Jane Campion Quotes
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Tragedy makes you grow up.
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I had a daughter who was 9 years old and I had the feeling I wasn't going to be a real parent if I didn't quit making movies for a while and spend time with her. I also felt that I'd made enough movies and said what I had to say at the time.
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You know, sex is actually not so original as the way people love or the stories behind each relationship, which is what you remember. Sex is sex in the end.
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It's a luxury to be able to tell a long form story. I love novels, and I love to have a long relationship with characters.
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Women today are dealing with both their independence and also the fact that their lives are built around finding and satisfying the romantic models we grew up with.
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I had this spooky psychological thing about 'The Piano' before it began, which was how everybody was going to go nuts on the set. Because a film tends to set up the way people are going to behave.
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This is the first generation to grow up on Thatcher - it's a different ethos. It's money minded, and it's the cult of yourself. Now that's fine, except when it falls down, and you can't achieve your goals - through high unemployment, through the fact that you probably need inherited money to get anywhere.
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I think feature film can be quite conservative, because you have to now get audiences to come out, and it's quite a hard thing to do. Of course, television can be conservative too.
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Actual violence has no attraction for me at all.
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It's harder being a woman director because on the whole women don't have husbands or boyfriends who are willing to be wives
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I think women don't grow up with the harsh world of criticism that men grow up with, we are more sensitively treated, and when you first experience the world of film-making you have to develop a very tough skin.
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I didn't like England. I couldn't take the look of the place or the style of friendship. I need more intimacy from people than is considered okay there, and I felt that my personality and my enthusiasms weren't understood. I had to put a big lid on myself.
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What I have learned from my work up to now, is to try to be open, but also protect myself by not letting the good and the evil get too much importance.
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When I read Andrew Motion's biography, I wept. It's something about the purity of the story and how fresh it was because of the love letters Keats wrote.
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I took four years off after 'In the Cut' because I wanted to see who I'd be without work. I even tried being a hermit in the wilderness in New Zealand. I stayed in a warden's hut two-and-a-half hours off the Routeburn Track through the fjords on the South Island. It was early winter, so there was no electricity or running water.
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I think that three-act fundamentalism in film culture is a problem sometimes, because it's almost too obvious, or it's too expected. And it's not the only way to fill two hours, or to phrase things, or to order thoughts, or order ideas.
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I love it when actors come to you with a problem and you have to listen. You'd like them to just get on with it, but it often means that there's a problem with the script.
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I think this is interesting, us human creatures are capable of love, and it's a very powerful emotion. It also can go awfully wrong.
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I'm a much better filmmaker than painter. But studying it did make me visually acute and taught me lessons like being economic: Say something once and you don't have to say it again.
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In some ways Holy Smoke is about people's journey to the heart.
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When you first fall in love it's so thrilling, you can't wait to throw yourself away and make this new wonderful twosome.
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A message I've been telling myself: the cinema is very conservative, and unless you have a story that satisfies you, that is within the unchallenging zone, but you love it, you can't do it as cinema. Otherwise, you better go do it for television, which is more daring now.
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But short films are not inferior, just different. I think the short gives a freedom to film-makers. What's appealing is that you don't have as much responsibility for storytelling and plot. They can be more like a portrait, or a poem.
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I would love to see more women directors because they represent half of the population and gave birth to the whole world. Without them the rest [of the world] are not getting to know the whole story.
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Between 18 and 26 I acted professionally, on the stage and a little bit on television. Acting is okay, but it's quite pressurized. Then I went to England - I wanted to reinvent myself.
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I've had a lot of different responses to my films. I got a lot of support from 'The Piano,' the obvious one, but it feels like an ocean, with a lot going on - the goal is to keep alive.
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If you start with a good idea, you can encapsulate it in a phrase and explain it. I like high-concept films. Everyone can get hold of it. I don't think there's any harm in that at all.
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Eight years ago, I was drawn into Keats's world by Andrew Motion's biography. Soon I was reading back and forth between Keats's letters and his poems. The letters were fresh, intimate and irreverent, as though he were present and speaking. The Keats spell went very deep for me.
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I think that the romantic impulse is in all of us and that sometimes we live it for a short time, but it's not part of a sensible way of living. It's a heroic path and it generally ends dangerously. I treasure it in the sense that I believe it's a path of great courage. It can also be the path of the foolhardy and the compulsive.
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I can't imagine people telling me what to do - I just can't imagine it.
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