Quotes from Jane Campion

I love it when actors come to you with a problem and you have to listen. You'd like them to just get on with it, but it often means that there's a problem with the script.

I think this is interesting, us human creatures are capable of love, and it's a very powerful emotion. It also can go awfully wrong.

When I read Andrew Motion's biography, I wept. It's something about the purity of the story and how fresh it was because of the love letters Keats wrote.

I fell in love again (laughs).

I can get very philosophical and ask the questions Keats was asking as a young guy. What are we here for? What's a soul? What's it all about? What is thinking about, imagination?

I think that the romantic impulse is in all of us and that sometimes we live it for a short time, but it's not part of a sensible way of living. It's a heroic path and it generally ends dangerously. I treasure it in the sense that I believe it's a path of great courage. It can also be the path of the foolhardy and the compulsive.

I think women don't grow up with the harsh world of criticism that men grow up with, we are more sensitively treated, and when you first experience the world of film-making you have to develop a very tough skin.

It's been such a deep and amazing journey for me, getting close to John Keats, and also I love Shelley and Byron. I mean, the thing about the Romantic poets is that they've got the epitaph of romantic posthumously. They all died really young, and Keats, the youngest of them all.

I took four years off after 'In the Cut' because I wanted to see who I'd be without work. I even tried being a hermit in the wilderness in New Zealand. I stayed in a warden's hut two-and-a-half hours off the Routeburn Track through the fjords on the South Island. It was early winter, so there was no electricity or running water.

There are some things that are real, that you can see, that you can observe, like the moon, and grass and things. But for ideas to become real, they have to be played on your senses.

A message I've been telling myself: the cinema is very conservative, and unless you have a story that satisfies you, that is within the unchallenging zone, but you love it, you can't do it as cinema. Otherwise, you better go do it for television, which is more daring now.

For me, being a director is about watching, not about telling people what to do. Or maybe it's like being a mirror; if they didn't have me to look at, they wouldn't be able to put the make-up on.

Eight years ago, I was drawn into Keats's world by Andrew Motion's biography. Soon I was reading back and forth between Keats's letters and his poems. The letters were fresh, intimate and irreverent, as though he were present and speaking. The Keats spell went very deep for me.

I didn't like England. I couldn't take the look of the place or the style of friendship. I need more intimacy from people than is considered okay there, and I felt that my personality and my enthusiasms weren't understood. I had to put a big lid on myself.

This is the first generation to grow up on Thatcher - it's a different ethos. It's money minded, and it's the cult of yourself. Now that's fine, except when it falls down, and you can't achieve your goals - through high unemployment, through the fact that you probably need inherited money to get anywhere.

I would love to see more women directors because they represent half of the population and gave birth to the whole world. Without them the rest [of the world] are not getting to know the whole story.

The studio system is kind of an old boys system and it's difficult for them to trust women to be capable

Women today are dealing with both their independence and also the fact that their lives are built around finding and satisfying the romantic models we grew up with.

To deny women directors, as I suspect is happening in the States, is to deny the feminine vision.

Because there is that sort of feeling that people don't know what to do with gaps in their lives. It's a scary notion, but actually, if you can stand in space just for a little while, a new door will open, or you'll be able to see in the dark after a while. You'll adjust.

Performers are so vulnerable. They're frightened of humiliation, sure their work will be crap. I try to make an environment where it's warm, where it's OK to fail - a kind of home, I suppose.

As for how criticism of Keats' poetry relates to criticism of my own work, I'll leave that for others to decide.

What I have learned from my work up to now, is to try to be open, but also protect myself by not letting the good and the evil get too much importance.

But I think it's quite clear in my work that my orientation isn't political or doesn't come out of modern politics.