Nicole Kidman and Jane Campion: The burning question
One of the great cultural lessons of 2017 was surely the power of female friendship and female collaboration to deliver great viewing. (It was a lesson made all the more pointed because we were also being reminded of its antecedent, so camply dramatized in the FX show Feud, about two women in Hollywood – Bette Davis and Joan Crawford – who delivered great entertainment, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, fueled almost entirely by mutual loathing.)
Hopefully, things have moved on. The creative bond forged between Nicole Kidman and Reese Witherspoon as actors-turned-producers led to the phenomenal Big Little Lies, which justly swept the Emmys and Golden Globes, and has set a new bar for series created by and about complex women.
But that wasn’t the only show to be powered by women. We were gifted with The Handmaid’s Tale (produced by and starring Elisabeth Moss, directed by Reed Morano), GLOW (created by Liz Flahive and Carly Mensch, starring Alison Brie) and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel (created by Amy Sherman-Palladino and with Rachel Brosnahan in the lead) to name a few.
We also had Top of the Lake: China Girl, a haunting and beautiful thriller about a missing girl that many viewers seemed to overlook when it aired last year, but which is definitely worth a revisit. Co-created and co-directed by Jane Campion, the series is a follow-up to the police procedural Top of the Lake, starring Elisabeth Moss, which first aired in 2013. The original series was set around a small lakeside community in New Zealand; the follow-up shifts to Sydney, and sees Gwendoline Christie, Jane Campion’s daughter Alice Englert and Nicole Kidman join the cast.
Kidman and Campion have history. While still at high school, Kidman was set to star in one of Campion’s student films, but the young actress balked at being cast when she realized she’d have to kiss another girl. (She later took the lead in Campion’s big-screen adaptation of Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady in 1996.) Kidman has thankfully outgrown that young bashfulness to become one of the most daring performers in Hollywood – behold her recent gutsy performances in The Killing of a Sacred Deer and The Beguiled, neither of which are for the faint-hearted.
To celebrate their decades-long friendship, we asked Kidman and Campion to pose one another one question that they’d always wanted to ask. This is what they came up with…
Hi Jane,
You have an incredibly tight, intimate relationship with your daughter, Alice – working together and still vacationing together. As a mother who has raised a girl, what advice do you give to me now?
Love, Nic
Darling Nic,
It’s really hard to give advice about mothering a daughter. In my case, it felt like one great improvisation. My own mother had no mother. Both her parents died of alcoholism by the time she was nine and she said she had no idea how to be a mother. She used to get very exasperated by the chaos of family life, but she loved and cared about each of us. We were the most important people in her life and we knew that clearly.
The best that can be said about me as a mother is that I truly love my daughter. Alice says the best thing is that I’m myself, that I’m loyal and determined and funny and generous. She also said she likes that I explore what it is to be a person.
One piece of good advice I heard recently was a mother saying to her daughter, “Don’t live a shallow life” – in these times, it’s fair warning.
Your friend, Jane
Hi Nic,
I wanted to ask you if you have any recurring dreams and if so what are they? Sleep is a bit of a nightmare for me, so I’m always curious about people’s routines. How do you drop off to sleep and how many hours do you generally get a night? Do you nap during the day?
Love, Jane
Dear Jane,
I used to have recurring dreams where I was jumping out of a tree and landing on my head, sort of like diving, but instead of diving into water I was diving into solid ground. Thank goodness that has stopped. Sleep is a bit of a nightmare for me too and I really need it. I have a meditation iPod that I listen to, I have special breathing techniques and soothing mantras in my head. I try to get eight hours of sleep but I can operate on six, therefore I usually end up with seven. I have an internal alarm clock ever since I’ve had children; it wakes me up around 5.45am, even if I have been out the night before. I love napping, and I nap pretty much every day for about 20 mins – when I say nap, what I really mean is I meditate in a lie-down position.
Love you, Nic
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