It’s been eleven years since her feature “Bright Star” (2009) and four years since her last series, the second season of ‘Top Of The Lake,‘ titled “Top of the Lake: China Girl,” but legendary auteur Jane Campion (“The Piano“). is finally back. Her latest film, the luminous and haunting “The Power Of The Dog,” comes out December 1 on Netflix (November 17 in a limited theatrical release; read our review here). The movie centers on a charismatic rancher (Benedict Cumberbatch) who inspires fear and awe in those around him. But the order of his world is turned upside down when his usually submissive and pliant brother (Jesse Plemons) brings home a new wife (Kirsten Dunst) and her son (Kodi Smit-McPhee). Seemingly incensed by his brother’s decision to have a life outside him and bring strangers into their house, he begins a relentless, icy campaign of emotional torment aimed at his new family members.
There’s much more to the rich and layered film, which features a fantastic score by Radiohead‘s Jonny Greenwood. Given its period setting and toxic male center, the film somewhat resembles what would happen if Campion tried to make her own twisted version of “There Will Be Blood.” Still, it’s better to let its secrets lay for the viewer to experience first hand. One of the highlights of the recent New York Film Festival, where ‘Power Of The Dog’ played as its centerpiece selection, was Campion in conversation with fellow filmmaker Sofia Coppola (“Lost In Translation“), the two colleagues and admirers of each other’s work (Campion said she fell in love early on with “The Virgin Suicides“). We happened to miss the conversation, but Film At Lincoln Center recently put the full one-hour Q&A talk online (see below).
It’s a fascinating conversation, with a delightful Campion much more playful, candid, and DGAF about things than you might expect. For starters, one interesting tidbit was Campion revealing that Paul Newman tried to star in and make “The Power of The Dog” way back when.
The director said she’d been dying to work with the aforementioned musician Jonny Greenwood for her new film. Clearly, she’d been paying attention to his film composition work and felt he’d be perfect for her latest work about control, masculinity, and power dynamics. “I’ve always loved his music. I’ve always admired the hell out of him and admired everything he’s done with Paul Thomas Anderson,” she explained. “He’s my hero. I feel like I’m his best audience; I’m always going to love what he does.” As for her direction to Greenwood? “Look, honestly, you should do whatever you want, Jonny,” she said with a laugh.
The auteur also talked about her excellent and criminally underseen BBC2/Sundance Channel murder mystery crime series “Top Of The Lake” (2013). The series is another phenomenal piece of work, a real forerunner in auteur-driven TV (before 2014’s “True Detective,” which seemed to usher in a new era of this brand of TV).
Having never done both TV and film (though she has a show in the works currently for AppleTV+), Coppola genuinely sounded curious and asked Campion what she felt the differences were. “Well, it’s so obvious to me that everything ends up online anyway, one way or another,” she said for starters. “And then it’s the length and the storytelling potential you can get out of a series.”
“I definitely feel like in a series you can be a lot wilder, for some reason, the feature culture is more conservative,” Campion continued. “But in the series culture, you can be very crazy, and since I’m a little bit crazy, it was nice to play in that field…What I didn’t like about it was so much fucking work,” she laughed.
Speaking more in-depth about “Top Of The Lake” —which starred Elisabeth Moss as the show’s lead detective (she almost starred in ‘Power of The Dog’ but had to drop out due to scheduling)—Campion also thinks it was criminally under-watched. To the point, she says, she hopes Netflix buys (or licenses it) and puts it on their streaming service.
“I would love to see them go onto Netflix or some kind of [streaming service]. I would have loved it to have been on something like Netflix, where I think it would have more presence. I wish they’d go and buy them. Netflix?” she said, turning comically to pose the question to some of the Netflix PR in the audience. “Because I still think they haven’t been seen that widely at all, and I do love that show.”
Campion’s not wrong, “Top Of The Lake” was definitely underseen. Look at a very broad but telling metric: “The Power of The Dog” isn’t even out yet, and it has nearly 80 reviews on Rotten Tomatoes. “Top Of The Lake” season one only has 40, all these years later (films or series that have been out for years tend to amass hundreds of reviews over the years as people catch up). As a massive Campion fan and a huge champion of “Top Of The Lake,” we’d love to see it. Netflix? It must be a drop in the bucket for you, no? Watch the entire one-hour conversation below with a few related discussions from NYFF and “The Power of The Dog” cast.