How we made An Angel at My Table

THE IDEA

Jane Campion read To the Is-land in 1982 while a film student in Sydney. Her mother, Edith, sent her a copy. She’d loved Frame’s books since reading Owls Do Cry as a teenager. She cried. She had an idea. Back in New Zealand for Christmas, she asked her Levin-based godmother, Marga Gordon, a friend of Frame, to arrange an introduction, and visited the writer in Levin.

CAMPION: Going to Janet in the first place, I was so nervous. I could barely speak. Janet also was nervous. We were two nervous, loving and ironic women together. One towards the end of her career and the other near her beginning. The first step was so hard, the meeting incredibly awkward, but I did it.

I was really aware that I was still just a film-school student and hadn’t finished even any of my short films at that point. But I wanted to say that I loved it and I could see that it would be fantastic to perhaps do it as a mini-series.

Janet suggested I wait until I had read the next two volumes of her autobiography, due out in 1983 and 1984. In the meantime, she would not sell them to anyone else.

In the new year, Campion visited producer Bridget Ikin on the set of Vincent in Taranaki, suggesting they team up. They wrote a letter to Frame and her literary agent, Tim Curnow, who in later correspondence with his client described the pair as “a couple of dreamers”.