Hello, my name's Justin the Klu, and I'm here today with Will Sloan.

And you're listening to The Important Cinema Club.

And today, we're talking about a con film festival darling, and that's Jane Campion.

Were you familiar with her work before doing this podcast?

I'd seen a couple of her movies over the years,

as you do. She hasn't released that many. She just made the sort of movies like, you know,

the piano that you kind of see over the years if you're interested in movies. Yeah, she's a

filmmaker that was always on the outskirts and wasn't something that I would actively go and see.

Could it perhaps be because we're... White guys?

Or just guys?

Yeah.

Like, it hasn't been like appointment viewing.

Like, looking back, her previous films were like a romantic kind of very mannered biopic,

bright star that came out.

She did Top of the Lake recently as a TV series.

But her real hits were like the piano and an angel at my

table. And particularly the piano, which was a genuine cultural phenomenon at the time it came

out. Like there's still jokes you can find them like magazines and shit about that defining what

art cinema is. So Jane Campion grew up in a family of artists. Her parents worked for the theater. When she went to

school, she actually wanted to get away from all that. And she studied anthropology because she

wanted nothing to do with artists or anything like that because it had been part of her life so much.

And then suddenly she got interested in storytelling through what she was studying,

...