Bright Star at TIFF

At first glance, Bright Star looks like another stuffy period piece, this time about the doomed Romantic poet John Keats (Ben Whishaw) and his love affair with the girl next door, Fanny Brawne (Abbie Cornish). But in Jane Campion’s hands, the film lifts out of its era and becomes a vivid and intimate love story, not only between John and Fanny but with the added complication of John’s jealous best friend (Paul Schneider of Parks and Recreation). The stars and director gathered for the film’s premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival on Friday, September 11.

“Jane’s intention wasn’t to make a period film, not to get caught up in that,” says Cornish. Instead, Campion concentrated on the “core human stuff -- love, life, death. Just because it was 1818 doesn’t make those feelings any different to what we feel today.”

Whishaw believes the film feels relevant because of the similarities between Keats’s era and our own. “[The Romantic era] was a reaction against the industrialization of society, where people were being replaced by machines,” he says. “And the romantic poets were trying to place human beings at the centre of the world again and trying to get in touch with feelings again. And I think perhaps we need to do a similar thing today.”

The process of getting the actors in touch with their feelings was sometimes disorienting for them. Whishaw says his background in theater led him to believe rehearsals should be rigorous. Instead, “rehearsals with Jane sometimes consisted of us doing nothing but staring out the window for a few hours or lying on a couch talking about our childhood or whatever,” he laughs. “But there was a method in her madness. And it was again to do with this kind of relaxed openness that she was wanting us all to have.”

Campion explains her approach. “What happened for me in rehearsals, when people were trying to do something, my attention just drained. And when they were doing something really simple, like listening like you are now, I’d get really interested. I think they all felt quite frustrated. There’d be a lot of people jumping up and down showing me stuff for awhile, and I’d be going, God! I was waiting for them to relax. That’s harder to do.”

Above all, the dialogue -- even when reciting poetry -- had to sound natural. “She’d bring us up if what she was hearing was just us talking like period people, you know,” says Whishaw. “She didn’t want it to sound like they were lines.”

Campion was inspired to make a film out of Keats’s short life and deep love for Brawne when she read their letters. “I just was sobbing by the time I got to the end of the story,” she says. “We have more intimacy in this love story than you could have with Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie. We don’t know what they write to each other but we know what these guys wrote.”

Not all of their letters to each other survived. “What happened was, he went to Italy to die and Fanny wrote letters to him that he refused to read,” explains Whishaw. “He couldn’t bear to see her handwriting, couldn’t bear to think about her. So he was buried with those letters but he never read them.”

Whishaw had to tamp down his natural “nervous energy” to play Keats the way Campion envisioned him -- “as something like an angel, or in touch with another realm. Jane wanted the character to be very present and very open.”

Cornish found the experience “so intense. There were three months of my life where I disappeared into [the character], so when I was done it was like popping out on the other side of the wormhole.”

Schneider, on the other hand, felt almost as awkward on set as his character feels around the young lovers. The American actor had to gain weight, wear “crazy clothes,” and listen to Campion’s “wacky direction” while trying to remember his lines and deliver them in a perfect Scottish accent. “And then our accent coach Jerry would come over and say, ‘It’s not ‘bitch’ it’s ‘betch’.’ And at that point I’d be like … my brain doesn’t … I’m not smart enough to do this.” But he tried his best anyway. “Fear is a great motivator and I didn’t want to go to the center of great acting -- London, England –--and be the American clunker who sunk this great ship that we were building.” His performance adds a humorous yet still touching angle to the love story. “I thought a lot about how Ringo must’ve felt like when Yoko started hanging around,” Schneider says. “I feel like everyone has been in a situation where one of our friends starts dating someone we don’t like. Like, what can you ask for? Can you say, I need more of you -- I need more time? And especially as a man, it’s hard to say ‘I’m needy. I need your presence here.’”

The need for intimacy – even in an era where lovers addressed each other by last names, right up until after Keats left to die -- is what the film is ultimately about. Campion isn’t sure she’s cracked the code yet, though. “You know, I’m confused about intimacy because you think you want it and then you get it and it’s too much,” she laughs. “These guys are better at it than me.”

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Bright Star, Jane Campion, tiff, tiff 2009

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