Bright Star's Ben Whishaw on Jane Campion's Stare and Abbie Cornish's Mix CDs

So you had never read with Abbie or even met her before you were both cast?

Yeah.

That's quite a leap of faith on Jane's part!

I know! I think it says a lot about Jane. She's just got really amazing instincts about people, in a way I've never really come across before. She has intuitions about things that are kind of uncanny. She can see into people, I think, and anyway, she must have had some intuition that we would get on well. She never even seemed to doubt it.

Had you met Jane before you went in for this film?

No, but she set me at ease right away, right in the audition. She was a bit unnerving at first, just because she kind of fixes you with her stare, but she's actually incredibly soft and gentle and easy on people. There's something about her that's very direct -- she told me, "Don't be polite with me. John Keats was not famed for his politeness. We've got to speak the truth to each other, so you can just leave that outside."

Do you feel reticent sometimes with directors?

I don't ever feel reticent, but I think I was brought up to be polite to people. We were trying to talk about something with the character, and I was kind of tiptoeing around the issue, and Jane said, "Let's just talk about it plainly. It's not helpful to us to do otherwise." I've always felt that that's been a sort of block of mine, you know? And she immediately said, "Let's get rid of that."

What issue were you discussing with her?

I can't even remember. I think she asked me the question of had I felt betrayed before. I was kind of pussyfooting around the answer.

You have Kill Your Darlings on deck next, where you play Lucien Carr, who brought together Beat poets like Allen Ginsberg and John Kerouac but also found himself entangled in a murder. When does that shoot?

We were gonna start in June, we were gonna start in August...I don't know exactly now, but I'm fairly certain it will happen. Maybe not until next year. It's such an exciting story, though, kind of a film noir. It's definitely not a biopic of Ginsberg or Lucien Carr or William Burroughs or anyone else. It's very much using those characters to explore themes and ideas.

Keats and Carr are both figures that have written and been written about, but Carr's story is much more ambiguous. How do you actually make decisions about how to play the mystery of the character, especially when he's a real person who died only recently?

It's a good question. I guess I don't know yet, is probably the answer! [Laughs] It's a bit like Bright Star in that there's this game you play with fiction and reality. Your performance has to lie somewhere in between.

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