The director Jane Campion has called the actor Sam Elliott “a little bit sexist” and “a bitch”, for criticising The Power of the Dog, her Oscar- and Bafta-nominated western, for its driving theme of repressed homosexual desire and for being filmed in New Zealand.
Campion’s film has 12 Oscar nominations, including best picture, best director, best adapted screenplay, best actor (Benedict Cumberbatch), best supporting actress (Kirsten Dunst) and two nominations for best supporting actor (Kodi Smit-McPhee and Jesse Plemons). Campion is the first woman to be nominated for best director twice.
Campion spoke to Variety at the Directors Guild of America awards in Los Angeles on Saturday, at which she won the award for outstanding directorial achievement in theatrical feature film.
She said: “I’m sorry, he was being a little bit of a B-I-T-C-H. I’m sorry to say it but he’s not a cowboy, he’s an actor. The west is a mythic space and there’s a lot of room on the range. I think it’s a little bit sexist.”
She added: “I consider myself a creator. I think he thinks of me as a woman or something lesser first.”
Elliott, who has starred in numerous westerns, spoke last month on Marc Maron’s WTF podcast.
“Yeah, you wanna talk about that piece of shit?” he said.
“You didn’t like that one?” Maron asked.
“Fuck no,” Elliott said. “Why? I’ll tell you why I didn’t like it anyway. I looked at [it] when I was down there in Texas doing [the TV series] 1883 …
“There was a fucking full page ad out in the LA Times, and there was a clip, and it talked about the evisceration of the American myth. And I thought ‘What the fuck? What the fuck?’ This is the guy that’s done westerns forever. The evisceration of the American west? They made it look like – what are all those dancers, those guys in New York that wear bowties and not much else? Remember them from back in the day?”
Maron suggested he meant the Chippendales, an all-male strip troupe.
Elliott said: “That’s what all these fucking cowboys in that movie looked like, running around in chaps and no shirts. There were all these allusions to homosexuality throughout the fucking movie.”
Maron said: “I think that’s what the movie’s about.”
Elliott said: “Well, what the fuck does this woman from down there – she’s a brilliant director – know about the American west, and why the fuck did she shoot this movie in New Zealand and call it Montana and say, ‘This is the way it was.’ That fucking rubbed me the wrong way, pal.
“The myth is that they were these macho men out there with the cattle. I just come from fucking Texas where I was hanging out with families, not men, families, big, long, extended, multiple-generation families.”
Elliott also complained about Campion’s star, saying: “I mean, Cumberbatch never got out of his fucking chaps. He had two pairs of chaps – a woolly pair and a leather pair. And every fucking time he would walk in from somewhere – he never was on a horse, maybe once – he’d walk into the fucking house, storm up the fucking stairs, go lay in his bed in his chaps and play his banjo.
“It’s like, what the fuck?”
Earlier this month, the Guardian published an interview in which Campion was asked: “Did you ever worry about overdoing all the leather and ropes and chaps?”
Campion said: “I encouraged it! I loved it because they looked like satyrs. And when I looked at the pictures from the period, big woolies are really common; I guess Montana’s super-cold. So wearing a sheep on each leg is sort of helpful.”
Elliott also asked: “Where’s the western in this western?”
In partial answer, Campion told Variety: “When you think about the number of amazing westerns made in Spain by Sergio Leone, I consider myself a creator.”
Of Elliott, she said: “I think he thinks of me as a woman or something lesser first, and I don’t appreciate that.”