Tag Archives: Top of the Lake

Jane Campion is a Clever Person Doing TV

Jane Campion is a Clever Person Doing TV

From Sweetie to The Piano, New Zealander Jane Campion has made some of cinema’s strangest, strongest films. So why has she switched to the small screen? The Guardian investigates. It is eight years since Campion,…

Top of the Lake Season Two More Accessible

Top of the Lake Season Two More Accessible

Critics loved Top of the Lake, New Zealander Jane Campion’s dark crime drama, starring Mad Men’s Elisabeth Moss as Robin Griffin, the police detective tasked with finding out why a…

Top of the Lake – Series With Star Location

Top of the Lake – Series With Star Location

“Across the globe and across generations”, there are stories with “settings as important as any character with dialogue,” according to an article in IndieWire. New Zealand’s Top of the Lake is one…

Top of the Lake Two Never Meant to Be Says Campion

Top of the Lake Two Never Meant to Be Says Campion

New Zealand-born director Jane Campion has said she never expected to be working on Top Of The Lake again and that she was surprised by the success of the original 2013 BBC miniseries that…

Game of Thrones Star Joins Top of the Lake

Game of Thrones Star Joins Top of the Lake

Gwendoline Christie, who plays popular Game of Thrones character Brienne of Tarth, will join Mad Men star Elisabeth Moss in a new season of the much-praised Jane Campion TV show Top of the Lake,…

Re-Examining The Piano’s Kinky Music Lessons

Re-Examining The Piano’s Kinky Music Lessons

“Films about mute piano players embroiled in erotic love triangles never did become a burgeoning genre. Perhaps that’s because it’s virtually impossible to imagine another equalling writer/director Jane Campion’s 1993 magnum opus: an extraordinarily…

Top of the Lake Season 2 to Start Filming This Spring

Top of the Lake Season 2 to Start Filming This Spring

“It’s been almost three years since Top of the Lake first aired and it’s still hard to shake the series’ sense of creeping dread”, writes Jacob Stolworthy in an article on The Independent. Lead actress…

Jane Campion’s Daughter Acting up

Jane Campion’s Daughter Acting up

As the child of New Zealand-born director Jane Campion and Australian filmmaker Colin Englert, Alice Englert – who stars in the BBC’s magician drama Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell – grew up immersed in…

Terrific Top of the Lake Returns to Screens

Terrific Top of the Lake Returns to Screens

“Last year came the exciting news that Top Of The Lake, Jane Campion’s terrific TV series, wouldn’t just be a one-off, but would return for a new round of episodes,” Indiewire reports. “Details were…

Lucy Lawless to Star in Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D

Lucy Lawless to Star in Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D

Former Xena: Warrior Princess Lucy Lawless, 46, will join the cast of American television series Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D in an unspecified role later this year. According to TV Line, the show is looking to fill…

Director Firmly Back in the Game

Director Firmly Back in the Game

As Jane Campion returns to the Riviera chairing the jury at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, the Palm d’Or-winning filmmaker tells the Guardian’s Andrew Pulver about surviving as a woman director. Campion was the first…

You Don’t Say No to a Director like Campion

You Don’t Say No to a Director like Campion

The fact that Jane Campion’s drama Top of the Lake has been so well received only makes sense to American actress Holly Hunter, who played feminist seer GJ in the award-winning series. “It’s been energising…

Campion to Preside over Cannes Jury

Campion to Preside over Cannes Jury

New Zealand filmmaker Jane Campion will preside over the jury of the 67th Cannes Film Festival, succeeding last year’s president Steven Spielberg. This year’s festival takes place 14-25 May. Campion is the only female director…

Cage and Cusack Star in Impressive Debut

Cage and Cusack Star in Impressive Debut

New Zealand-born writer-director Scott Walker’s “impressive debut” The Frozen Ground, starring Nicholas Cage and John Cusack “amounts to an exploitation flick about the hunt for Alaska’s most notorious serial killer, but told with style and…

New Zealand Landscape Plays Active Role in Films

New Zealand Landscape Plays Active Role in Films

“If a country could be eligible for a best actor award, New Zealand could be in the running for every gong going,” writes Megan Lane. In the piece for BBC News Magazine, Lane explores…

Long-Haul Visitor Numbers on the Up

Long-Haul Visitor Numbers on the Up

There has been a significant growth in the number of international visitors to New Zealand this year, with a 10 per cent rise in arrivals during the first half of 2013, compared to the…

Top of the Lake Receives Eight Emmy Nods

Top of the Lake Receives Eight Emmy Nods

New Zealand director Jane Campion mini-series Top of the Lake has received eight Emmy nominations, including Outstanding Miniseries of Movie, Outstanding Writing for a Miniseries and Outstanding Directing in a Miniseries. The New Zealand-shot…

Ada Would Not Have Surfaced Says Campion

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…

New Zealand’s Answer to The Killing

New Zealand’s Answer to The Killing

Jane Campion’s television series Top of the Lake, “set in the staggeringly beautiful landscape of the South Island”, has been called New Zealand’s answer to The Killing. Obstreperous and tunnel-visioned, detective Robin Griffin has…

Why Hollywood is Staying in New Zealand

Why Hollywood is Staying in New Zealand

“From James Cameron’s organic farm to Emmy contender Top of the Lake, the idyllic island nation continues to thrive 12 years after Frodo and Co. put it on the movie location map,” The Hollywood…

Cannes Award for Campion

Cannes Award for Campion

Director of award-winning film The Piano, Wellington-born Jane Campion, 58, will be presented with the Carrosse d’Or from the Society of Film Directors at the Cannes Film Festival in May. Campion will be…

Strength to Strength

Strength to Strength

“Early signs suggest will bend toward something even more mysterious, beautiful, unsettling and satisfying than the mysterious, beautiful, unsettling, satisfying thing it is from the start,”…

Everything is Not What it Seems

Everything is Not What it Seems

“It is typical of and visualise a pregnant 12-year-old girl walking into it up to her neck, the central image of what…

Campion Returns a Champion

Campion Returns a Champion

New Zealand director Jane Campion makes a ‘haunting’ and near-perfect return to TV production, according to Andrew Pulver, The Guardian’s Film Editor.  Campion’s return to high-end TV film-making comes with her directing the first…

Class Written All Over It

Class Written All Over It

“New product from Bright Star director Jane Campion is always welcome,” the Guardian says about the New Zealander’s six-part television series, Top of the Lake, which is showing in the Berlinale Special section at…

Our Dark Side

Our Dark Side

Jane Campion’s seven-part miniseries Top of the Lake, which was shot in and around Queenstown, premieres on the Sundance Channel in the United States on 18 March. “It’s the most comprehensive documentation of modern…

Big and Small Comparisons

Big and Small Comparisons

In an appearance at the Mipcom conference in Cannes, New Zealand director Jane Campion explained that she was attracted by the creative freedom in television, in comparison to film. Campion was at Mipcom to…

Talking of The Small Screen

Talking of The Small Screen

Palme d’Or and Oscar-winning New Zealand director Jane Campion will attend the international television market MIPCOM next month in Cannes, France to talk about her first small-screen foray, the new series Top of the Lake….

Campion Directs Madmen Star

Campion Directs Madmen Star

Wellington-born film director Jane Campion has written and will direct a Sundance Channel seven-part miniseries starring Madmen actress Elisabeth Moss, called Top of the Lake. Campion wrote the script with Gerard Lee of Sweetie…

On the Small Screen

On the Small Screen

Filmmaker Jane Campion has been commissioned by the BBC to work on a television series thriller set in New Zealand called Top of the Lake. The series will follow the disappearance of a five…