The Power of the Dog director Jane Campion on her personal journey into the year's most Oscar-nominated movie

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Jane Campion made history when she became the first woman to be nominated twice for Oscar's Best Director. It's a big deal, yes, but The Power of the Dog, a psychological Western of rare power, is more than just a milestone. The director, 67, spoke with us about her process and working with the ensemble of the year.

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: It was 1994 when you were nominated for The Piano, and there was so much excitement around that. How has it been different this time?

JANE CAMPION: It's hard to compare. So many things were going on for me, real tragedies in my life, at the time of The Piano. Shortly after the Palme d'Or, my baby died, and it was a real horror. I was flung into the deepest grief I've ever experienced in my life. And then, six months later I was pregnant again, so when I was at the Oscars receiving the award, I was about five months pregnant with Alice, and I was like, "Oh, I don't want anyone to know or see," and just nervous. All I cared about was my baby, so I hardly participated in any of the press because I was just too wrecked. This time, I have been able to participate a lot more.

It's good to have you back. Dog feels like a reawakening of a certain aspect of your style. What snuck up on you when you were prepping?

Sometimes the buried meanings of the story don't reveal themselves until later. One of the deep revelations for me was realizing that I had had a person like Phil [Benedict Cumberbatch's cruel cowboy] in my life — a nanny that haunted my sister and me. And our parents didn't believe us that she was being brutal and telling lies, and so we really had to handle it for a long time, like five years. So I understood that depth of what Rose was going through.

You mention Kirsten Dunst's character, Rose, a frontier wife who's plunging into alcoholism. It's hard to grasp how good Kirsten is in this. How would you describe her?

She carries such a beautiful kindness and womanliness, but also a depth of pain and sadness that she needed to sink into in order to do this role. You've probably heard her speak about it, but she's left a more difficult time behind her. To have to revisit it was tough. I can remember seeing her in The Virgin Suicides and just thinking, "Oh, my God, who is this amazing young actress?" She's absolutely riveting. She has qualities from the old film stars, like Lauren Bacall, as well as being quite modern. And obviously, she's incredibly funny to hang out with — irreverent and cheeky and says whatever she thinks.

Meanwhile, there aren't too many actors who could do what Benedict Cumberbatch does here. Why was he perfect for this, and how did you two work together?

He's really beautiful and also a little scary, and he's charismatic. We've seen that in different performances by him, like Sherlock. He's fireworks with dialogue, and he's got a lot of special capacities. It's a joy when you can work with an actor that lets you in, because you can only really be as close as the actor's going to allow it. You can't force these things. Benedict is a sort of angry perfectionist if he feels he didn't do anything quite right. But in every other way, he's really a darling.

Benedict sounds like he was hard on himself. Did that extend to his interactions with the rest of the cast?

It was very charming to see Benedict enjoying Kodi [Smit-McPhee, who plays Rose's son, Peter] as much as he did during the rehearsals. He would say to me, "He's very good, Jane. I hope you're getting enough of him." I said, "I think I am — I can't stop filming him."

Kodi does such an arrestingly strange performance, gangly and deceptively fragile, one that steers the movie onto interesting ground. How did you know he'd be so perfect?

I think the project is so lucky to have Kodi playing Peter. I don't know if it would be nearly the film it is without him. It's a wonderfully conceived character in the book, but Kodi is better than the character in the book. He really brings something magical and other to it, that surpasses the book's version of Peter. He has a sort of philosophical bent and a mystery to him, and a sort of tall, willowy elegance that's unexpected. I was always thinking, Oh, he's supposed to be young, he's supposed to be shorter, and, of course, Kodi is spectacularly tall, and I really loved that.

And finally, there's Jesse Plemons, such a quiet strength in this.

In some ways, he reminds me of the late, great Philip Seymour Hoffman because of the grounded depth of the work. Very different and tone and feel, but Jesse was another gift. And the fact that he's actually married to Kirsten — as Kirsten kept saying, "You're getting two for the price of one," at least in terms of paying for location. Jesse is riveting to watch because as little as he did, it was all in his art. You were completely with him. You completely believe him, every moment. And to look through his different takes was very intriguing because each one of them was absolutely usable.

As viewers, we first connect on the level of the storytelling, but how did you get Dog to feel so deep and intimate?

There's a more subversive level that you can also have the story operating on, but for me, I think both levels have to be working. An example of that might be when Phil picks up the flowers in the restaurant of Rose and Peter, and he puts a big, dirty finger in real close-up into the delicate stamens that Peter has made, threatening to wreck it, but he's does it in quite a suggestive way. And so there's that slightly erotic suggestion of Phil's teasing or humiliating of Peter about these feminine little paper flowers. And then, the burning of it casually when he lights a cigarette, is a suggestion, too, of what's to come—that it's going to be explosive.

We feel your directorial sensibility here, one I bet you can't boil down to a general philosophy.

It's sometimes a bit like when Muhammad Ali used to say, "I'm going to float like a butterfly and sting like a bee." That was in the background of my thinking: letting the story be out there, and then coming in and finding those moments that give you a real insight into what's going on with these characters.

Related content:

• Kirsten Dunst on the secret she shared with Kodi Smit-McPhee making The Power of the Dog
• Interview: Benedict Cumberbatch cowboys up for The Power of the Dog
• See the full list of 2022 Oscar nominees