Jane Campion breaks down four key scenes from ‘The Power of the Dog’

After a 12-year gap between films, Jane Campion made her feature-length return with this year’s most nominated awards contender. Brooding western The Power Of The Dog earned the New Zealand filmmaker Venice’s Silver Lion for best director and has kept galloping through every awards field since — culminating in 12 Academy Award nominations, including three for Campion, plus eight Bafta nods, three Screen Actors Guild nominations, a Directors Guild Awards slot and three Golden Globe wins. 

The only female director to have won the Palme d’Or until 2021, for 1993’s The Piano, Campion has now made Oscar history by becoming the first female filmmaker to be twice nominated for best director. 

A tale of toxic masculinity and repression set on a Montana ranch in 1925, The Power Of The Dog sees Campion adapt Thomas Savage’s 1967 novel about Phil (Benedict Cumberbatch) and George Burbank (Jesse Plemons). Following a droving run, George marries widowed inn-owner Rose Gordon (Kirsten Dunst), a move that his brother disapproves of, as Phil initially does of Rose’s soft-spoken son Peter (Kodi Smit-McPhee) as well.

Phil’s taunting and disdain only grow when Rose moves to the Burbank ranch. But when Peter visits over his summer break from school, the commanding cowboy slowly starts to spy a kindred spirit. 

“We needed the deepest portrait we could create for Phil,” says Campion. “The main thing with sexuality or eroticism or sensuality is to find the deep notes in it.”

Screen International spoke to Campion about four key scenes in the film. Spoilers follow.

The Burbank brothers dine at The Red Mill

The scene: Phil, George and their cowhands eat at The Red Mill after their cattle drive, with Peter waiting on the group. Rose decorates the table with flowers that Peter has fashioned out of paper, which Phil ridicules, upsetting his hosts.

Campion: “This scene gets all the characters together and is something I look forward to because it kicks off the drama that the film explores. Preceding this scene, we’ve spent some time with the brothers, and with Rose and Peter — and they’re coming from such different worlds — and now for the first time we’ve got them all together.

“The scene is very important to begin the subversive dialogue that goes on throughout the film. Phil inserts his dirty finger into the centre of Peter’s delicate flower stamens and explores it, which is extremely provocative in many ways for Peter. And then later, Phil sets the flower on fire, casually lights up a cigarette and dumps it into the water jug. It’s talking about the sensuality underneath and everywhere and also the explosiveness possibly to come.

“Once we get into these scenes, I like to leave the actors alone. They’re all very thoughtful, incredibly inspired actors, and they have their own dreams about the scenes — and I like to let them hold those dreams and for them to be revealed as we go through the shoot. I might make adjustments or suggestions, but I’m really just enjoying their performances as I see them arrive. In that way, they supply all the character ideas for the performance.

“The hula hoop happened because we had one in the rehearsal space, Kodi was starting to play with it, and I loved it. I asked my art department, ‘Did they hula hoop?’ and it goes back to Ancient Greece or something like that, so hula hoops would’ve been around — although the current use of them I guess is from the ’50s or the ’40s. 

“And then the twirling that Phil does with the chair, I love that he always has this way with objects. He’s elegant and also uses things to express his feelings, like slamming the chair back down. There is a synchronicity between the two actions, but it’s not something that I planned, ‘Oh, they’d both be twirling.’”

Phil remembers Bronco Henry at his sacred place

The scene: Phil takes his horse to the river and caresses a bandanna that bears Bronco Henry’s initials. He thinks he’s alone, but Peter watches on from the willows.

Campion: “Bronco Henry was one of the great challenges of this story because he’s the ghost, so important but never seen. I had to keep thinking of ways to bring the memory of Bronco Henry to the fore. One of the things I did was create a shrine inside the barn that Phil had made for Bronco Henry, where his spurs and his saddle were. That wasn’t in the book, but it helped locate the heart of Phil’s grief, love and yearning. 

“This is the summertime, and I was trying to set up a moment where we could enjoy Phil remembering Bronco Henry. This scene depended on finding a great private location, and then [keeping] it private, which is a hard thing to do because of the complexity of recording material and how many people need to be around. We made it so it was just Ari [Wegner, cinematographer] and myself, and a boom person — maybe that wasn’t even there, maybe we added the sound later — to try to create a situation where Benedict could feel it.

“It did totally depend on his capacity to find Phil’s way of honouring in that sort of samurai style, where he kneels. None of this was planned, this was all Benedict. It was a scene that I love and I remember better than any other scene that we filmed because, honestly, I didn’t breathe through it. Just watching what Ari was managing to record, and what Benedict was doing, and staying in sync with him, it was like she locked into his brain somehow. Those moments are unique and special in filmmaking.

“[With casting Phil Burbank], I felt that a great actor like Benedict, that had a big journey to go on to find this character, would find it more exciting, challenging and be more interested than someone who was closer to the role. When you know you’ve got a big journey, you make space in your life to do this work.

“That’s exactly what Benedict did do. He did go off and do the time on the ranch. He did learn to do those ranching activities and took it seriously. I think he had an appetite for a role that had real depth and challenge.”

Rose meets her new in-laws at the Burbank house

The scene: George and Rose entertain George’s parents (Frances Conroy and Peter Carroll), alongside the Governor (Keith Carradine) and his wife (Alison Bruce), over dinner. Rose is asked to play the piano but she is struck by nerves. Phil makes a late entrance after refusing to wash up for the meal.

Campion: “[In the book], the dinner party scene is very brief, and Phil’s not even there. This was my job in doing the adaptation — the book itself is great reference material, and the idea and the story is there — to bring it into a space where it could be understood in film language, [given the audience is] not always able to see what they’re thinking. I had to find substitutions that would read for film.

“That’s why I put Phil into the scene and sent George out to talk to him, and use the opportunity to go into a fantasy that tipped off in my head about why Phil says he’s not coming — because he stinks and he likes it.

“Phil finds these amazing, sneaky opportunities, even in a crowd of people, where the others are going off to say farewell and he has Rose to himself, and he can just turn that knife on her. I need those sneaky moments in the scene. I felt that was helpful for their relationship, and for her first public drink that we see her take.

“The actors are so incredibly helpful. Kirsten kept saying to me, ‘I don’t think I should be drinking at all until that moment.’ I was saying, ‘Don’t you think you’d drink all through this night, and that’d be part of the reason that you can’t perform?’ And she said, ‘No, if that happens, everyone’s going to think I’m just a drunk.’ And she’s so right. She saved me from myself there.

“I always look from the characters’ points of view, because they’re the important ways of keeping the story moving. My read of it is that Phil’s intention is to expose Rose as a small-town incompetent who is just after George for his money, because in Phil’s books, George has nothing to offer. He’s not handsome, and Phil can’t imagine anybody seeing anything in him. He thinks that for George, he’s the only person who would ever take an interest in him.”

Phil and Peter’s relationship evolves over the course of their final day together

The scene: Phil and Peter spend a day together on the far reaches of the ranch. That evening, Phil braids the rawhide rope he is making for Peter, and asks him to stay to watch. 

Campion: “[In the diner scene], Phil has an automatic bristling to someone presenting themselves as what he would call ‘a sissy’, because it’s what Phil fears. He feels that you can’t present as a man in an effeminate way, it’s disparaging to masculinity, which is how Phil has tortured himself with it. And it’s intriguing how Kodi’s character manages to be comfortable in his skin as a different kind of male.

“I think they are two genuinely lonely people who are actually sharing with each other when they’re by the haystack. Later at the barn, when Peter offers Phil the hide for the rope and touches his arm, in the book it’s written as being a big sign that Peter feels close to him. Maybe not just close but sexually interested, or that’s how Phil’s experiencing it. It becomes a very moving moment that leads into the scene I created, where the rope is being completed and Phil has said, ‘Will you watch me make it?’. That is such a vulnerable thing for Phil to say. It’s like a real date.

“It’s the love scene, as I’ve always called it, even though it’s not fully expressed. I always imagined it with Jonny Greenwood’s music on it. And I had the idea of doing this slow track in on Peter watching the rope being made, then up to Phil’s hands as he’s plaiting it, which happens to be around crotch level, and then back to Peter as he’s watching. Then we see Peter go across to Bronco Henry’s shrine, and Peter knows that this is playing into Phil’s favourite area. 

“Peter is just trying to keep Phil at the job, keep him there as long as possible and let that poison work. And at the same time, he is enjoying the erotic sense he has, the power he has over Phil. He can feel it, and we feel it as an audience that Peter is aware of Phil’s intention in a different way than it’s ever been before. 

“It really begins on those hills outside as well, where the music starts, and it’s that long horn, almost like a whale’s song. It’s a masculine sound and a haunted lonely sound, and it plays on beyond that scene. All of that builds the sensuality of the scene, because the hills have got such muscularity in them, and they’ve always been there and now we’re seeing them tighter and closer than ever before.” 

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