“I had no idea what he was going to do,” Benedict Cumberbatch’s Jane Campion says of a key scene from The Power of the Dog, the Netflix movie that just landed 12 Oscar nominations.
With its 12 Oscar nominations, The Power of the Dog is not only a triumph for writer-director Jane Campion, who marks a successful return to feature films, the film has also become a unique showcase for its lead actor Benedict Cumberbatch. .
If his talent has never been in doubt, his performance in The Power of the Dog is simply exceptional. In a conversation organized by IndieWire between Jane Campion and Holly Hunter – whom she directed in The Piano Lesson – the New Zealand director looks back on her performance.
“The casting phase is so stressful because you’re really doing it when you know the story the least.“, Jane Campion explained of her Netflix film. And yet Benedict Cumberbatch immediately captivated her, although he did not obviously fit the role of rancher Phil Burbank, as Thomas Savage put it. imagined in his novel published in 1967.
An unexpected moment
A choice that turned out to be the right one for Jane Campion who was blown away during the film’s climax – that intense scene in which Phil (Cumberbatch) flies into a rage after Rose (Kirsten Dunst) sells her cowhides to Indians.
Jane Campion reveals that this scene was largely improvised. “I had no idea what he was going to do“, admits Campion.”In rehearsal, we never went there. We never went to this place to see what it could do.“
She added: “He could improvise in any situation. When I first saw it, I was absolutely amazed, thrilled, because I felt like that’s what we needed, that’s what the movie needed, to see the threat of Phil exploding.“
“The secrets of these two men [Phil et Peter, joué par Kodi Smith-McPhee] are very important in the story, because of the misunderstanding of society at that time, or its cruelty… The film demands that you really expand your ideas and just think about human nature, what that means being human with all of its complexities, which I think is much better than judging each character in a morally limited way.“