The Power of the Dog: how Ari Wegner created Jane Campion’s wild west

Adapted from a 1967 novel by Thomas Savage, Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog is a haunting story of humans and nature. Set in 1920s Montana, it follows macho cowboy Phil Burbank (Benedict Cumberbatch) as he takes to bullying his brother’s new wife (Kirsten Dunst), and her sensitive son Peter (Kodi Smit-McPhee), when they come to live on his ranch. Phil is not a ‘bad’ man, but someone who is mired by loss, loneliness, and a lifetime of emotional repression: an embodiment of toxic masculinity, and a deft subversion of the western genre.

It’s not a plot-heavy film. But it is, by all accounts, achingly beautiful: from the cascading mountain range captured in magnificent wide-screen, to the intricate paper flowers Peter crafts for his family restaurant; the deep golden browns of sprawling dusty vistas, to the way light falls so delicately through the windows of the Burbanks’ house. Director of photography Ari Wegner made history this year as the first woman ever nominated for the BAFTA in Best Cinematography. She is only the second woman nominated in 94 years of the Oscars.

“It’s definitely one of those reminders that we’re just at the very start of progress,” Wegner tells Dazed over Zoom. “It often feels like women have come a huge way in the world. But in some areas, we really haven’t seen much movement.”

In The Power of the Dog, Wegner masterfully visualises a world rife with contrasts and contradictions: one that is utterly expansive in its setting, but unnervingly claustrophobic in the anguished psyches of its characters; where the primality of nature clashes with the artificial personas we construct. Brutally bright outside shots are interspersed with dark, dusky ones inside, and the tension of countless dichotomies boils to the surface. Strength and vulnerability; desire and disdain; the exteriors we project versus who we are inside.

Wegner spent an entire year with Campion on pre-production, which is virtually unheard of. Yet the stakes of a Jane Campion film had Wegner doubting that a year would be enough. “When someone like Jane calls you and says we're gonna be shooting in a year, it’s like, ‘holy shit, that’s like tomorrow.’ Because you look at her body of work and every film feels like a masterpiece.”

Scouting a location was the pair’s first task. The South Island of Campion’s native New Zealand, renowned for its untouched natural landscapes, allowed Wegner to shoot as widely as possible with minimal tweaking in post-production. From start to finish, authenticity was the priority: there were numerous picture-perfect, postcard-worthy valleys in New Zealand they could have chosen, but they didn’t. “Looking at the mountain range [we chose], it was like a body lying down, with all these folds and knobbly bits and rough edges,” Wegner reflects. “It was beautiful because it was imperfect and real and relatable… That’s how we chose to shoot it, too. Like shooting someone you love lying on a bed.”

One early visual reference was photographer and diarist Evelyn Cameron, who moved from London to eastern Montana at the end of the 19th century. In Cameron’s unique images, showing ranch life as seen through the eyes of a female outsider, Wegner was struck by how much of what we think we know about the American West is informed by ubiquitous cultural references reproduced over time – but that, for all we know, bear little resemblance to reality. “Like, at no point would you find in a history book what [Cameron’s photos showed] people were wearing,” Wegner says. “That was the bar of authenticity we were trying to find.”

The touchstone for Wegner’s pared-back colour palette was the metallic hue of sun-bleached grass, complemented by natural tones like earth, fur, skin and leather. The paintings of Andrew Wyeth and Lucien Freud were other strong visual influences, for their ability to conjure strikingly atmospheric scenes using only muted and minimalistic colours. In Wegner’s words, “you look at one frame, and with very few elements, you’re able to build a narrative.”

Minimalism pervades The Power of the Dog, from props to dialogue and everything in between. “We wanted elegance by removing as much as we could – like if something doesn’t need to be there, get rid of it,” the cinematographer says. “Jane very early on mentioned the word ‘unadorned’, and that kept coming up; that it doesn’t need frosting, it doesn’t need ‘jewellery’, it doesn’t need extra things on top to prove that it’s pretty or good.”

Wegner talks admiringly of Campion’s “incredibly childlike energy”. Namely, the way she finds beauty and wonder in the small, mundane details, rather than manufacturing beauty for beauty’s sake. The duo’s penchant for minimalism is not to say The Power of the Dog is not an intricate film. It is simply to say that, true to typical Campion style, every sight, sound and experience that did make the cut was a choice of immense purpose. The result is a spectacle to behold, worthy of all the awards recognition sure to come its way.