1990

Screening tonight as part of the Frames Film Festival is An Angel at My Table, based on the autobiography of the writer Janet Frame. Director Jane Campion talks with Murray Bramwell about her newest work.

There is a story the poet James K. Baxter used to tell about Janet Frame – that when she was confined in a mental institution in New Zealand she was persuaded by doctors to consider a leucotomy, a procedure which cuts through nerve fibre in the frontal lobe. Other patients had such operations, she was told, one was now happy selling hats in the DIC department store in Wellington.

Janet Frame spent eight years in mental institutions and it was only later in her life that she discovered that her supposed schizophrenia was a misdiagnosis. Her real aberration was to be a creative woman, her deviance an inability to conform to the narrow social pressures of post-war New Zealand. For Baxter and many others at that time she became a sort of icon, a martyr to the life of the imagination.

Fortunately Frame did not undergo surgery and, encouraged by more enlightened and humane psychiatric staff, she began to publish fiction. First, The Lagoon and Other Stories, then Owls Do Cry and her account of life in the asylum- and the two hundred bouts of ECT she received there – Faces in the Water. Janet Frame became not only New Zealand’s finest writer but one of international prominence. She has written ten novels and, consolidating her reputation, a three volume autobiography- To the Is-Land appeared in 1983, followed in 1984 by An Angel At My Table and, a year later, The Envoy From Mirror City.

Film-maker Jane Campion, herself a New Zealander, has been making films since 1982. Her most recent Sweetie, attracted attention as one of the best local features in years. Now she has completed An Angel at My Table, screening once only in the Frames Festival and returning for a season at the Trak on December 26.

“It’s funny to think back to where things began, ” Campion reflects, “I always remember being so excited to get To The Is-Land. Mum sent it over to me in Sydney and I just kept on reading it until I finished it. Tears were rolling down my cheeks, I was smiling and crying – it was so touching to me. I don’t know whether it was because I was a New Zealander but Janet Frame’s recollections suddenly brought my youth back to me too.”

“I read it and thought the writing was so available – there’s nothing obscurely intellectual about it. It is so direct . I loved that quality. I wondered whether Janet would give the rights to it – and I wanted to be one of the first to ask. That was back in 1982. She said she’d be happy to discuss it when the other volumes came out .”

By that time Jane Campion had met up with Bridget Ikin, the film’s producer, and they had formed similar ideas and enthusiasm for the project.

“Our experience at that stage was pretty slim ,” she observes, “By the time I asked her permission I had made three short films and it took another year for them to get recognition. They didn’t mean anything to Janet anyway, she never looked at them. She was responding to our enthusiasm for her books.”

Was Campion tempted to choose from the fiction ? “Vincent Ward has already done an excellent short feature of A State of Siege and although I really loved Owls Do Cry, the autobiographies have an immediacy about them. They work on people in an extraordinary way, they bring out their shyness and vulnerability. You don’t have to have a special interest in cinema or literature or anything to appreciate the vision.”

The script for An Angel At My Table came from Laura Jones, who has written for ABC-TV as well as High Tide for Gillian Armstrong. “It is a great privilege working with someone like Laura because she is totally passionate about what she works on. She is very good with dialogue and in making it sound like it came from Janet, which was a big concern because we had to dramatise things that weren’t in dialogue in the books.”

“Script editor Jan Chapman, Laura and I worked together. But Laura did it. We were just cheerleaders. She spent a year on it. It is one of the nice things about this film -it was about fifty years in the making. I took a year to film it, Laura a year to write it, Janet three to write the books and about forty-five years to live it all.”

A distinctive aspect of the film is its narrative understatement. “That’s Laura’s quality,” Campion explains,”She’s very economical in her scripting. She hates any sledgehammer effects. You have to be careful when you take on a task like this. Too much respect can have its problems too. What you need to do is say -`Look, I love it and I’m going to do the best I can. I’m me, I’m not Janet – and trust to that.”

“Every now and then we had to take a bit more licence to make it work dramatically. One bit I felt happy about was where the school inspector comes to watch Janet teach for her certification and it precipitates her breakdown.”

The scenes in mental hospital are also powerfully presented.
“At first we weren’t going to have any at all. Janet in the autobiographies just skipped the whole thing saying she’d written about it all elsewhere. The books survive perfectly well without them and we wondered whether we were being too crass in wanting to show them. On the other hand to see something of this experience might help to understand what she was recovering from. Janet agreed to it in the end but she wasn’t all that keen.”

“It was always our concern that Janet knew everything that was happening and could give us feedback about anything that bothered her – after all, it was her life. It wouldn’t have satisfied us to do something she was unhappy about, even though we did own the rights. It would be a very empty experience to make a film that she felt miserable about.”

“Luckily for us she is an artist and respects other people’s necessity to interpret things . She sees it as a piece of fiction. We gave her the drafts – although not the early ones because it can be confusing reading work in progress. She loved the finished scripts. She thought they were wonderful and better than the novels. Perhaps that explained her generosity towards us.”

Janet Frame went to Auckland for some of the filming. Jane Campion recalls -“The impression I had at that start was that she was about a hundred yards away, very shyly watching. And then by the end of the week I’d turn around and she’d be right behind me.”

Twenty-three year old Kerry Fox, a recent graduate from the New Zealand Drama School plays the lead . “Early on I went to New Zealand to try to find a Janet,” says Campion,”I wasn’t worried about any of the other roles at all. I just wanted the best person in Australasia. I was prepared to have an Australian actor play the role but hoped I’d get a New Zealander. I just thought Kerry was the best, we all did. There was something about her that was true and shy and vulnerable. I liked her immediately.”

“Janet met Kerry on my birthday. It was the first time I had spent any time with Kerry and I drove her up to meet Janet. They were both incredibly shy. I felt like a matchmaker. I was asking Janet about the house she lived in because we were building the sets and I was trying to get details. She sat down and drew a picture of it and she and Kerry started to get into conversation.

“Then Janet got out this gift, a lucky talisman for Kerry. It was an oyster shell that had been made into a pendant. I took some photos of them together (which they both loathed of course !) but it was astonishing how they showed almost identical expressions. It was uncanny. They had a very easy relationship.

“We were always terrified of mentioning` MH’ in front of Janet (mental hospital, that is) because it has left its scars on her, it’s very painful for her still. So when Janet asked Kerry how she found doing the scenes in the hospital, Bridget Ikin, the producer, got a bit anxious. But Janet was really practical about it. She was curious to know how Kerry had felt.”

Making An Angel At My Table has had a personal impact on Jane Campion as well. “I’d developed myself creatively outside of New Zealand,” she explains, “So to go back was quite emotional. It was like going back to a new world with ancient memories. It was good to have a chance to reassess my childhood there and to find again what New Zealand people are like. What is honourable and modest about them and what is restricting and suffocating about New Zealand Presbyterianism.”

The film has already attracted enthusiastic response in festivals in New Zealand and is about to be released in cinemas there. “The word is good,” Jane Campion notes, “People are excited to see a New Zealand film.” Then she adds, modestly and honourably, “All I tried to do was my best- but you never know how it’s going to turn out.”

“Filming an Angel at My Table” The Advertiser, September 7, 1990, p.14.