Jane Campion interview for Top of the Lake: 'The world is focused on sexiness' Jane Campion's mystery turns on the unexplained disappearance of a child in the New Zealand town of Paradise Top of the Lake, which was screened at both Sundance and Berlin in a single six-hour sitting, begins with a 12-year old girl, Tui, walking in to a limpid, freezing pond. She is recovered, found to be pregnant, and then not long after, she disappears. The same week, Robin, a detective played by Mad Men's Elisabeth Moss, returns to the area to visit her dying mother. She is drawn to the case as ineluctably as Tui was drawn to the lake. According to Campion, when the BBC approached her they gave her free rein to tell any story she wished. Her decision to make a crime drama might surprise those who know her for The Piano, Portrait of a Lady or even her breakthrough feature, Sweetie (co-written with her former partner Gerard Lee, who also co-wrote Top of the Lake) but then her last film but one, In the Cut, was based on Susanna Moore's erotic murder thriller In the Cut. "I've always read crime books and I love Stieg Larsson's trilogy," she says. I'd already started thinking about our story by the time I started reading his books. I was just really encouraged that he was a feminist. He wrote his books because he'd seen a rape, a gang rape when he was 15 and he was so repelled that he became a life long fighter for women's rights. I felt that it was encouraging that a book like that was so widely accepted because it's pretty radical: a strange, lesbian, almost autistic heroine, accepted so powerfully in a basically macho world. Top of the Lake may be a crime drama for cataloguing purposes, but as that suggests, Campion is interested in much more than the thrill of the chase. Top of the Lake, like much of her work, is female-led and riven with gender skirmishes. She brings in an alpha-male in the form of Peter Mullan as a self-styled local padrone with unkempt hair and feral sons he uses as enforcers. Then she sets unreconstructed masculinity against enlightened femininity, in the form of Holly Hunter, the actress who she directed to an Oscar win in The Piano, as a guru called GJ. GJ arrives unbidden with a tribe of post-menopausal female followers, and makes camp on a prize piece of land they've bought called "Paradise." Mullan's drug lord thought he had an option on the land. The presence of anyone there, not to say a bunch of damaged women offering him tea and sympathy, rubs him up the wrong way. And in this part of the world, it is made clear, men don't like being rubbed any way at all. In real life this part of the world is an area in the Western crook of Lake Wakatipu, near Queenstown on New Zealand's South Island. With its looming snowy peaks and shimmering grasslands, it feels disorienting on screen, huge and yet powerfully remote. Campion, who grew up in New Zealand but now lives in Sydney, has what she calls a "hut" there, where she spends part of each year. I love it because it's a genuine wilderness. In the wilderness and in nature I feel incredibly happy, I feel relaxed. I feel I can sit down on a lump of moss and just smile. You know how the poets of the 19th century had the Arcadian ideal? That they thought it was hard living in cities and that you had to return to nature to understand who you really want to be? Well I agree with that. The irony of course, and an underlying theme of Top of the Lake, is "Et in Arcadia Ego" - that even in paradise, death is present. This is an idyllic landscape spoiled only by the presence of fallen men. Not so far from where Campion filmed her Paradise, there is a real place at the head of Lake Wakatipu called Paradise. There is also an Arcadia. "I'm really interested in concepts like paradise," says Campion. A lot of people move to this area in the hope of making themselves happy but of course there is no such thing as paradise, not on earth - our minds drive us crazy wherever we are. The closer you get to the so-called ideal, the more painful it is because it doesn't work. It is the topography of Top of the Lake that sets the moral tone. Everything is unusual, menacing and extreme. It makes for extreme viewing, too: sudden violence, incest and suicide seem to come with the turf. We were told by Ben Stephenson [the BBC's head of drama] to be as outrageous as we wanted. No holds barred," Campion laughs - she is unexpectedly droll. "We were like, "Are you ready for us? Well we're ready for that! There were far fewer constraints than making a feature film. Given free rein, Campion has allowed herself some indulgences: there are several obviously personal components in Top of the Lake. GJ, not only looks a little like Campion with her long silver hair, but she is based on a guru whom Campion knew well, U G Krishnamurti, who died in 2007. "He was the only really free human I ever met in my whole life and he's dead now and you think, "God, there aren't that many of them."" Incorporating what is effectively an on-screen tribute to a friend might have been a narrative cul-de-sac. Sensibly, Campion drafted in her old collaborator Holly Hunter to play the role. In Hunter's hands GJ, who could easily have been a cartoon seer spouting new-age pablums, turns out to be one of those characters that television can produce whose screen time is minimal but whose impact endures, like Nancy Marchand as Livia Soprano. GJ and her merry band of women seem at first to be a sideshow. Yet Campion's interest lies as much in these women as it does in the case of the missing girl. They live by the lakeside, wandering naked across shots and being granted all of the best lines ("You ever try masturbating? It's very relaxing and not fattening.") Women like these rarely get a look in either on television or film. These women are like 40-plus so basically, in a kind of gross way of putting it, they're unf---able and not interesting to the main thrust of the world's focus. It's all about sexiness. I'm really curious about these women - obviously being one myself - and the sort of fear of being outside of it but also the freedom that comes from being over that edge. Campion has been watching women on the periphery her entire career, from Janet Frame in An Angel at my Table to Fanny Brawne in Bright Star. She is a feminist herself, but to call her work feminist is reductive. When I was a kid, the reason I liked kids stories was because there were kids in them and you could experience the world through their problems. So similarly I'm interested in the world from a female point of view because I am a woman. The women who interest her are the ones who, like herself, and the women in the camp on Top of the Lake, have seen what the world wants from them and chosen not to comply. That's what I love about them, they're untameable, they don't work with logic and they just do their thing. The same could quite easily be said of Campion: the film-maker who despairs of film, and so has decided to take television into the wilderness. Top of the Lake begins on Saturday 13 July on BBC2