A collection of Jane Campion’s favourite movies
Following the release of her feature debut, Sweetie, in 1989, Jane Campion found widespread acclaim just a few years later with The Piano. The historical romantic drama allowed Campion to become the second woman in Oscar history to receive a ‘Best Director’ nomination, eventually winning the prize in 2021 for The Power of the Dog.
The director has enjoyed a successful career, mainly crafting period pieces, including a John Keats biopic, Bright Star, and an adaptation of Henry James’ novel The Portrait of a Lady. Campion has broken many boundaries in the androcentric filmmaking world, becoming the first woman to win the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival.
To achieve greatness, Campion has looked to other filmmakers for inspiration, such as Jean-Luc Godard and Akira Kurosawa, as well as contemporaries like Paul Thomas Andeson and Jonathan Glazer. Over the years, Campion has discussed some of her favourite movies and the ones that have significantly inspired her.
The director cites the subversive cult classic The Night Porter by Liliana Cavani as one of her favourites, telling Criterion how it made an “enormous impression” on her. She explained that the movie “persuades me that our lives are not logical but poetic and allegorical.”
Elsewhere, she heaped praise on surrealist master Luis Buñuel, particularly his movie That Obscure Object of Desire, with Campion calling the artist “my first deep love in cinema.” The director described him as “the adult that pulled the plug on the human art of pretending. He blazes through the hypocrisy at the heart of our bourgeois lives mercilessly—no one is sacred, no ideal or moral is spared.”
Campion is also a big fan of Federico Fellini, picking La Strada as her favourite movie of his. “Fellini is a deep, deep master of film. As time goes by I adore him more and more.” She continued, “Fellini is the most fluent filmmaker of them all. His shots and storytelling are so at ease and elegant, it’s as if he’s thinking his shots through a camera in his mind and straight onto a screen.”
Discussing some of the movies that she couldn’t help but think back to while making The Power of the Dog, Campion cited Badlands by Terrence Malik, calling it “a perfect film,” and telling A.Frame how she loves the filmmaker’s “delicacy of shooting style and observation.” She also picked out his “beautiful and elegiac” movie Days of Heaven, stating, “Returning to this film, I appreciated the sustained mood of romance and impending doom.”
Discover Campion’s complete list of favourite movies below.
A collection of Jane Campion’s favourite movies:
- Seven Samurai (Akira Kurosawa, 1954)
- The Night Porter (Liliana Cavani, 1974)
- The Firemen’s Ball (Miloš Forman, 1967)
- That Obscure Object of Desire (Luis Buñuel, 1977)
- Contempt (Jean-Luc Godard, 1963)
- Tokyo Story (Yasujirō Ozu, 1953)
- La strada (Federico Fellini, 1954)
- Scenes from a Marriage (Ingmar Bergman, 1973)
- Samurai I: Musashi Miyamoto (Hiroshi Inagaki, 1954)
- Badlands (Terrence Malick, 1973)
- Days of Heaven (Malick, 1978)
- Birth (Jonathan Glazer, 2004)
- The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (John Huston, 1948)
- The Master (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2012)
