The Promise by Michael Nyman, from The Piano, is literally a rain-swept, iron-sands beach in Northland in musical form.

Recently revisiting her 1993 Palme d'Or-winning movie, The Piano director Jane Campion had admitted she was "shocked to see a film I barely remembered".

Speaking to Britain's Empire magazine to celebrate the New Zealand-shot movie's 25th anniversary, the Kiwi film-maker said it still had "some surprising strengths and freshness".

She said it was things that she took for granted at the time of making it that stood out for her now.

"Telling the story from a female point-of-view, which was so amazing, but is so rare, especially an eroticised female point-of-view."

The Piano won the Palm d'Or and three Oscars.

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Asked about the genesis of her 1850s-set story about the love triangle between a mute woman, her wealthy landowning husband and a plantation worker, Campion said it was inspired by her obsession with the works of George Eliot and the Bronte sisters. She said she had written a five-page outline written many years earlier, "but I didn't feel I could do it right then. I need to grow and get more experience as a director".

Stuff Anna Paquin's acceptance speech at the 1994 Academy Awards is one of the most memorable Kiwi moments at the Oscars.

The 64-year-old also revealed that her heroine Ada was originally tall and dark, modelled on the film's near six-foot costume designer Janet Patterson. That meant Campion had to be persuaded that the more dimunitive Holly Hunter (standing at 5ft 2) was right for the part that eventually won her an Academy Award.

"Her agent was very persistent. Holly read the voiceover and handed me a tape saying 'this is my piano playing, I 've been playing for a number of years'. It was immediately obvious that she communicated with the eyes. And if you weren't going to be speaking, you needed that. And even though she may not be conventionally the most beautiful of the women we met, her particular kind of beauty really drew you to watch her. And also she is a very f..ing badass woman."

Holly Hunter wasn't exactly the look Jane Campion envisaged originally for The Piano's Ada.

As for her other Oscar-winning star, Anna Paquin, then a Wellington schoolgirl, Campion says she was just about resigned to having to simplify the character when "this tiny little girl" came along to audition with her sister.

"I didn't know if any of the girls were going to be able to do a Scottish accent, handle these complicated ideas and all of the fabulating that the character of Flora did...but she [Paquin] was so beautiful looking, such strong-focus, telling this story and it was perfect. Just like that. I didn't direct her at all."

Mark Metcalfe Jane Campion says it was things that she took for granted at the time of making The Piano that stand out for her now.

And watching it again confirmed Campion's decision not to kill off Hunter's character at the end of the movie as she once contemplated.

"She had that stubbornness that was so powerful. I think she'd die for it, really. But I wanted her to get to a place where she was almost dead and then be like, 'I can let this go, I don't have to be defined by not speaking. I can change it. I'd rather have life'."