Run time: 119 mins
MPAA Rating: PG for thematic elements, some sensuality, brief language and incidental smoking.
Opens in Las Vegas, Nevada; Albuquerque and Santa Fe, New Mexico on Oct. 2; Tucson, Arizona on Oct. 23, 2009.
"Bright Star" Director's Notes
By Jane Campion, writer and director
The film is in itself a kind of ballad, like Keats’s 'Eve of St Agnes' – it is a story about the love affair of Fanny Brawne and John Keats. The story progresses in verses charting their increasing involvement and attachment as well as their deepening difficulties.
The storytelling’s restraint mimics Fanny’s own life restraint, the passive waiting fate of any young woman of her time: the life amongst the family, her obsession with sewing, the restrictions on her activities and her chaperoned outings. Against all these restraints, her determined passion for John Keats expressed through the notes she left under his pillow or by presenting herself at his window when he was sick, seem all the more remarkable.
The most important quality of this story was to get across the intimacy of the characters to the viewer. Rehearsal was very important for this as it helped the actors to establish a subtle Being. Both Ben Whishaw and Abbie Cornish have a particular delicious charisma which, through the rehearsal period, they gave their characters claim to. The more real they are, the more the mystery of their unique personalities is allowed to fascinate us, capturing our imagination and our hearts.
I see the world of Keats and Fanny as light filled, literally leaking light, and even though the film ends with Keats’s death, the lamp lit by his poetic genius and unique spirit cannot be extinguished. It is Bright Star’s ambition to sensitize the audience, to light the lamp.
