The Power of the Dog’s Oscar-nominated producers: ‘This film could be transformative’

The idea of turning Thomas Savage’s 1967 novel The Power of the Dog into a film had been kicking around for years but it never seemed to get off the ground — until Oscar-winner Jane Campion got hold of a copy.

Campion sensed that the dark Western psychodrama could be a great motion picture, so in mid-2018 she asked producer Emile Sherman to meet her at a café in Sydney’s Bondi Beach to discuss making it. “Jane had a real glint in her eye,” Sherman, 49, says in a Zoom interview from his home in Sydney. “The book sounded intriguing but, to be honest, we would have done anything Jane wanted.”

Sherman and Iain Canning, his London-based partner at independent production house See-Saw Films, had worked with Campion on a television series, Top of the Lake, and they cleared the next day to spend with the book. “It was a great joy not just reading the novel . . . but also knowing that the best film version of this could be quite extraordinary,” Sherman says. “In Jane’s hands you had the potential for great visual cinema. It could be transformative [for the Western film genre].”

It has certainly touched a cultural nerve. The Power of the Dog, released in December on Netflix and in a limited number of theatres, has been nominated for 12 Academy Awards, including Campion for director and adapted screenplay. This is familiar territory for her, having been nominated for best original screenplay and best director in 1994 for The Piano, winning the former.

The Power of the Dog stars Benedict Cumberbatch as Phil Burbank, a brilliant, conflicted, cruel cowboy who runs the biggest ranch in Montana with his soft-spoken brother George (Jesse Plemons). After George marries widow Rose (Kirsten Dunst), an embittered Phil wages a vicious campaign to torment his sister-in-law and her artistic, bookish son, Peter (Kodi Smit-McPhee). All four have been nominated for acting Oscars.

Visually, the film has much of what you expect to see in a Western, including expansive skies — with New Zealand standing in for Montana — and plenty of chaps and cattle. But it is hardly a conventional Western, reflecting the fact that this take on a masculine genre was written and directed by a woman and shot by a female cinematographer, Ari Wegner (also Oscar-nominated).

The result, says Canning, 42, is a “subversive” Western set in the 1920s, when real-life cowboys had already become aware of — and influenced by — cinema cowboys. “There is this idea of masquerade, and what cinema Westerns had brought to the actual west in terms of [defining] how to be a cowboy, what it means to be a cowboy and that element of masculinity,” says Canning, joining the Zoom interview from Los Angeles. “It’s a Western but the fundamental aspect of many Westerns is the gun, and this film does not have one.”

The Best Picture nomination for The Power of the Dog is the third for Sherman and Canning, who won the award for The King’s Speech (2010) and were nominated for Lion (2016). It is a remarkable record for the independent See-Saw, a 14-year-old production company with 35 employees split between offices in Sydney and London.

The partners say they have managed to hold on to their independence in part by taking advantage of the government incentives offered by the UK and Australia, from Screen Australia to the British Film Institute, Channel 4 and the BBC. “This is crucial to maintaining our authenticity and our approach to risk-taking,” says Canning. “It mitigates the risk in terms of the commercial money.”

After starting off making films — usually producing just one a year — See-Saw branched out into television as the streaming boom began. The company counts Apple, Amazon, Hulu, Netflix and other streamers as customers or partners. “We’re lucky that now the streaming world has hugely boosted the appetite for content and injected a huge amount of money,” Sherman says. “It’s a crazy market at the moment.”

The level of ambition and competition in the market became apparent as See-Saw and the other members of the Power of the Dog team, which included fellow producers Tanya Seghatchian and Roger Frappier, went to Cannes to strike a deal for the film in 2019. A number of companies were eager to buy it, but Netflix executives captured Campion’s attention by asking her to imagine what she could do with more money and freedom than she had with her earlier projects.

Still, there were concerns about whether Netflix could deliver the majestic big-screen experience for a Western such as Power of the Dog. Once the streaming company said it could arrange a theatrical release for about 200 screens in the US, the deal was sealed, though it has hardly been a box office hit.

For Netflix’s prestige films, such as The Power of the Dog or its other Best Picture nominee, Don’t Look Up, the theatrical release’s primary role is to ensure that they qualify for Oscar consideration, not rake in ticket sales at the cinema. The film has been viewed in more than 40mn homes on Netflix itself.

Sherman and Canning note that the distinctions between film and television have been blown up by streaming — which is fine with them. “Now is the moment for great stories,” says Sherman. “We’re just looking out for stories that are distinctive, voiced, entertaining and urgent in some way that can resonate around the entire world.”

For now, it appears to be a moment to savour. In a later interview on a sun-drenched afternoon in Los Angeles, Canning pauses to reflect on the heady experience of being in Hollywood as one of his company’s films is up for 12 Oscars.

“The Power of the Dog is such a wonderfully strange film, and now it’s on a billboard on Sunset [Boulevard],” he says. “It was surreal to be speaking to Jane after the nomination while also walking past a huge billboard of her. It’s a definite pinch-yourself moment.”

The 94th Academy Awards take place on March 27; see-saw-films.com

This article has been amended since its original publication to correct the category in which Jane Campion won her Oscar

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