The Paul Thomas Anderson movie that inspires Jane Campion
For the last 20 years, the writer and director Jane Campion has been making some of the most mysterious, arresting, and intelligent films in modern cinema. Campion is the second of seven women to be nominated for the Academy Award for ‘Best Director’ in recognition of her 1993 film The Piano. However, her latest effort, The Power of the Dog, has brought her filmmaking to the attention of a larger audience.
In 1993, Campion released her beautiful and beguiling 19th-century period drama The Piano, starring Harvey Keitel, Sam Neil, Anna Paquin, and Holly Hunter. Set in Campion’s native New Zealand, the film tells the story of a mute woman and her daughter who are exiled and sent across the world along with a piano. The woman has been arranged to marry a wealthy landowner but begins to fall in love with a poorer farm worker. Campion handles the story as if it’s an adaptation from a novel written in the period, and her stunning use of voyeuristic photography makes it seem as if the frame is a window into the era. It’s a superb movie that went on to win the Palm d’Or at Cannes and the Academy Award for ‘Best Original Screenplay’.
Campion’s recent offering was the western thriller The Power Of Dog, adapted by the filmmaker from Thomas Savage’s novel. Set on the hostile plains of Montana during the 1920s, an overbearing and bullish rancher reacts badly when his brother brings a new wife and her son into his home. It’s a brooding and pulsating drama that delves deep into the masculine psyche, which earned Campion the Academy Award for ‘Best Director’.
Bearing this in mind, Campion recently shared some of the films that have shaped her own career as a filmmaker with A-Frame. However, there was one filmmaker and a specific film of theirs that Campion cites as having a significant influence on her work: Paul Thomas Anderson and his hypnotic masterpiece, The Master.
The Master, Anderson’s freewheeling, bewildering, and epic film, tells the tale of Freddie Quell, a lost soul and World War Two veteran who has a knack for brewing homemade alcohol by siphoning fuel from bombs and anything else he can get his hands on. Freddie sneaks onto a cruise ship that belongs to Lancaster Dodd, the leader of a cult. What follows is a complex and manipulative power dynamic between Freddie and his new master.
The Master, on the surface level, might be considered a story about religious ideologies, the plight of veterans returning from the war during the 1950s, and alcohol abuse, but like so many of Anderson’s films, it’s about so much more than that, and this is something Campion appreciates. “I like the way that Paul’s films play loose with narrative,” she said. “Sometimes following tight causal patterns, then breaking away to more tangential expressions, seemingly in service of discovering some more elusive quality.”
It’s no wonder Campion has cited Anderson as a reference, as there are some striking similarities between The Power Of The Dog and Anderson’s triumphant There Will Be Blood, such as her use of cinematography to capture the vast oppressive landscape of the frontier, and Campion even hired Anderson’s longtime collaborator Jonny Greenwood to compose the score. But it’s Anderson’s ability to build a world and transport his audiences to a different slice of history that Campion adores most. She said: “I simply appreciate everything in his films and, in particular, the texture of his world, the feeling of reality, and the photography of his characters that is qualitatively different, somehow more tender and curious than everyone else’s”.
