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Women tend to be too sensitive to become successful film directors, according to the only female director to have won the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival.

Jane Campion, who took the Palme D’Or in 1993 for The Piano, said today that although the sexist “old boys' system” of the studios played a part in holding women directors back, their own vulnerability to criticism was also a factor.

“At every film school in the whole world you will find 50 per cent boys and 50 per cent girls but then it just changes.”

Far fewer women than men go on to direct feature films while the gender imbalance is even more marked at the very top of the profession. No woman has ever won the Academy Award for Best Director and only three have been nominated: Lina Wertmuller for Seven Beauties in 1976, Campion with The Piano in 1993 and Sofia Coppola for Lost in Translation in 2003.

Campion was in Cannes for the premiere tonight of her new film, Bright Star, about the doomed romance between the poet John Keats and his neighbour Fanny Brawne.

“I would love to see more women directors because they represent half of the population and gave birth to the whole world,” she said.

“Without them the rest are not getting to know the whole story. I think women don’t grow up with the kind of criticism that men grow up with. We are more sensitively treated. It is quite harsh when you first experience the world of film-making — you have to have a tough skin.

“My suspicion is that women are not used to that. We must put on our coats of armour and get going because we need them [female directors].”

“I think the studio system is kind of an old boys' system. It’s difficult for them to trust women to be capable.

“I have been very, very lucky because some of our cinema [in Australia, where the New Zealand-born Campion’s career took off in the mid 1980s] is state sponsored so they have to be fair to both men and women. It’s part of the expectation.”

Campion is one of four previous winners in competition for the festival’s top prize this year (the others are Ken Loach, Quentin Tarantino and Lars Von Trier). Her own relationship with Cannes stretches back more than 20 years. Pierre Rissient, a Frenchman, put Campion on the world cinema map in 1986 when he discovered her three short films in the archives of the Australian Film Commission and brought them to the festival, along with Two Friends, Campion’s debut television feature. One of the films, Peel, won the short film Palme d’Or.

Her first feature, Sweetie, was shown in the main competition in 1989 and Rissient helped her to secure funding for The Piano, which was given its premiere at Cannes and won the festival’s awards for Best Film and Best Actress.

It went on to win more than 30 awards internationally but Campion has made only four feature-length films in the intervening 16 years, including Bright Star.

The justification she gave for that today may also partly explain why there are far fewer films made by women: the pull of family.

“I have a daughter who I was beginning to wonder if she knew she had a mother. I was determined to have some time with her while she was still young. Alice is my reason and she is my best film yet.”

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