Be sure to go and check out the official Bright Star website, now live! And read on for an article regarding the film, courtesy of Mail on Sunday. The article also comes with the very first production still of Abbie as Fanny. She looks absolutely radiant and stunning! I truly cannot wait to see Bright Star!

Jane Champion comes bounding down a gravel path and, suddenly, her body goes into karate mode. After playing an entertaining game of online poker, she began to swing her arms and threw a couple of fancy kicks.

She’s only kidding – one of the assistants on Bright Star, her film about the intense relationship between the poet John Keats and Fanny Brawne, the young woman he met in the last two years of his life, happens to be a martial arts champion and she’s just having a laugh with her.

All the same, it’s good to see this most passionate of directors having fun on a film that lingers on the subject of death (there’s romance as well, I hasten to add).

For me, it marked a marvellous contrast: going from the craziness of the Cannes Film Festival to contemplating Keats in the quiet of the English countryside.

Bright Star (the title of a Keats poem about Fanny) ends its nine-week shooting of principal photography today, and has brought together two of the most exciting up-and-coming stars working in cinema.

Abbie Cornish, the Australian-born actress who has given such powerful performances in movies as diverse as Somersault and Stop-Loss, portrays Fanny. She said that she read Campion’s script once, and it was ‘burned into her imagination’.

Ben Whishaw, whose Trevor Nunn directed Hamlet at the Old Vic is indelibly seared in the memories of those who saw it – and who, by the way, re-defines Sebastian in the new film version of Brideshead Revisited – takes on the role of Keats.

Paul Schneider plays Charles Armitage Brown and Kerry Fox plays Fanny’s mother. Ms Fox starred in Campion’s early film An Angel At My Table 20 years ago. Thomas Brodie-Sangster and Edie Martin, both young and, clearly, stars of the future, play Fanny’s younger siblings.

The main set has been in deepest Bedfordshire – a remote farming estate with a pond standing in for Hampstead Heath.

Campion has shaped her screenplay through her own researches and using information from Andrew Motion’s biography of Keats.

Jan Chapman, Campion’s long-time producer and a major force in cinema in her own right, told me that the director has used nature and seasons a lot as a kind of emotional tone, although during filming, the weather didn’t always play along.

The movie – a joint British-Australian production – is essentially told from Fanny’s point of view. Chapman said: ‘There are a lot of letters from Keats, but there’s hardly anything written from Fanny, so Jane’s had to create her whole character, really. These are Jane’s views of an 18-year-old girl full of intense feelings and extreme emotional expression.’

Over 13 weeks of rehearsals and filming, the actors seem to have put life on hold to fully embrace their characters. ‘I think sometimes the balance isn’t always what it should be,’ Ben told me, with a rueful laugh. ‘ Sometimes the work I’m doing feels more real than my life. It just sort of happens; the character takes over.’

Indeed, Chapman noted that it was spine-tingling, watching the actor ‘almost channelling Keats’.

Ben said he was struck at how death looms large over Keats’s story, and added that Fanny’s role in Keats’ poetry was vital. ‘He wrote all the poetry he’s remembered for now in the space of a year, and that was the year she came into his life,’ he said.

Ironically, the strict social conventions of the time, which kept Keats and Fanny apart, also played a part in inspiring his work, Ben added. ‘Because Keats had little money, he wasn’t able to marry Fanny. It was social etiquette that got in the way.

‘There’s something really beautiful about those restrictions placed on a relationship because you have to express your love in different ways. I think that’s another reason why the poetry and letters by Keats are so extraordinary.

‘You couldn’t just snog and have sex – there’s beauty in that innocence.’