Having landed Holly Hunter on a beach with a piano, and turned Kerry Fox into a poetic carrot-top in An Angel At My Table, award-winning director Jane Campion now takes Meg Ryan into unexpected new areas with her masterful, erotically-charged, psychological thriller In The Cut.

Is it true that the original backers pulled out when they realised you weren't making a Se7en-style thriller?

I did sort of make the mistake of teasing my original backer with the thought of Se7en. But I hadn't read the book then, and it did become clear that it wasn't really like Se7en. But in some important ways it was, because Se7en is all about relationships, and so was our film. It's just different. But I didn't want to back off from what we were moving towards, because I realised that, for me, the genre was of no value unless it was working for me rather than me working for it. So I kept saying, "I want it to be a relationship-based story first," and they didn't.

Reality fails to live up to the romantic longings of the half-sisters in the film. Did you want to say something about the predicament of modern women?

Women today are dealing with both their independence and also the fact that their lives are built around finding and satisfying the romantic models we grew up with. The story gave us an opportunity to see how that model falls short for us, and creates enormous amounts of grief. Women often postpone their lives, thinking that if they're not with a partner then it doesn't really count. They're still searching for their prince, in a way. And as much as we don't discuss that, because it's too embarrassing and too sad, I think it really does exist.

Were you comfortable dealing with the violence in the film?

There's not any onscreen violence, which I do actually find quite difficult. In fact, even the stunt where Meg's stand-in gets hit by the taxi, I was in a torment, you know? I thought, "What the hell am I doing this f***** stuff for? This person could really get hurt. Let's not do it." It was the worst day.

Meg's character is asked if she is happy when she wakes up in the morning. Are you happy, Jane?

Not when I was writing this story, no. I'd feel like there were voices in my mind going, "You're f****** pathetic. You're hopeless." This is the sort of dialogue I live with. My unconscious would get going before I'd even have a chance to say "Stop". It'd be, "You're a joke. You're F***ed. You're full of S***." Then I'd go, "Grrrrrrr", and struggle my way into the day. When I became aware of that, which I gave to Meg's character, I thought, "Hey, you've really got a problem." So I've tried to do something about it.

In The Cut is released in UK cinemas on Friday 31st October 2003.