.

"Keats, Byron, Shelley – they all died so young. What is so romantic, so exciting about [these poets] is they put different values on life to what we do. They put the value of following the soul and the spirit as high priority rather than what was conventionally required."

Campion says she doesn't perceive this to mean they fell in love and had a great time. Rather, it was that they honoured their higher impulses first.

"That is very engaging, particularly with the drudgery of living then."

SITTING IN an oversized cream couch, in the Sydney house office of her co-producer and long-time work ally Jan Chapman, Campion looks for all the world like she would be more at home teaching yoga instead of running to punishing schedules for movie productions.

Her long, silver and honey-coloured hair is bunched in a ponytail to one side. She wears no makeup and her lightly tanned face is barely wrinkled. She is in top-to-toe black.

On yoga she does digress briefly to say she is a convert, spending 15 to 30 minutes every day on the practice, even if her version is "ridiculous yoga, comedy yoga".

A women she met and who became a close friend in India introduced her to yoga. Campion credits this friend with inspiration for her movies, including Bright Star. At first she thought the film wouldn't happen.

"But if I fall in love with [an idea] I have to try and do it, no matter how small it is, even if it is a little thing for television. Following my heart gives me the energy to make a movie."

She spoke to her financier Pathe and the firm had never heard of Keats until she gave them the book.

"They cried too," she says.

The movie stars British actor Ben Whishaw as Keats, Australia's Abbie Cornish as Fanny Brawne and Kerry Fox as Fanny's mother.

Britain's unusually bright blue sky during filming gives a textural and brilliant background for scenes filmed in fields smothered in flowers, and filled with birdsong.

Campion says the weather in Britain during the entire film shoot was so exceptional it was "spooky", and she wonders if Keats was nodding in approval from beyond.

She says Bright Star – so named because of a poem of that title written by Keats for Brawne – is about the way Keats' poetry works. She says it works on the senses and even when he is not there it's about the yearning.

Campion reflects on the number of young people who worked on the film. Her composer Mark Bradshaw, for instance, was Keats' age.

"It was a kind of mantra for me to trust young people because Keats had already done his major work at 23 and quite often we don't really how much young people are in their prime then," she says.

"Young people are sort of in the experience more. They don't seem to chat as much as us. They are much dreamier than we are.

"Ben [Whishaw] is 30-something but we laugh and have fun together, and I love the breakup of the ages."

Campion gets back to another age-related subject – invisible women like her in their 50s. They will be the subject of her next mini-series – a mystery detective story. Writing a detective story has been a lifelong goal for Campion but the script – yet to be written with Gerard Lee, her co-scriptwriter of her early movie Sweetie – will have some of that life questioning bent so permeating Campion's life right now.

It will be called Top of the Lake and will be set somewhere on the wilderness edge of a South Island lake, but she doesn't want to say where just yet.

"So why are women invisible in their 50s? These women are all post-menopausal and kind of neglected or unseen in the world, unf--kable – excuse my language. I'm in that age group of invisible women in a spiritual sense." In other senses, though, she is known far and wide.

Jane Campion

Born: April 30, 1954, Wellington, to Edith and Richard Campion, an actress and theatre and opera director respectively.

Education: Anthropology degree from Victoria University (1975); painting major at Sydney College of the Arts (1979). Married: Colin Englert, daughter Alice (b 1994), son Jasper (1993 but died 10 days later).

Lives: Sydney, Australia Awards: Palme d'Or at Cannes Film Festival for first short film, Peel, in 1983; Palme d'Or at Cannes for The Piano in 1993; best director Oscar nominee for The Piano in 1994 (Anna Paquin won an Oscar for best supporting actress in The Piano, Holly Hunter won an Oscar for best actress, and the movie won best original screenplay).

Film highlights: Sweetie, An Angel at My Table, The Piano, The Portrait of a Lady, In the Cut.

Bright Star is in cinemas from February 18.

- © Fairfax NZ News