Jane CampionPhoto: Jesse Grant (Getty Images)
Sam Elliott’s apparent attempt to present himself as the arbiter of all cowboy fiction ran into a lot of healthy opposition last week, especially from the woman he most directly criticized: Jane Campion, director of the Oscar-nominated western. The Power of the Dog.
While many of Campion’s film stars tried to stay away from Elliott’s comments – both Jesse Plemmons and Cody Smith-McPhee seemed to brush off the inevitable questions this weekend, with Benedict Cumberbatch diplomatically calling them “weird” earlier this week – Campion confronted them herself, calmly and comically, head to head at the Directors Guild of America Awards this evening.
Asked about Elliott’s various claims that her film was “a piece of shit”, “gutting out an American myth” and that Campion, as a New Zealand woman, had nothing to film in, the director was at pains to say: but she wrote one . “Sorry, he was being a bit of a BITCH” – Campion. Mark Malkin of Variety said. “He’s not a cowboy, he’s an actor.”
Noting, like many others, that some of the best westerns ever made were made by non-Americans and filmed outside of America, Campion was not at all afraid of Elliott’s scorn, which he vented on a recent episode of Marc Maron’s WTF. According to Deadline, she later stated that he “struck the trinity of misogyny, xenophobia and homophobia”.
Campion is seen as a strong contender for the Outstanding Achievement in Feature Film award at tonight’s DGA, which is being held in Los Angeles tonight without televised coverage. (Hosted by Judd Apatow; we’ll have a list of winners shortly.) If she wins tonight, past data suggests she has a pretty solid chance of winning Best Director at the Oscars in a few weeks, in which case she’ll be her first win in this category since her 1993 nomination for Piano.