Life Lessons From Jane Campion

I hated life as a 14-year-old. It’s intense when you’re a teenager: so much feeling and no experience of managing it. “Just grow up” is cruel advice. Getting older is the best cure.

I’m not an adult. If I feel good inside myself, I’m ageless.

I mix old and young friends consciously. Ben Whishaw [who played John Keats in Campion’s film Bright Star] has become my new son, and I’ve recently been adopted by a woman younger than me as her daughter, which is fabulous.

Nobody is ever really speaking the truth. It’s always relative.

Director and screenwriter Jane Campion provided her “this much I know” answers to The Observer’s Eva Wiseman. “We should mandate that 50 percent of films produced are made by women,” says Campion. “That would be possible with public money. Instantly the culture would change. It can be done.”