LOS ANGELES — Jane Campion is sitting cross-legged on a yoga mat in the bedroom of her Sydney, Australia, home in late February. Barefoot, wearing faded jeans, she rotates her laptop 360 degrees to give me the nickel tour before returning her laptop’s camera to the perfectly framed background she has chosen — an immense painting of kiwis by New Zealand artist Bill Hammond.
This is Campion’s workspace, more often than not, the place where, reclining on her bed, she’ll open up a plain, high school notebook (“those leather-bound ones give me the creeps,” she says, “like, what you’re writing is too important, so you can’t make mistakes”) and take pleasure in letting her imagination roam and see what comes from it. If she likes what she wrote, she’ll revise it and send it to an assistant who will type it out for her. Computers aren’t her thing; Campion is defiantly analog.
“When people write on computers, they tend to preserve, and they don’t make the revisions that I think everything should go through,” she says.
