Director Jane Campion called actor Sam Elliott “a bit of a sexist” and “a bitch” for criticizing The Power of the Dog, her Oscar- and Bafta-nominated western, for its driving theme of repressed homosexual desire, and for being filmed in New Zealand.
Campion’s film received 12 Oscar nominations, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Actor (Benedict Cumberbatch), Best Supporting Actress (Kirsten Dunst) and two nominations for Best Supporting Actor. (Cody Smith-McPhee and Jesse Plemons). Campion became the first woman to be nominated twice for Best Director.
Campion spoke to Variety at the Directors Guild of America Awards in Los Angeles on Saturday, where she received the award for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in a Theatrical Feature Film.
She said, “I’m sorry, he was a bit of a BITCH. I’m sorry to say, but he’s not a cowboy, he’s an actor. The West is a mythical space, and there is a lot of space on the training ground. I think it’s a little sexist.”
She added: “I consider myself a creator. I think he first thinks of me as a woman or something less.”
Elliott, who has starred in many westerns, appeared last month on Marc Maron’s WTF podcast.
“Yeah, you want to talk about that piece of shit?” he said.
– You didn’t like that one? Maron asked.
“No, hell no,” Elliot said. “Why? I’ll tell you why I didn’t like it anyway. I looked at [it] when I was there in Texas doing [the TV series] 1883 …
“There was a full-page ad in the LA Times and there was a clip that talked about gutting the American myth. And I thought, “What the fuck? What the hell? This is a guy who has always done westerns. Disemboweling the American West? Did they make it look like all these dancers, these guys in New York, wear bow ties and nothing else? Remember them from the past?
Maron assumed he was referring to the Chippendales, an all-male striptease group.
Elliott said, “That’s what all those damn cowboys in that movie looked like, running around in pants and no shirts. All these allusions to homosexuality were throughout the whole fucking movie.
Maron said, “I think that’s what the film is about.”
Elliot said: “Well, what the hell does this woman from there – she’s a brilliant director – know about the American West, and why the hell did she make this movie in New Zealand, call it Montana and say: how it was. It fucking hurt me, mate.
“The myth is that they were macho with cattle. I just came from fucking Texas where I hung out with families, not with men, families, big, long, multi-generational extended families.”
Elliott also complained about Campion’s star, saying, “I mean, Cumberbatch never got out of his fucking boyfriends. He had two pairs of guys – woolen and leather. And every fucking time he came from somewhere – he’d never been on a horse, maybe once – he’d walk into that fucking house, storm the fucking stairs, get into bed in his pants and play the banjo.
“Like, what the hell?”
Earlier this month, The Guardian published an interview in which Campion was asked, “Do you ever worry about going overboard with all the leather, ropes and brocades?”
Campion said, “I encouraged it! I liked it because they looked like satyrs. And when I looked at the photographs of that period, large woolen things were very common; I think it’s very cold in Montana. So wearing a sheep on each leg seems to be useful.”
Elliott also asked, “Where is the western in this western?”
In a partial response, Campion told Variety, “When you think about the amount of amazing westerns Sergio Leone has shot in Spain, I consider myself a creator.”
Of Elliott, she said, “I think he first thinks of me as a woman or something less, and I don’t appreciate that.”