Jane Campion has been widely admired for centering women and drilling deep into their unique viewpoints in such works as “Sweetie,” “The Portrait of a Lady” and TV’s “Top of the Lake.”
Now, however, the New Zealand filmmaker — who was only the second woman ever nominated for a directing Oscar, and won original screenplay, for 1993’s “The Piano” — is tackling new territory: the hearts of damaged men in the American West.
“The Power of the Dog,” in select theaters Wednesday, Nov. 17, before streaming on Netflix on Dec. 1, has four main characters, and only one is a woman. Kirsten Dunst does a heartbreaking job playing delicate alcoholic Rose Gordon, the widowed mother of morbid Peter (Kodi Smit-McPhee of “The Road”) and new wife of wealthy, cunningly passive Montana rancher George Burbank (Jesse Plemons, most recently seen in “Antlers”).
It’s George’s bullying brother Phil, a well-educated, multitalented cowboy’s cowboy who covers up his repressed homosexuality with macho belligerence, that dominates the movie and every scene he’s in — and even a few he isn’t. Played by Benedict Cumberbatch, Phil’s as disturbing and poignant as any of Campion’s unhinged heroines and proves to be the movie’s magnetic draw.
“Thomas Savage’s was a male point of view that it was easy for me to be intrigued by,” Campion said of the 1967 source novel’s author, who grew up on a Montana ranch the director visited before making the movie. “A lot of the story is quite autobiographical. He had an uncle like Phil, called Ed Brenner, who was a bully. I could really relate to a lot of the feelings.
“It was thematically designed to explore and investigate some of the shaky constructs of masculinity,” the director added during a video interview with The Chronicle from Los Angeles.
Phil can be nasty about most anything, but he really hates his new sister-in-law and her effeminate son, though he inevitably finds Peter intriguing as well. For Cumberbatch, who’s played everything from Sherlock Holmes to computing pioneer Alan Turing to Marvel’s Dr. Strange, the “Power” role required learning ranch skills from riding a horse to castrating a calf.
But mainly, “I had to learn how to be an asshole,” the English actor admitted during a recent L.A. news conference. “I’m quite apologetic and I’m a bit of a people pleaser in life, and I had to learn to not be those things for Phil Burbank.”
For Campion, Cumberbatch had the charisma the cruel but mesmerizing Phil required. Just as important, “we got on,” the filmmaker said. “It would be hard to work with a character like him if you were afraid of the actor. Ben is a very kind man, so it was easy for me to trust him.”
The film’s cattle town and Montana ranch exteriors were constructed in a remote valley on New Zealand’s South Island that resembled the 1920s Montana foothills. Interiors of the barn where Phil keeps a shrine to his mentor (and lifelong crush) Bronco Henry were shot there too, while rooms of the imposing Burbank mansion were built on soundstages in Auckland. Cumberbatch stayed in character all day at every location.
“A gift that Jane gave me was to introduce me as Phil to the crew rather than as Benedict,” the actor recalled. “She said, ‘You know, Benedict’s nice. You’ll meet him at the end. This is Phil.’ ”
At work Cumberbatch also kept his distance from Dunst. That reflected and informed how Phil often torments Rose from afar, like plucking a banjo offscreen while she’s trying to work out a tune on the piano.
“I had to kind of create my own monsters by rehashing things from my own life because Benedict’s not a scary person to me,” Dunst explained during a separate video interview with The Chronicle from L.A. “And we’re barely in any scenes together. It’s more like a faint whistling or something that makes Rose terrified. But that’s not really enough to make me scared. He’s not yelling at me, he’s not doing anything to me that I can use. I had to make my own demons come alive again, which isn’t a very lovely place to live in.”
Fortunately, Dunst had her real-life partner Plemons and their first child to go home to for solace.
“I think I would’ve had a really hard time if I was by myself,” Dunst said of making the movie. “I always talk to Jesse about what I’m going through on set and vice versa. But to actually have him know what I’m talking about is a great comfort. It helped me be centered and happy on the weekends with our kid.”
Campion had long wanted to work with the former child star and “Spider-Man” actress due to Dunst’s psychologically searing work in Lars von Trier’s “Melancholia” and Sofia Coppola’s “The Virgin Suicides,” “Marie Antoinette” and “The Beguiled.” “I think she’s got such a profound sense of female softness, but also of suffering,” the director said of Dunst. “I thought she would be just the sort of woman that Phil would hate the most.”
While her signature critiques of patriarchy find their way into “Power,” Campion was also borderline giddy to make a movie in that most masculine of genres, the Western.
“What was daunting was working with the cattle and horses, figuring out ways to make sure it felt like that tough world while at the same time we didn’t hurt any animals,” she admitted. “But there were a lot of cool things about it because I love cowboys — and I love the 1925 version of cowboys. That’s the generation where they were making clothes and catalogs to sell to cowhands who wanted to look like cowboys of yore.”
It’s got a lot of those dudes. Some Native Americans too along with the cattle, horses and “Brokeback Mountain” subtext. Still, “Power of the Dog” isn’t really like any Western previously seen.
“There’s not one gun in this movie,” Dunst pointed out.
At its core, the movie transcends genre to explore the theme Campion’s unflinchingly examined throughout her career: people profoundly uncomfortable with their environment and the inside their own heads.
“I just thought Phil was so damn interesting … and the fact that I was a little afraid of it to begin with, afraid of a man like that,” she said. “The more I went into it, the more compassion and understanding I felt for someone who wasn’t able to live authentically, whose sexuality was villainized and ridiculed. How painful that is, and how distorting to personality that can be.”
“The Power of the Dog”: (R) in theaters Wednesday, Nov. 17. Available to stream on Netflix starting Dec. 1.