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Director Jane Campion brought a stiletto to her knife fight with actor Sam Elliott, who went on a homoph0bic, xenophobic rant about her new Western-style movie The Power of the Dog. “He was being a little bit of a B-I-T-C-H. He’s not a cowboy; he’s an actor,” Campion told Variety before the DGA Awards on Saturday night. “The West is a mythic space and there’s a lot of room on the range. I think it’s a little bit sexist.”
Appearing on Marc Maron’s podcast, Elliott called Campion’s movie a “piece of shit,” questioned what business a filmmaker from New Zealand has directing a Western, and whined that her cowboys look like exotic dancers. “They’re all running around in chaps and no shirts. There’s all these allusions to homosexuality throughout the fucking movie,” he said. Campion noted that Sergio Leone made his Westerns in Spain. “I consider myself a creator,” she said. “I think he thinks of me as a woman or something lesser first, and I don’t appreciate that.”