By Iain Blair

Jane Campion won an Oscar for writing, and was nominated for directing 1993’s The Piano, which racked up nine Academy Award nods and three wins. The New Zealand-born Campion also became the first female director to win the Cannes Palme d’Or for Best Film.

Campion’s new feature, The Power of the Dog, has also gotten a lot of Oscar attention, including for Best Picture, Best Directing and Cinematography. The Power of the Dog tells the story of two ranch-owning brothers living in 1925 Montana — prickly Phil (Benedict Cumberbatch) and mild-mannered George (Jesse Plemons), who share a bedroom but not much else. Their simmering tension finally explodes when George suddenly gets married. It’s a Western, but all the violence that follows is psychological and internal.

Behind the scenes, Campion assembled a key group of creatives, including DP Ari Wegner (Lady Macbeth), editor Peter Sciberras (The King) and visual effects house Alt.VFX.

I spoke with Campion — whose credits also include The Portrait of a Lady and An Angel at My Table — about making the film, post, editing and VFX.

This was shot digitally. Did you consider shooting on film?
Not really. To be honest, I can’t tell the difference now (laughs). And lots of things look beautiful shot digitally, especially with long lenses. I am influenced by the feeling and the look, but this was just too hard for us to consider shooting film.

I wanted to be able to shoot with lots of cameras and not worry about how much we were shooting. And I do like the freedom of just shooting whenever the actors are near the cameras, and anything they do that we love, we can get.

We shot with ARRI Alexa Mini LFs, which are light and great for this kind of location shooting and Steadicam work. We used Panavision APO Panatar lenses. [Other technical specs: aspect ratio was 2.39:1, ARRIRAW 4.5K source format, digital intermediate 4K (master format) and Ultra Panavision 70 anamorphic (source format).]

How did you pick your DP, Ari Wegner?
I wanted a woman to have the opportunity, and Ari is really good. She has a beautiful eye and great capacity to read a script and really get the story. To me, a great DP is someone who’s as interested in the story as in the visuals and the look, and I always have enough prep time to really help make a DP shine.

Talk about the look you and your DP went for. Is it true you spent a year on prep with her and other key department heads? 
I did contact her a year ahead, so in a way you’re renting out their head space whether they’re working full-time on it or not. And she didn’t do any other jobs in that year, so it was just ticking over. Obviously, we didn’t spend the whole year working together, but we did quite a few recces and a lot of storyboarding and going through the script together, and we worked on a lot of details and the sets and so on.

Importantly, that year was all about the story for both of us, and production designer Grant Major also came on early, as we shot in a very remote location on the South Island of New Zealand, which doubled for Montana. It had terrible high winds, and winter weather there is very bad, so we all worried whether we’d even be able to build all the sets in time, before winter. It was very unnerving.

How tough was the shoot?
I had this massive anxiety before we even began, trying to think of all the alternatives we could do when we didn’t have fine weather. But once we got rolling, I just gave up (laughs). I’d done all the prep I could possibly do, and we actually had good weather in the end for all the locations and exterior work. I was so relieved. Then two weeks later, we were shut down for three months because of COVID.

What was the most difficult scene to shoot and why?
The most difficult scenes to plan and execute were ones with all the cattle and roping them, and then the big castration scene with Benedict and the steer. It was very tricky to shoot, as you want to make it as real as possible without staying on a shot too long to see that it’s a fake animal.

Tell us about post. Was it remote because of COVID?
It was done in Sydney, and I decided to stay in New Zealand after we wrapped because I didn’t want to do the quarantine needed to go back to Sydney. My editor, Peter Sciberras, was based in Melbourne, and there was also an embargo between there and Sydney, so it was just as easy for him to come over to New Zealand and edit there with me, especially as we were living the COVID-free life. So it felt like this very safe little bubble where we could just work and find the film away from the rest of the team in Sydney.

How did you work together? Was he on set?
For the first two weeks or so, Peter was remote because of COVID, and it was very difficult working that way, as I didn’t know him and we’d never worked together before. My own editor was retiring, and Peter and I didn’t even try to get to know each other at first. We just focused on the work in this weird, remote way. I had a monitor showing what he was doing on his screen, and gradually we got to know each other by the choices we’d make in the takes, what we liked and didn’t like, and what we could cut altogether.

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The initial assembly was very long; we had 80 minutes we had to shed, which was very alarming. So we decided not to waste time fine-cutting stuff we knew we were going to lose and just concentrate on the material we felt had story weight that’s doing something. Then when he got out of quarantine and we were able to be in the same room, we were quite shy with each other to start with. It actually really slowed us down because then you have to do all the social work of learning about the other person. And I love Peter! He’s so lovely with his crew and has so many great qualities — intelligence, kindness, a great sense of humor and optimism — that inform his work as an editor. So that helped keep things light, and we both like to work fast. I don’t like wasting time finessing stuff you might never need or use.

What were the main editing challenges?
Finding the story and reducing all the material to tell that story in the most economical, effective way. I like to use the metaphor of a sneaker shoe that’s all loose and baggy, and then you start tightening the laces until you get the perfect fit. You’re basically trying to fit in all the best material, all the best performance pieces, all the pieces you really believe in, and then you need to be ruthless about cutting all the rest. You don’t keep anything you don’t really love. It all has to serve story, which is a very demanding master. You can feel when it gets tighter and the tension builds, and that’s when you realize you have the film.

There are quite a few VFX. What was entailed?
Alt.VFX did them all. The one of the shadow of the dog on the hills was quite tricky and a kind of puzzle that gave me a lot of worry. I wondered just how we were going to create this. Then one of the team came over early to the location, and we found a spot where we got all these great shadows when the clouds moved across. Then they sent me rough versions and I finally relaxed, as I could see it would work without looking too corny or obvious.

The idea was that it wasn’t always visible, depending on the light and shadows and so on. It was something magical, briefly present. They did a lot of work on it, refining how it would work in the shots we used. We did a lot of work on the skies and even the grass, plus the usual cleanup.

What about the DI? Who was the colorist, and how closely did you work with them and the DP?
Trish Cahill was the colorist, and we spent a long time on the DI at Soundfirm in Melbourne working on some difficult shots, like getting the right look in the night sky when Phil comes out of the mill at night. We did a lot of manipulation to get the colors just right and not too bright. There were a lot of stages to the DI that I was surprised weren’t more automatic, like the HD version and 6K and so on. We had to go through it all again several times.

What sort of film did you set out to make?
A version that was faithful to the novel by Thomas Savage, on which this was based and which I fell in love with. It felt like he’d lived through the whole experience, and it haunted me. I couldn’t stop thinking about it, and I just felt it’d make a really good movie. It’s a Western, but it’s not a genre piece. I didn’t set out to make A Fistful of Dollars. There are no guns or shootouts, and I don’t naturally gravitate toward genre. Most of my influences are literary, and the filmmakers I like are ones like Tarantino, who’s like a genre unto himself and completely unique.

Did it turn out the way you first envisioned it?
No (laughs). I wanted to shoot it in black and white. That was my original vision, but I’m very happy with the film we made.

Industry insider Iain Blair has been interviewing the biggest directors in Hollywood and around the world for years. He is a regular contributor to Variety and has written for such outlets as Reuters, The Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Times and the Boston Globe.