Spontaneous breeze

“In person, Campion is neither gorilla nor goddess,” writes Guardian correspondent Peter Conrad. “The breeze derives from her quirky humour and the mercurial play of expression on her face; her greying hair and her black clothes suggest severity, but the woman herself is a riot of frank, flushed emotion. ‘I found myself sobbing,’ she said about reading John Keats’s letters to Hampstead seamstress Fanny Brawne, on which her latest film Bright Star is based.” Conrad remembered [Harvey] Keitel’s description of Campion as a friskily spontaneous breeze. “‘I’m someone who loves to play,’ she said. ‘I make films so I can have fun with the characters.’ At the very least, she is a breath of fresh air, reinventing an art staled by commercial cynicism. The wind she stirs up is also a manifestation of the creative spirit, which in less grudgingly democratic days was known as genius and in even remoter times was attributed to God, or perhaps to a goddess. During our conversation, she described herself as ‘a visual person’. But New Zealanders are modest to a fault and I’d prefer to call Campion a visionary. On the set of Bright Star, she told actor Ben Whishaw that for her poetry means ‘openness to the divine’; her films open us all to that possibility that such a realm might exist.”