«Harvey Weinstein, as we know, did horrible things, but he also did great things for art and for bringing audiences into the theater. In this he was bold. He loved movies. I must admit, the marketing strategy was his intuition.” Jane Campion at the Taormina Film Festival surprises everyone and, in a meeting to talk about ‘Piano Lessons’, praises the former king of producers and founder of Miramax.
The Oscar-winning director, although aware of making a “very disturbing” statement, isolated the crimes of the former producer – now in prison – from his distribution merits, attributing him the credit of having understood and promoted the commercial potential of a story initially considered niche and which managed to gross, thanks to American distribution, as many as 140 million against a budget of 7.
«A high price for MeToo, the patriarchy wants to take back the land»
“There is the feeling that there is a really high price to pay for the #MeToo movement,” warned Campion, speaking of the movement born from the protest against Weinstein and linking the recent crackdown on civil rights to a specific conservative reaction. «Abortion, for example, which has been revoked in America. And the feeling that some sort of patriarchy really wants to reclaim its ground, you know? This is my feeling.”
«But today women want their cinema, and this will not disappear»
«The positive note, however, is that today women earn in a way that didn’t exist before. They have their profession, they have their money and they want films that speak to them, not just Marvel films. They want their cinema. It is this weight on the cultural market that has given opportunities to many more female directors, and this will not disappear”, concluded Campion.