tMF | The Movie-Fanatic

“Film tends to work best when it's in the safe hands of a storyteller.”

A storyteller, says screenwriting guru Robert McKee, is a life poet “…an artist who transforms day-to-day living into a poem whose rhyme scheme is events rather than words—a two-hour metaphor that says: Life is like this!”

British film director Anthony Minghella is just such a storyteller. His films can be described as poetry in motion picture format, stanzas of sound and light and texture and feeling. From his exploration of love, grief and loss in Truly, Madly, Deeply, through the mysterious and tragic love story of The English Patient into the darkly disturbed mind of The Talented Mr. Ripley, Minghella tells us stories that vibrate with love, mystery and the shifting rhythms of life.

Roots of his craft:

“There was a time, for five years, when I read Beckett almost on a daily basis. The sense of language and poetry in his writing has been the single biggest influence on me as a writer.”

Born in 1954 to Italian/Scots parents, Anthony Minghella grew up on the Isle of Wight, a predominantly rural community with dramatic coastlines, sweeping stretches of farmland, and abundant wildlife, seemingly the perfect setting for an idyllic childhood. But not for the young Anthony. “My father,” he says, “was an Italian ice-cream seller and I was very conscious of the fact that we had a completely different culture to all of my friends. I had one instinct and that was to find some escape route from wearing a yellow nylon jacket and selling Minghella’s Ice Cream for the rest of my life.”

He turned first of all to music as an escape, unleashing his frustrations by “banging the piano and singing.” Music turned out to be his passport off the Isle of Wight when he was accepted into the University of Hull in Yorkshire on the basis of his musical and artistic abilities. It was there that his idiosyncratic outlook on life, which had previously set him apart from his peers, was encouraged, and the roots of his love for literature were sown.

“'I discovered Beckett the second I arrived (at Hull). The following four or five years of my life were defined by that discovery in some ways. I became obsessed with the writing—its mixture of austerity and romance. It's like Bach for me—the two major discoveries in my young adulthood were Bach and Beckett. For both it's true that there's this monkish, extremely rare and dry surface, underneath which there is a volcano.”

At the University of Hull, his initial interest in music led him into writing for musical theatre and a commission to script a play soon followed, bringing with it an epiphany that proved life-changing.

“I love writing. I find it very difficult, but it’s the time when I’m most comfortable with myself, or I feel most like myself.”

The switch from playwriting to screenwriting came gradually. Following graduation and a stint in teaching, Minghella went on to work in television in the 1980s, script-editing the children's drama series Grange Hill for the BBC and later writing The Storyteller series for Jim Henson. He was involved with the popular ITV detective drama Inspector Morse, eventually turning down the opportunity in 1991 to direct one of these episodes in favor of working on his debut feature film Truly, Madly, Deeply.

At Berlinale Talent Campus in 2004, Minghella discussed this steady progression towards his emergence as a filmmaker: “By the time I got into film I had really experimented in various ways with some of the constitutional elements of film. I also studied history of fine art, painted and drew. I was making music, and I studied literature. I feel in some ways that I had been working towards the various elements which create film: music, writing, language, and image.”

Truly, Madly, Deeply (1991)

“Music is a very big actor.”

Strictly speaking, Truly, Madly, Deeply wasn’t Minghella’s first feature film. At the age of 22, with no experience at all, he borrowed money from the bank and wrote, produced and directed an ambitious and now nameless full length feature film. “It took me 10 years to pay them back,” he said at Berlinale. “But I was a film lover and longed for the opportunity to move into the filmmaking. Finally I was able to because my career as a writer in Britain was developing, so the BBC were prepared to take a risk with me as a director. So in some ways I leveraged my reputation as a writer to give me the opportunity to direct my first film, Truly Madly Deeply.”

An exploration of love, the paralysis of grief, and the difficulties of moving on, Truly, Madly, Deeply was written and directed by Minghella and stars Alan Rickman and Juliet Stevenson. A romantic comedy with a large dose of magical realism, Minghella’s stylistic signature can already be seen in this debut work. The use of filtered light and dark in the opening sequence, the inclusion of literary elements—in this case the poetry of Pablo Neruda as part of the denouement—and finally, music as a member of the cast: Nina is a pianist and her dead husband Jamie was a cellist.

"If I wasn't working in film, I would be a musician,” Minghella once said in an interview. “Film is much closer allied to music than it is to language. So I initially think about what music I might use and what the movie might sound like. But I also think of the film metaphorically in musical terms. Theme, exposition of theme, rhymes, visual rhymes. Not to know how your movie is going to sound is rather like making a movie with one invisible actor whose face you can’t see and whose voice you can’t hear and suddenly, after you have finished making your film, there he is and that’s how he sounds. Music is a very big actor in the movies.”

Mr. Wonderful (1993)

Following the critical success of Truly, Madly, Deeply, he went on to make a second romantic comedy, Mr. Wonderful starring Matt Dillon and Annabella Sciorra. Mr. Wonderful received good reviews on both sides of the Atlantic and did fairly well at the box office. But it was his next film that established him as a global filmmaker of note.

The English Patient (1996)

Starring Ralph Fiennes, Juliette Binoche, Kristin Scott Thomas and Willem Dafoe amongst others, The English Patient was immediately tagged by critics as having all the hallmarks of a cinema classic.

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Set in Italy and North Africa during World War II, the film explores issues such as identity, nationality, belonging, passion and betrayal. It took Minghella nearly 18 long and lonely months to complete the screenplay, a story based on the Booker prize-winning novel by Michael Ondaatje. The next two years were spent filming on location in Italy and Tunisia, with Minghella at one point directing from a wheelchair, courtesy of a broken ankle. He speaks of the necessary balance of the changing rhythms of life as he moves from periods of writing to fulltime directing and then on to post-production.

"When that year and a half of writing was finished, I was able to go out and play with 150 people making the film. Then I get back into a small room again and now there's only six of us left working. So there's a rhythm of public and private life which is great for me. It's healthy."

The English Patient was nominated for a boatload of awards, including Golden Globes, BAFTAs and twelve Academy Awards of which it took home nine, including Best Supporting Actress, Best Cinematography, Best Sound, Best Editing, Best Director and Best Picture—an amazing achievement considering it was only Minghella’s third feature film. But he remains remarkably grounded in the face of such early success and has this advice for young filmmakers who find themselves facing high expectations at the beginning of their careers:

“I think you have to live inside the work you do and not inside people’s opinion of the work you do….Spending too much time with the periscope up is probably not useful for any of us. The best place to be is with the periscope down and exploring. Being as rigorous as you can be, that’s the joy and privilege of what we do. The rest of it is people commenting on the work you do, and we shouldn’t be around the commentators, we should be with the people doing the work.”

The Talented Mr. Ripley

Several of Anthony Minghella’s films feature a central character who finds himself living life on the edge of the group, much as Minghella himself felt like an outsider growing up on the Isle of Wight. Tom Ripley, played by Matt Damon and supported by Jude Law, Gwyneth Paltrow, Cate Blanchett and the inimitable Philip Seymour Hoffman, is an extreme example of the outsider trying to fit in. The movie plays out against a beautifully recreated late 1950s Italy—the warm, lazy and sensual la dolce vita contrasted with the horror of Tom Ripley’s slowly fracturing mind and his increasingly desperate struggle to hold onto a place in society that was never his to take or keep.

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A Minghella film is, almost by definition, a thing of riveting and luminous beauty and The Talented Mr. Ripley is no exception. But Minghella has clear ideas on where to draw the line. Commenting in a BBC interview once, he said: “… we would never allow either architecture or landscape to overwhelm the people in the film, because after all, for me, I would rather look at an actor against a wall being good, than I would look at a beautiful view…” This clear focus in a film which is a complex and fascinating examination of a deeply disturbed young man ensures that the audience’s attention remains riveted on the leads, not the landscape. Yet, despite of the fact that he is an amoral liar with a homicidal bent, we still end up caring about Tom Ripley. Such is the cinematic genius of Anthony Minghella—and clear testimony to the strength of the performances he is able to draw from his actors.

People, he admits, are very important to him. Over the years, Minghella has worked regularly with such industry legends as film editor Walter Murch, cinematographer John Seale and costume designer Ann Roth. "It's been a preoccupation of mine," Minghella says, "to put together a film crew that will travel with me and help me. Being a writer-director can sometimes make you incredibly blinkered. You need to have a group around you sufficiently muscular and curmudgeonly to take issue with you, to teach you. I love the internationalism of it too - Australians, Italians, Americans, British... the film set is a passport-free zone.”

Cold Mountain (2003)

Cold Mountain is the most large scale and epic of all his films to date and was adapted by Minghella from the book written by Charles Frazier. His passion for books and good writing are clearly a major part of what both informs and compels him as a filmmaker.

"The book appealed to me mainly because it's a palimpsest: it's written over many other texts. The Odyssey, very consciously; a lot of documentation of the Civil War; the real story of a relative of the author's who deserted the Civil War and went back to the actual Cold Mountain. It also evokes some Chinese Buddhist poetry about a spiritual journey to a place also called Cold Mountain."

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In the same vein, Cold Mountain functions at many different levels. It’s a movie about the harsh realities of life and death on the battlefields of the American Civil War. It’s also about the war on the home front, the war against doubt and fear, the struggle to keep believing in love, the future and hope. Minghella is emphatic that his film should be read in symbolic terms, not as a comment on the American Civil War. "To be honest, I could care less about Union soldiers and Confederate soldiers,” he says. “ I kept thinking about the Cultural Revolution in China. What was interesting to me about this material was the war away from the battlefield, and the abuses that accrue when there's chaos in the land and people are empowered to police when the men are gone. The home guard interested me as much as the armies."

The film received, amongst others, seven Academy Award and ten BAFTA nominations. In both instances, Renee Zellweger picked up the award for Best Supporting Actress.

Breaking and Entering (2006)

For the first time in years, a film brought Minghella back to his homeland and also to the scene of his first feature film, Truly, Madly, Deeply. Written and directed by Minghella, Breaking and Entering is an original screenplay and a thoughtful adult drama set in post-millennium London. It examines the gentrification of the city, as well as the problems faced by immigrants who, although educated professionals in their home countries, are now reduced to menial work and petty crime to survive. Once again, the landscape is an ‘actor’ in the film as cinematographer Benoit Delhomme makes calculated and effective use of the grey-tinged concrete and stone of the working-class area of King’s Cross in London. The players in this drama include Jude Law, Juliette Binoche, Robin Wright Penn and Martin Freeman.

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This is the third movie Minghella has made with actor Jude Law. “Jude is my friend, my collaborator, everybody in my crew loves to work with him…you know, how leading men and women behave in movies determines the quality of the film to me and the quality of the experience…I just made my acting debut acting in a movie and it was very interesting because it taught me for the very first time that you need the help of other people when you’re acting. You need the person who you are acting with to give you something back all the time even if the camera’s not looking at them…. Jude always makes the other people in the scenes look good.”

Coming up next:

The No.1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, based on the book by Alexander McCall Smith, is next on Minghella’s schedule. He is co-writing the screenplay with Richard Curtis (Love Actually). “I love this book,” said Minghella in an interview in Glasgow following the release of Breaking and Entering, “and I think Madame Ramotswe (also known as the Miss Marple of Botswana) is waiting to announce herself onscreen somewhere. I think the issue for us has been whether she should be on a big or small screen.” Minghella says his instinct would be to have a long running series where she was coming into people’s living rooms every week, bringing the good news of Africa. He likes the idea of there being something to celebrate about Africa for a change.

Also announced on IMDb for Minghella is The Ninth Life of Louis Drax (2008), a psychological and literary thriller based on a novel by Liz Jensen, which focuses on highly intelligent but deeply disturbed nine-year-old boy as he lies in a coma following an ‘accidental’ fall into a ravine. Anthony Minghella has bought the film rights and it is easy to see why a film-maker would be attracted to the book. As well as the intriguing plotline, it is set in the intense mid-summer heat of Provençe and has been described as “surreal”.

Beyond the borders of Hollywood

"There are people who have great skills at navigating the waters of Hollywood, but I'm not one of them, and I learned quickly that it was very unlikely that I was going to flourish in a mainstream market."

“I think I do see myself as an independent filmmaker, in so far as I have looked for the money for my films from independent sources, from smaller labels like Miramax. But the provenance of the money is totally irrelevant to me. And the tag ‘independent’ is irrelevant, too. I don’t know exactly, what it means, independent. I think, I try to make films for grown-ups, films that reflect my own view of the world, rather than embrace or buy into the status quo.”

Minghella is a filmmaker who cares about the purity of cinematic experience. But he is also a man who is not afraid to experiment in other media. His non-feature film work has included puppetry, avant-garde theatre-film and radio plays, such as his recent Verdi monologue. His operatic debut production of Puccini's Madama Butterfly was first seen at the English National Opera in London in 2005 and later at the Metropolitan Opera in New York in 2006. He is also currently chairman of the British Film Institute.

Minghella is married to Hong Kong-born choreographer, Carolyn Choa. His siblings Edana and Dominic Minghella are also successful scriptwriters, his son Max is an actor and his daughter Hannah is involved in film production. Appointed a CBE in the 2001 Queen's Birthday Honors List, he is a big Portsmouth Football Club fan and once appeared in a Channel 4 documentary Hallowed Be Thy Game, talking about his passion for the club.

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Spotlight on Anthony Minghella written by Linda Bennett, with excerpts from: Wikipeadia, Talking Pix, Isle of Wight Rock Archives, The Guardian, Berlinale Talent Campus 2004, and Creative Filmmaking From The Inside Out by Dannenbaum, Hodge and Mayer, published in 2003 by Simon and Schuster.