In the Cut did not win Jane Campion her Oscars or the Palme d’Or, but it has won a permanent place in my four favorites. I used to think I didn’t understand people who named horror films as their comfort movies, but somehow, every rewatch of this seedy, pulpy, post-9/11 noir about a literary professor who begins a steamy romance with a New York detective, whom she also suspects is a serial killer, just always makes me feel good. Or, in Bethany’s words, “mark me down as scared AND horny!”

Maybe it’s the subversive, careful treatment of women’s bodies in life and in death. Maybe it’s the representation for people who actually read subway poetry. It could be the subtle modeling of consent and sexual agency for Meg Ryan’s character, Frannie Avery. Or perhaps it’s Mark Ruffalo’s mustache. According to many fellow Letterboxd reviewers, yes, it’s definitely Mark Ruffalo’s mustache. 

I’ve been curious about whether Campion knows all of this: that Frannie fans are out there getting high off the Ryan-Ruffalo chemistry, the always-bonkers Kevin Bacon cameo, the delicious performance by Jennifer Jason Leigh as Frannie’s half sister and love-optimist. And whether knowing this has changed her own feelings towards In the Cut. So, Letterboxd reviews in hand, I tracked her down at home in New Zealand for an evening Zoom, ahead of her trip to Australia for the Sydney Film Festival’s ‘Jane Campion—Her Way’ retrospective. 

There are major spoilers ahead so if you haven’t watched In the Cut yet, you might want to order up the new Mill Creek director’s uncut edition Blu-ray and bookmark this story for later.  

“The seediness is off the charts and I kind of love how thoroughly dirty the film is.” —⁠Tuomas

Captured in filmy edges and shallow focus by cinematographer Dion Beebe, In the Cut was shot entirely in New York City, from downtown apartments and dive bars all the way uptown to the Little Red Lighthouse under the George Washington Bridge. Campion loved living in the “fantastically Muppet-like” city, its streetlife far more communal and heterogenous than our sleepy suburbs downunder. 

The scars of the 9/11 attacks, however, were still very fresh. “New York was shrouded in materials that were protecting buildings: it physically looked like it was in grief,” Campion recalls. “But it was also a moving thing to be there in a grieving city, to be part of people coming back to trust the place, and to live there. It was amazing to live in New York for as long as we did, while we were putting the film together and shooting it all through a really hot summer.”

Campion knows sorrow: The Piano, also celebrating an anniversary this year, will always be associated not only with the Palme d’Or and several Academy Awards, but with the death 30 years ago of her first child, Jasper, at just twelve days old. It’s an inseparable fact for the filmmaker, which makes the presence of her daughter just as inseparable from the making of In the Cut.

Alice Englert, who was born in 1994 and is now an actress, writer and director (her confident, campy debut feature Bad Behaviour is at Sydney Film Festival this week), was an elementary aged girl at the time. “I’m the other mother,” Campion laughs, in reference to the family’s long-time nanny (and friend, still), who made it possible for Jane to always be with her daughter while always being at work.

“I was a single mum, yeah, at that time. My partner was the film and all my great companions on it. It’s wonderful to have a kid. That’s the best thing that’s ever happened to me, better than any of the films that I’ve made”—not that she would want to take any of her work out of her filmography, she stresses—“but by the time I had Alice, I really had a taste for that kind of work, and that richness of involvement in each project, and I don’t think I could have stopped at that point, you know? I just would have felt very bereft.”

“My eyes were on stalks,” Campion says of the 1995 novel of the same name by Susanna Moore from which In the Cut is adapted. “I remember reading it and going ‘Woah, this is hot’. I mean red-hot, like, dangerous in every sense of the word. I really didn’t think anybody would let you make a film of it.” Frannie, as a linguistics teacher at a community college, specializes in articulation (“in the cut” is itself slang for vagina). The detectives who cross her path deal in disarticulation, chasing a killer who dismembers women’s bodies and leaves an engagement ring as a signature. “It’s sort of like a literary thriller. It’s smart and sexy, but from a very, very sophisticated female point of view.” 

Although In the Cut came out when New York’s surviving first responders still cast heroic shadows, the film generally agrees that a cop at your door is rarely a welcome thing. They often come bearing bad news, bad attitudes, or both. Sometimes, the line between rescuer and victim blurs, as it does between Malloy and Frannie. Critics fixated on on such implausibilities (as if every trashy plot twist in a Paul Verhoeven or Adrian Lyne movie makes sense!). But from Ruffalo’s mustache (“de rigueur for detectives”) to their steamy affair, the story is steeped in truths experienced by Moore in research for her novel, and Campion in her preparatory ride-alongs and precinct visits.  

“The detectives themselves, who were driving us about and were our informants, did say that, like, it’s a pretty sexy job,” says Campion. “That they’re meeting women in domestic violence situations who need to trust somebody, or who have been all fucked up with love, and a lot of the relationships begin that way. The detectives don’t really go home, and live out of their cars, and everybody’s lifestyles are a little crazy.” 

“Exists in the liminal space between tenderness and danger… understanding what many similar films do not: that the moments the characters spend casually unclothed, talking and smoking, puttering around, are just as sexy (if not more so) than the moments when they fuck as it feels even more taboo because nobody ever shows that.” —⁠Justin LaLiberty 

The body is sacred in In the Cut. The detectives (Malloy’s partner Rodriguez in particular) might be all crude bluster, shoving graphic photographs in front of Frannie to indulge in her reaction, but the filmmaker takes great care. In one instance, Frannie is the first on the scene of a horrific murder, and where there could have been shrieking and crime-scene tape and hazmat suits, instead there is gentle cradling. 

I tell Campion how much I appreciate that precious moment, how it is one of the reasons I feel safe as a viewer, in a film that partners sex with danger and viscerally embodies how it feels to be always watched, perceived, observed, stalked by men. “Thank you. I thought about that a lot, yeah. It’s coming from, you know, heart rather than horror.” 

And there it is. The only question that matters every time the sex-in-movies debate rears its prudish head: Where is the motivation coming from?

“If there is no character in the sex, then I don’t think you need it. But in an erotic love story, it’s kind of needed to be a part of the character,” says Campion. “I mean, I just think that sex is very important because after survival, it’s one of the great motivators of behavior. It’s affectionate, it’s about love, and it‘s also about being chosen. And about a liminal experience: that you can discover parts of yourself that are not part of your brain; that you can experience yourself as a body, as a pleasure, emotional heights. 

“When you think about a human being’s life, the times when you’ve been able to combine love and affection and sex are really amazing times of anybody’s life.”

“Equally daring are Ryan and Ruffalo for living in that transfixing and vulnerable state for so much of this movie.” —⁠Josh Kadish

The cinema sex debate, though, is not just about whether to show people making out, and who we get to see having sex (In the Cut’s leads are good-looking, cishet, white actors, it must be said), but what kind of sex we get to see.

“I always love it in movies where you see them have sex and then, next thing, you’re pregnant, like ‘isn’t that easy’!” Campion chuckles, as we talk about the L-shaped sheets that plague bedroom scenes, the methodical missionary of it all, and how to get beyond the basics. Some of her favorite sex scenes? The “egg laying” in Nagisa Ōshima’s 1976 erotic art film In the Realm of the Senses, and the Little Bill driveway scene in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights. 

In the Cut was released before YouTube or Pornhub were a thing. Now, we live with an unstoppable stream of pirated, out-of-context content. It’s a vulnerable time for actors, particularly those who might want to bare their bodies as part of their work. “It’s a sewer out there, it really is,” Campion agrees. The lack of control over the material once it hits the world inhibits an actor’s ability, she says, to fully share their body with their character.

Skeptical at first of intimacy advisors, Campion is impressed with how they help actors hold space for sexual expression on screen. “I was thinking it was going to really reduce everything, to make it very basic, but it’s more like stunt work,” she tells me. Her daughter Alice is a great advocate for the craft: “She says that it gives them agency and a voice, the actors.” And it works: “In Bridgerton they had a pretty hot intimacy advisor. I thought that was pretty sexy.” (That’s the work of Elizabeth Talbot.)   

There were no intimacy coordinators, as such, two decades ago, when In the Cut was headed for its R-rating. For the intimate scenes, Campion would draw the shots she wanted to capture, going over them with her actors, and having them sign off on the pictures. “Plus they could always remove anything they weren’t comfortable with later. So right through the process, they had the chance to withdraw consent, and I think that made them feel pretty comfortable.” 

“It is CRIMINAL that this film didn’t revitalize Meg Ryan’s career. She’s phenomenal in this, giving a performance I never thought I would ever see from her. The way that she navigates her desire is captivating.” —⁠Jourdain Searles

In a behind-the-scenes interview at the time of making In the Cut, Ryan describes Campion as having “altered her molecules”. She had asked to be considered for the role of Frannie. “She wanted that part,” says the filmmaker. “She had started to work with the acting coach Sandra Seacat, who’s really the Hollywood royalty of acting coaches. She had been really disappointed, I think, at the level of what was being offered to her as acting roles.” 

Ryan will interrupt her low-key life with What Happens Later, a nostalgic take on the romantic comedy, which she directs and stars in alongside David Duchovny. It’s due out through Bleecker Street soon. She and Campion are “still mates. She’s a really good person, and always true to her word.” 

Although many critics slammed In the Cut, audiences still found their way to the box office, returning twice the film’s budget. That was enough to encourage Campion’s Pathé benefactor to invest once again, giving us the exquisite Bright Star six years later—another film whose Letterboxd rating has been slowly rising. “I never expected them to want to have another outing with me, but they did. So, pretty amazing.”

“I still remember the stink that was raised about how bad this movie was when it was released (I thus conveniently skipped it at the time), but this kind of subject has always been on Jane Campion’s mind, and I guess the rest of the world just had to catch up.” —⁠Jeffrey Chen

As In the Cut’s opening song goes, whatever will be, will be. And Jane Campion’s erotic masterpiece will be in my Letterboxd top four for at least twenty more years, probably.