Top of the Lake starts screening on UKTV on Sunday, March 24.
Susan Chenery – The Australian – March 16, 2013 12:00AM
GREAT flanks of mountains; deep, glassy alpine lakes; primeval forests: the sheer
mythic scale of this remote South Island New Zealand landscape insists it be the
dominant character in any scenario.
Past glaciers and hanging valleys at the head of Lake Wakatipu in central Otago, is
the tiny frontier town of Glenorchy. It was here that Jane Campion came 15 years ago
to visit a friend. “It was quite a profound experience; it is real wilderness.” In the
summer twilight that lingers until after 10 o’clock she walked into the scenery. “It
just was incredibly magical and remote and beautiful”. She had found her spiritual
home in her own country.
“A lot of the people who live there have lost their lives in the lake. The lake has a lot
of different personalities; sometimes it is really glassy and other times it is really
broken up and dangerous.” She started thinking about writing a story set in this
place. And it is typical of her sensibility that she would look at the beautiful lake and
visualise a pregnant 12-year-old girl walking into it up to her neck, the central image
of what would become her first foray into television production in more than 20
years:, the six-hour series Top of the Lake.
And it is entirely characteristic, too, given an illustrious career making films about
women with all their eddies, undercurrents, struggles and complexities, that she
would park a tribe of women “who have fallen off the edge of the earth” in a camp
made of containers in a place called Paradise near Glenorchy, with a decidedly blunt
though enigmatic guru, GJ, played by Holly Hunter, with whom Campion had
worked on The Piano (1993), for which they both won Oscars.
Campion’s writing partner Gerard Lee points out that she wrote the child in the lake
scene when her daughter was 13, and about women in their 50s when she was
entering this decade herself. “No, that is personal,” she says briskly. “I personally feel
very angry about the rape of women or any sexual abuse of women. And this is an
opportunity to tell a story where you get to feel the weight of it.” She has known Lee
since film school, has shared all the significant events of her life with him, and he is
her daughter’s godfather. “She is formidable person,” says producer Emile Sherman.
“She is so smart emotionally and intellectually that she just gets everything. I was a
little bit scared of her in the beginning, I had to work out how to phrase my views and
comments as a producer”.
Top of the Lake is a vast, imaginative work that peers beneath the cracks of a
backwoods community, then goes deeper still, into an intense mystery. When they
were writing, Lee and Campion would act out the parts, something they would later
do for startled producers and the actors in rehearsal. “They are bloody hilarious as a
double act,” Wenham says.
When it was ready, they presented it to the producers, Sherman and his partner Iain
Canning, Christian Vesper from the Sundance Channel, and Philippa Campbell from
New Zealand. Ben Stephenson, head of drama at the BBC, had been on board since
the broadcaster’s involvement with Bright Star (2009).