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23 Q2 2018 / CINEMONTAGE THIS QUARTER IN FILM HISTORY Campion had begun writing the screenplay, originally titled The Piano Lesson, in 1984. In a May 1993 interview with Miro Bilbrough for the Australian film journal Cinema Papers, she said she was inspired by the all-consuming romance of Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights, Emily Dickinson's poetry and antique photos of New Zealand's Maori people, "sitting with great dignity… their sense of themselves was so powerful." Re-imagining the land's British settlers and using the piano "as the central mechanism from which the story evolves" allowed her to write, Campion said, "about characters who don't have a 20th century sensibility about sex… We grow up with so many expectations around it that it's almost like the pure erotic sexual impulse is lost to us. But, for them, the impact of sex is not softened." In 1987, Campion showed her first draft to producer Jan Chapman who stated, as print ads later proclaimed when the film was released in the US, "I was determined to finance The Piano in such a way that Jane's original vision could be retained." After Campion received acclaim for her first two features, Sweetie (1989) and An Angel at My Table (1990), the Australian Film Commission and the New South Wales Film and TV Office jointly invested $85,000 seed money in the project. This helped Chapman attract the attention of the recently founded French production company CIBY 2000. CIBY was then producing David Lynch's Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992), the theatrical prequel to his TV series Twin Peaks (1990-91). Campion completed the shooting script of The Piano late in 1990 and CIBY agreed to provide the $7 million budget for the picture. Among the actors Campion considered for the mute pianist Ada were Isabelle Huppert, Anjelica Huston, Sigourney Weaver and Juliette Binoche, but Hunter fought for the role. In a fall 1993 article in Filmmaker magazine, she declared, "I read so many scripts where there's this effort to make a feminist story [but] the women are written like men. I thought Jane was really captivated by the notion of her femaleness. Ada was the perfect palette. It was all the stuff I had not explored before." An accomplished pianist, Hunter had learned the instrument during her childhood and into late adolescence. Campion had doubts, however, about the actress' small stature. She told Cinema Papers' Bilbrough she had wanted Ada "to be a tall woman with a strong, dark, eerie Frida Kahlo-sort of beauty. But, in Holly's audition tape, her gaze was stupendous." For the music that expresses the emotional core of the movie — both the incidental music and the music that "speaks" for Ada through her piano playing — composer Michael Nyman based his score on Scottish folk and popular songs since Ada was from Scotland. It was, he noted to Bilbrough, "as though I was writing the music of a composer who happened to live in Scotland, then New Zealand, in the mid- 1850s." Nyman also revealed to Variety in November 1993 that Hunter found the pieces he wrote for her to perform on screen "so childishly simple that it gave me the chance to write stuff that was more challenging… Not only did she cope technically with everything I threw at her, but she put emotion in the music and made it very, very personal." In open auditions with 5,000 other young contenders, nine-year-old Anna Paquin read for the role of Flora, the daughter Ada brings with her half way around the world to New Zealand. "It was remarkable to see someone so young with such an instinct for performance," said Campion. During production, Paquin and Hunter developed such a mirror-like closeness, the filmmaker observed, "Anna would use all Holly's mannerisms of performance." In preparing for her role, Hunter worked with Darlene Allen (who taught Lily Tomlin American Sign Language for Nashville, 1975) to create an original sign language for Ada that could only be understood by Ada and Flora. Hunter herself taught Paquin this sign language, bringing the two closer together. From early on, Campion had envisioned Sam Neill as the farmer Stewart, who arranges with Ada's family to ship her to New Zealand to be his wife. To play Baines, The Piano. Miramax/Photofest