Ada Would Not Have Surfaced Says Campion

Jane Campion has revealed she wanted a bleaker ending for The Piano, with the character of mute Ada McGrath, played by Holly Hunter, drowning with her beloved instrument. It is one of the most iconic scenes from films made in the 1990s: the sequence near the end of The Piano in which Hunter’s Ada plunges into the ocean, her foot deliberately tangled in a rope. Ada eventually relents and floats to the surface, to begin what the film’s epilogue suggests will be a happier life. The Piano’s Oscar-winning screenwriter and director, Wellington-born Campion, 59, has revealed she wishes she had gone a step further and consigned her heroine to a permanent resting place beneath the waves. In an interview with the Radio Times to discuss her new project with Hunter, the six-part BBC2 TV series Top of the Lake, Campion says she has fond memories of the Palme d’Or and Oscar-winning 1993 film – but would have considered changing the ending had she shot it now. “I thought some of it was really good, but I thought, ‘For freaking hell’s sake, she should have stayed under there’,” Campion said. “It would be more real, wouldn’t it, it would be better? I didn’t have the nerve at the time. What if Ada just went down, she went down with her piano – that’s it.” Hunter, who won a best actress Oscar for her performance as Ada, said during the same interview that she would have kept the scene. “That was something Jane toyed with when we shot the movie, to end it there,” the American actor said. “And she’s still thinking about it! Me, I love that it’s a reverie for Ada, not a nightmare or something that haunts her. It soothes her.”