Education Quote by Jane Campion

Campion is sketching the emotional job description of a serious filmmaker: stay porous enough to notice the world, sealed enough to survive it. The phrase "be open" reads like the artist's credo - let in experience, contradiction, other people's mess. But she immediately pairs it with self-protection, admitting what creative culture often romanticizes away: openness is not a virtue when it turns you into a sponge for every mood, every review, every moral panic.

Her most telling move is to put "the good and the evil" in the same sentence as "importance". It's not a grand ethical manifesto so much as a warning about narrative gravity. In cinema, as in life, whatever you over-emphasize swells into fate. Campion's films - The Piano, In the Cut, The Power of the Dog - obsess over how quickly "good" and "evil" become costumes we force onto complex people, especially women. She's wary of that simplification in her own psyche: praise can be as intoxicating and distorting as condemnation; villainizing can feel clarifying until it becomes your only lens.

The intent, then, is pragmatic spirituality: cultivate attention without worshipping your own judgments. Campion isn't arguing for moral neutrality; she's arguing for proportion. The subtext is a veteran's survival strategy in an industry that rewards extremes - genius or fraud, masterpiece or disaster - and in a culture that loves sorting artists into saints and monsters. Her line is a refusal to hand over her inner life to that binary.