Jane Campion Quotes

I'm a filmmaker. I like to ask the questions, make others feel vulnerable. I don't want to be vulnerable.

I don't think you can be a director without a kind of sense of competitiveness.

For me, filmmaking combines everything. That's the reason I've made cinema my life's work. In films, painting and literature, theatre and music come together. But a film is still a film.

I really do enjoy making movies and I try to test myself on occasion with some different stuff.

Some films go so well, and some films are disappointing. It's the beauty of the craft. You get it right, and you get it wrong. You have tremendous highs, and you have tremendous lows. Hopefully, you learn from them and become better, as you go along.

Now women are rising to great positions and they run most of the studios now.

A man's presence suggests what he is capable of doing to you or for you. By contrast, a woman's presence... defines what can and cannot be done to her.

Directing is all about storytelling. It's not about equipment, or anything else.

Lancelot: Morgaine, Morgaine - kinswoman, I have never seen you weep. Morgaine: Are you like so many men, afraid of a woman's tears? (...) Lancelot: No (...) it makes them seem so much more real, so much more vulnerable - women who never weep frighten me, because I know they are stronger than I, and I am always a little afraid of what they will do.

That's a big responsibility, and the details obsess me. And, also, I no longer feel I have to do the Tonight Show every time I open my mouth. Twenty years ago, I told myself I'd rather direct than act, and it's taken me this long. You lose your passion in acting. You make too many mistakes. Maybe that's why I make so many movies; if you don't like this one, another one's opening on Tuesday. But then I spent six months of my life on 'At Long Last Love,' a picture nobody saw. I enjoyed making it, I learned from it, I grew, but that's too much time out of my life.

I wanted to be a director first to protect my writing. I'm a playwright and you don't need to protect your writing when you're in the theater because everyone's there to protect the writing. When I had an idea for a film that I really cared about as my own, I wanted to direct it, and then I immediately became interested in directing in and of itself because it's such a deep art. You suddenly have all these tools at your disposal to tell the story.

I wrote a script and I've been whispering in director's ears for a really long time and I'd love to direct.

I love working with women directors. They don't mind making you cute.

Women will change the nature of power, rather than power changing the nature of women.

The attractiveness that exists to man in the very helplessness of woman is scarcely realized.

When you're working on a scene, both in the script phase and also in the moment, you look around and you wait for the lightning bolt to strike you and based on your instincts tell you what the right thing to do is here. And that can result in anything from a change of dialogue to the realisation that what you thought was a dramatic scene should actually have some humour. And maybe if you stage it this way it's funnier, or if you put the camera here it tells a different story. That stuff is kind of everything when you're a director.

You know what's it's changed is my appreciate for the art form of making cinema. I don't want to act as much as I want to tell stories. I want to be a part of the whole collective and pull all of the pieces together. That's what I love about directing.

Women are making strides in many areas and women have mentored and supported me along the way. I think that women are underrepresented behind the camera as directors.

I've wanted to direct for a long time, but it had to be a story I wanted to tell. The writer's job is to find the story that he should tell.

I would love to try my hand at directing and even producing in some kind of way. Something about that intrigues me, but for directing I could completely see myself trying.

Every time you enter into a job it's a whole new universe. There's a new language with a new power structure. If you are in an all Black cast its a different dynamic, the same with an all male cast or a crew that is mainly women.

Writing is very different to having your photo taken. You are exposing yourself more, not physically but emotionally.

Music is endless and even though I've heard a whole bunch of music from so many different places and fallen in love countless times with all kinds of different music.There's still something about it,I guess it's called Freedom.

The world of the cinema and of painting are very different; precisely, the possibilities of photography and the cinema reside in that unlimited fantasy which is born of things themselves... a piece of sugar can become on the screen larger than an infinite perspective of gigantic buildings.

I love the art form, but working in film can be a disheartening experience.