The Mythology of Anthony Minghella

Undercurrents and inner voices influence the mythology of Anthony Minghella

by Phillip Williams | Published October 6, 2003

Anthony Minghella discusses a shot with cinematographer John Seale on Cold Mountain.

Phillip Williams (MM): What attracted you to Cold Mountain?

Anthony Minghella (AM): The provenance of this project is quite interesting. I had not thought about doing another adaptation. I felt like I’d gotten into this cycle of adapting novels, which had never been my intention. I’d actually done an interview where I’d said that I wouldn’t do another one. I was in Toronto, staying with Michael Ondaatje; we just kind of hung out for a weekend together in a cabin he has there. And he gave me a novel that he said his editor had passed on to him that he thought I might react to. I put it in my case and went back to London, and when I arrived, there were two Fed Ex parcels—both of which contained the same book. So I actually received three copies of Cold Mountain in one week. Then, several weeks later, I got a box in the post that had been stuck in Berkeley, where I’d been living, and inside was the manuscript to Cold Mountain. So I took that as some sort of an oracle that I had better pay attention. Before I finished reading it, I knew I would do it.

MM: What was it that you reacted to?

AM: It’s a gift to a filmmaker. It’s that very rare thing: a book whose literature is extraordinary and evocative and beautiful, but it’s also a book whose narrative is bony and muscular and strong. Sometimes when you take a wonderful piece of writing and reduce it to its narrative constituents, it’s often rather frail because the novel, particularly the modern novel, has moved away from storytelling as being its first priority. So a book like The English Patient, which is one of my favorite books of all time, when you carve off the flesh of its writing and its poetry, it’s indifferent to narrative. In a way, it’s a poem. To make the story of the film from it was extremely demanding.

With Cold Mountain, if you strip away everything that’s apparently beautiful about it, you end up with a resonant, thrilling narrative. It’s both a true story, or a speculation on a true story, and it has the quality of memoir. It also collects many of the anecdotal and/or factual material from the Carolinas, during the war, that exists in letters and documents. It’s quite consciously evoking The Odyssey and it’s also evoking a series of Chinese, Buddhist poems called Cold Mountain, which are all about the idea of Cold Mountain as a spiritual destination. It’s a palimpsest—it sits on top of all these other sources—so that when you read it, there’s a sort of slight mythological status to it, which for a film is a wonderful, wonderful gift.

Jude Law, whom Minghella calls “a gift to a director,” stars as Inman in the director’s latest epic, Cold Mountain.

MM: How important was the imagery evoked by Cold Mountain, the place, as you were writing the screenplay?

AM: Massively important. My wife is Chinese and I talked to her a great deal about this poet [who wrote the Cold Mountain poems]; about the meaning of the poems. She is someone who has translated Chinese poetry. I tried to write some poetry in the style of the original, just to get a feel for this idea of the spiritual journey. I was trying to make sure that there was a resonance below the narrative, where some of the concerns which intrigued me could speak. Inman, Jude Law’s character, is operating very much at a level of pilgrimage, in the strictest sense of the word.

MM: He’s looking to be redeemed?

AM: Exactly… He talks about his spirit being ruined. He doesn’t understand in many ways why he is alive. He tries to work out his purpose and what redemption means for him. There’s a significant exchange between a blind man and Inman, where they debate the value of possessing something for a precious second and whether it’s worth having something for an ephemeral, evanescent period, or whether it’s better not to have it. Some people think that a glimpse of happiness is better than no happiness at all. The story essentially hinges on whether or not you think the glimpse is enough. And he does.

MM: You often play with what one might call supporting or “subtextual” imagery. In The Talented Mr. Ripley, for example, there’s an image of Ripley’s face reflected by a piano where his head appears to be split in two…

AM: Yes, yes…

MM: Is that sort of metaphorical imagery something you play with when you’re writing? Or do you separate yourself as a director and come back to that on the set?

AM: No, I think that the pen proceeds through the whole process. The instrument of the writing changes, but it’s still a writing process. You’re writing with a notebook, you’re writing on the computer, you’re writing with the camera. I translate my notes to manuscript [form] and from manuscript to Final Draft. And then we’re ending the movie on Final Cut and we’re writing all over again. I don’t separate the writer from the director, whether I should or shouldn’t.

In terms of the image of Ripley: I was trying to find a visual iconography that supported what I thought were thematic ideas, because he’s a man who has no sense of his own value; who’s in a dislocated state, who’s fragmenting. The first title treatment has to do with fragmentation. What you want is for everything to support everything else. You want symphonic ideas; ideas where there’s a thorough composition. Sometimes you don’t succeed. But the idea is to try and create the kind of work that has pleased me as an audience member.

Minghella worked with famed production designer Dante Ferretti to create the world of Cold Mountain, which stars Nicole Kidman and Jude Law.

As an audience member, I love ellipses; I love lyric filmmaking. I love moviemaking that takes adults seriously and is demanding. Inevitably, when you have the opportunity to make a film yourself, it’s always going to be colored by your own taste. I love to go back to the same films again and again and see how they’re made and what their metastories are and how they inform the surface. I come from a world of study and deconstruction. When I make films, it reflects that training. Sometimes the danger is that people will only see the film once and maybe I should pay more attention to basic storytelling issues and not so much time getting obsessed with the undercurrents, and what in music you call the “inner voices.”

MM: Landscape can be so important as a storytelling tool, and must have been particularly so with Cold Mountain, where the image of home is something that drives the central character. What guidance do you give to your team when you’re scouting locations?

AM: First of all, I had one of the great production designers of all time, Dante Ferretti, working with me. A fanatical scout and traveler, he’s compulsive, like all of the crew that I’ve surrounded myself with. He won’t ever settle for second best. Dante covered thousands of miles looking for the landscape that we needed and we scouted the entire film in South Carolina, because originally we hoped to shoot the whole film there. Then, in terms of the finances, it was just unsupportable. For the ambition of the film, we could never have made it in the way that I wanted to in South Carolina. We had to accept, rather reluctantly, that if I wanted to keep the scale of the film, we’d have to look elsewhere. We had scouts all over the place.

Finally, we compared some of our scouting photographs with some of the Transylvanian landscape and it was remarkably close in its contours and its feel, but with an added bonus of being untrammeled, because Romania is not an industrialized country; it’s largely pristine. It has the advantage which you get almost nowhere now of not just foreground and mid-ground authenticity, but a deep background of untouched land.

I feel some remorse that we didn’t shoot the movie in the place that it was set, because it means a lot to the people in that region; it’s their story. There is a Cold Mountain, and obviously you would elect to shoot the movie in the place it’s set. No movie I’ve made has been shot in the place that it’s supposed to be. In the end, you become a robber of locations: you burgle the best places you can find and try and pull them into the fabric of your film.

MM: There is obviously a lot of personal, internal narrative in a book like Cold Mountain. Is there a way you can capture or keep some of that long text by translating it into specific imagery or re-occurring issues/52/images?

AM: First of all, my method of adaptation is much freer than that. I’ve elected a way of writing as a screenwriter where I think my job is to write my way back to the novel, rather than to write from it. I don’t try and analyze the book chapter by chapter and find certain correlatives. I go away and I write and hopefully what I’m writing will take me back to the book. I don’t have the book with me; I try not to imagine that my job is to top and tail each chapter and edit the dialogue that’s in the book. I imagine myself to be at the place where there is no book and someone has told me a story. My job is to try and remember and extol the virtues of the novel.

MM: How do you do that?

AM: What I try to do, particularly in a historical novel, is understand its sources. Cold Mountain is not a novel that was written 150 years ago; it was written six years ago. Obviously, Charles Frazier researched his own book. I tried to understand the reservoir that he drew upon and went back to it myself to see if there were elements that would be useful. Then, when I come to direct the film, I’ve got as profound an understanding of the world as Charles had. I gathered up as much of the source material as I could. In fact, I found my way back to many of the episodes which are dramatized in the novel. It was fascinating to see how the book had been built. After all of that reading and research, when I feel that I can begin to write, I start.

I have a little cottage in the country in England and, appropriately enough, it’s surrounded by a working farm that probably is not unlike Cold Mountain’s Black Cove. So I was able to dig into some of the events on the farm as I was writing. I spoke to the farmers and tried to find out what they were up to each season and why. One of the reasons I was attracted to the book was because I, like Ada in the novel, often feel this odd distance from the natural order of things. We’re so insulated. There’s something ironic about sitting and researching in the little writing room I’ve got, surrounded by the day-to-day rhythms of a farm and realizing I don’t know the first thing about how the farm is managed. In fact, I know almost nothing about my environ­ment other than how to cultivate an inner life.

I write by hand and fill up notebooks. The one book I didn’t have with me while I was doing this was Cold Mountain. It’s become a kind of superstition, to force myself to become a storyteller and not an editor. To make sure that I honor the obligation that I feel to re-mint the story for an audience.

MM: There are so many poetic issues/52/images in your films, and  I assume a lot of that comes to you when you are writing, but that you wouldn’t necessarily put it into the script. Do you have a companion journal where you chronicle the visual correlatives?

AM: The screenplay of Cold Mountain might feel extremely terse, and that’s partly because I’m not writing it to please anybody; I’m writing it as a technical drawing which will grow into the film. I don’t keep a separate journal of issues/52/images, but just like the notes of a composition, I know what the sounds are going to be. Your question is a good one, as one thing that I always find myself doing is reducing my research into issues/52/images rather than dialogue. I think my way through the film in terms of visual story, or finding ways that will collect and collapse certain areas of the narrative into issues/52/images or into particular set pieces. For instance, I can remember being in Hong Kong in 1998, working from the book, and writing down a series of issues/52/images which actually remained relatively intact through the entire adaptation process.

I decided to begin the movie at the Battle of Petersburg and I started with rabbits being forced out of a burrow by barrels of explosives. The first thing you see is a rabbit popping out of a hole into the middle of a battlefield. I’d also had this image of an escape of men chained together who were silhouetted against a slope like a series of paper dolls and in some form that has maintained itself in the film. So there are issues/52/images that stick with me and they come as I’m reading or researching and I do jot those down. So, in some ways—having denied that I do it—I suppose that’s exactly what I do! (laughs)

MM: You made a dramatic leap as a moviemaker from Truly Madly Deeply to The English Patient and The Talented Mr. Ripley, in that the later films are much larger productions. How did you find yourself stretching as you moved from making relatively small films to epic material?

AM: I can’t really account for the transition, except to say that it always seemed to me that the films that I admired were intensely cinematic and lyrical and poetic and that they had a sweep to them. I wanted to be able to create cinema of my own and, for that, the most beautiful part of filmmaking is the medium’s ability to flex between the intimate and the epic. You can move from a character’s eyes to a huge landscape in a single film sentence. It really does allow you to go from the minutely particular to the expansive. I suppose that I felt able, because of the material of The English Patient, to really explore cinema in a more bold way than the material of Truly Madly Deeply required. In the end, it’s about the landscape that the material generates. Truly Madly Deeply done in a more elaborate way would have been absurd. The material didn’t require me to open my shoulders any more as a moviemaker.

MM: Do you find that the bigger the production, the more of a challenge it is to make time for the actors?

AM: I suppose the truth for me is that I approach films as a writer first; my experience with actors was a sort of organic continuation of finding my plays being done by the same actors. In Britain in the late ’80s, I found myself with the same actors again and again; we all moved together into Truly Madly Deeply. I worked with Juliet Stevenson Alan Rickman and Michael Maloney before. So I came to filmmaking first as a writer and second as someone who loves to work with actors. If you took away those two elements, I’d have almost no interest in making films.

I suppose that what I’ve done, which I think is the cleverest thing I’ve ever done, is to surround myself with an incredible crew who’ve stayed with me, who’ve grown with me and who are prepared to put up with me. They know what my priorities are; they know that I would never surrender the moment with an actor for the sake of the efficiency of the shot; they are patient with me and with the cast. It has to be that way because in the end—and this is the truth of moviemaking as far as I’m concerned—no effect, no gesture of the camera, no lighting characteristic, no design or costume flourish has any weight in comparison to a moment of performance. If you can get the truth of a moment from an actor, with a video camera, with them standing against the wall, that’s worth more than any dollar that you can spend on anything else.

Of their acting styles, Minghella calls Renée Zellweger’s “very particular and quite mysterious” and says that Kidman is “first a filmmaker and second an actor.” Though set in the Carolinas, the Transylvanian landscape offered Minghella the look he needed for Cold Mountain.

MM: I’m curious about how the loyalty of the crew is maintained, particularly on these long, demanding shoots. I’m reminded of stories about David Lean in the jungles of Burma and having people leave after five months because they couldn’t take the demands he placed on them. How do you maintain a company over a period of time?

AM: I try to remember that even if a film is authored by one person, and I believe it is—that the film reflects the vision of a single person, the director—the conundrum is that it’s achieved by many hundreds of people. I’ve never allowed myself the delusion that I was doing it by myself. I am extremely grateful to the crew, and I let them know I am; I take their opinions very seriously.

MM: You’ve been able to support some great work from actors, but what were some of your earlier mistakes about directing actors?

AM: Let me just work backwards and say this: the one thing I’ve learned is that, given that I’ve written the scene, scouted the location and worked with the design (there’s very little that I haven’t had enormous control over), I’ve learned that the job finally becomes one of witnessing, not controlling. If I’ve got Nicole Kidman and Renée Zellweger in a scene and they’ve rehearsed with me and are saying the lines that I’ve written and doing the actions that I require of them, then beyond that, I don’t need to exercise power over them. In fact, quite the reverse: I need to learn from them and be instructed by them about the moment that they’re in as actors.

I want to create spaces for actors where they feel completely free and completely secure at the same time. The security has to be that they know that there’s no accident in the way I’m shooting, and they know that I’m paying attention and watching and being the best audience that they’ll ever have. But, by the same token, I’m not trying to manipulate them. It’s one of the things that I’ve always thought about. I’m a huge admirer of [pianist] Glenn Gould, and if you listen to the way that he performs Bach, for instance, it feels as if the music is being created by him and not by the composer. It feels as if he has ownership, not only in the performing of the music, but also in the creation of it. That’s something I would love to achieve with actors.

MM: Could you touch on your work with Renée Zellweger, Jude Law and Nicole Kidman?

AM: What’s evident for any director is that you can’t use a directing technique and bring it to bear on every actor. Some actors require you to address each moment of a performance and partner with them on each moment; some actors flourish when you are quiet with them. Part of the job is simply to discover what they want from you, because in the end the film will only be as good as the relationship you can conjure with each individual actor. What’s great about the central performances is that you have more time to develop a language of communication with each actor. Renée, Jude and Nicole are three completely different actors in the way they approach their work. Nicole is extremely alert and attentive to the whole movie at all times. She’s not so submerged in her own role that she doesn’t understand where the film is. Jude is a sort of a gift to a director; he is so malleable and delighted and enthusiastic and present. With him you always feel as if you have an ally who surrenders himself completely to the requirements of the film. He comes to work with an
enormous joy and without ego.

MM: How do you use sound to tell a story?

AM: I love the ADR stage of moviemaking;  it’s an opportunity to repair and focus the film and it’s an extremely creative phase. In the case of a filmmaker like me, there’s an enormous amount of lost material because of the length of the films that I make. (laughing) They’re always boiled down from a long assembly. A lot of reductions occur, and there are often scars. Part of the job of ADR is to mend those scars or to make them as invisible as possible.

MM: How are you using the term ADR?

AM: ADR (additional dialogue recording—ed.) is taking the actors back in the studio and re-recording their dialogue. It’s either fixing production dialogue because there’s something wrong with the recording, or it’s a creative process where you have an opportunity to take a final pass at the screenplay. I work with actors, change lines and just make the scene do more work. You go from the dream of the film, which is the screenplay, to the reality of the film, which is what you address in the cutting room.

MM: You referred to sub-textual imagery before. Do you use sound in a similar manner?

AM: I am able to work with Walter Murch, who I think is probably the most significant editor that’s ever been in film, not only because of his skills as a film editor, but also because of his skills as a sound editor. He began with sound and he and I are both preoccupied with the soundscape. It’s not particularly theoretical; I think of the whole process of moviemaking as growing, where everything is growing all the time: you grow from a blank page to an answer print and you grow the sound along the way. You learn about what sort of sound the film likes; what sort of layers of sound the film is intrigued by. Also, how sound works in transition.

Minghella jumped into the epic landscapes of The English Patient, with Ralph Fiennes; and The Talentented Mr. Ripley, starring Matt Damon, Jude Law and Gwyneth Paltrow; from a small-scale debut with Truly Madly Deeply, starring Juliet Stevenson and Alan Rickman.

I love the pre-lapping and post-lapping of sound. I love scenes that finish deep into the following scene and scenes that begin deep into the preceding one. Transitions become huge opportunities in film; in some ways, ellipses and transition are the two most secret parts of moviemaking. What you take away from a story gives the audience an opportunity to fill it in. And then transition, because the way that one scene becomes the next is crucial. It’s one of the most pertinent and unique aspects of film. Every other art form is largely about continuity; film is largely about discontinuity.

What makes Minghella’s discontinuous harmonies of sound and image so effective and arresting is that they unfold so effortlessly. Yes, his work requires an engaged audience, but we’re never made to feel that anything has been left out. In a Minghella picture, image, sound, edit and performance are sewn together for the the sake of both practicality and poetry. MM

COMMENTS | POST A COMMENT

POST A COMMENT

OUR PRIVACY POLICY | We will not publish or sell or share your email address or other personal information. Read more.

Name:
Email:
URL:

Type the word you see below:

Comment:

Remember my personal information

Notify me of follow-up comments?

SITE DELIVERY OPTIONS

Advertisement