Owed to Alice

At last year’s Cannes film festival, director Jane Campion was in a packed press conference. She was talking about her new film Bright Star – an acclaimed account of the youthful love affair between the doomed Romantic poet John Keats and his neighbour Fanny Brawne. On such occasions, directors routinely pay tribute to their actors and crew. Campion’s main tribute, though, was aimed closer to home – at her 14-year-old daughter, Alice.

“She has been my muse,” Campion said, smiling broadly. And at theside of the stage, unrecognised up to that point, a tall, slender adolescent girl smiled with pleasure and blushed with a teenager’s embarrassment. After that, Alice’s face had a glow of happiness whenever she was seen around Cannes with her mother’s party.

“She loves the film,” says a member of the entourage, “and feels she’s part of it. Alice might have inspired her mother, but it definitely works two ways.”

More recently, I met Campion in a London hotel. Born in Wellington and now living in Sydney, she was on a tour promoting the film. Alice had travelled to London too, but was back in their rented flat. Her mother tried phoning her, without success. It was 11.30am, yet presumably she was still asleep. Campion rolled her eyes. “Teenagers,” she said, not unkindly.

So how exactly had Alice inspired her? “In the way I thought about Fanny Brawne,” Campion explains. “Fanny was 18 when she met Keats, so Alice is a lot younger, but, I imagine, like the real Fanny, who was witty and mercurial.”

A crucial sequence in Bright Star shows Keats (Ben Whishaw) plagued by tuberculosis and reluctantly leaving his London home for the warmth of Italy. Possibly realising his life is drawing to a close, he writes to Fanny (Australian actress Abbie Cornish), breaking off the relationship. They never see each other again.

“I wondered what Alice would do if she got that break-off letter,” Campion says. “I thought, She would be very dramatic. Alice’s enthusiasm for drama knows no limits. She’s very passionate, yet at the same time incredibly kind. So in writing the script, whenever I got to a point where I thought, What would Fanny do about this? I thought about what Alice would do and that really helped me out.”

Even allowing for maternal pride, Alice sounds a remarkable child. She has written short stories and has been working on a novel since she was 12. She’s acted in two short films, one of them, The Water Diary, directed by Campion. She even lent a hand with the poster for Bright Star. Her mother felt its original colours were too gaudy, so Alice transferred it to her home computer and toned them down.

“I feel dwarfed by her,” sighs Campion. “She’s me, tripled. At her age, I was really stumbling around. But you don’t want to say too much, because it’s hard enough having a famous parent.”

“Famous” is perhaps an understatement. Jane Campion is one of the world’s best-known female film directors. She came to global attention in 1993, when her remarkable film The Piano took the Palme d’Or in Cannes for Best Film. She’s still the only woman to win.