In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

63 The Talented Mister: An Interview with Anthony Minghella Daniel Argent / 2000 From CreativeScreenwriting 7, no. 1 (January 2000). Reprinted by permission. Daniel Argent: What initially interested you in adapting Patricia Highsmith ’s novel The Talented Mr. Ripley? Anthony Minghella: The character of Ripley is one that once you’ve encountered him, he never really goes away. I think it leaps away from the actual text of the novel and from any questions about the quality of the novel. It’s such a creation, it’s such a pungent example of the alienation of people in postwar society. Ripley is an index of how far from the center people feel and how much at odds with their own personality that people are led to feel and do intrinsically feel. And I also remember the absolute claustrophobia present in every one of [Highsmith’s] novels I read, the sense of there being no air in the writing at all. In a way you feel that the sensibility of Ripley colored almost every other character she ever wrote. She said herself she felt Ripley had written his own novel. And I think that having found the sound of his sensibility, she never gave it up. Literally, in the sense that he went on to be the protagonist in a clutch of other novels, but also in almost every other novel she wrote there was a Ripley sensibility at play. And so that’s what I took with me. DA: Ripley’s talent is for improvisation—there are several scenes where he practices mimicking people, honing his skills. Does he know what his talent is, and does he know how his actions affect those around him? AM: I can’t answer that question. I think there’s something essentially unformed about Ripley that’s very much a young man story. In many ways, it’s a rather nightmarish rites-of-passage story. It’s a film which constantly plays with the idea of journey and of travel, and the biggest 64 anthony minghella: inter views journey that’s made in the film is Ripley’s own voyage of discovery. So, when you say, does he know what his talents are, I think the annihilation of self that he is so fixated with, the idea of trading himself in, almost by definition means that he does know himself, he doesn’t value himself in any way. But whether he knows what his talents are, I couldn’t say. He is tormented by himself and tormented by his own personality, so I don’t think he’d be quick to recognize any of his own virtues. One of the hardest things for him in the film—and it happens at the most tragic moments—is to hear finally somebody advertise his talents and his qualities, at the very end of the movie. DA: There’s a philosophical discussions between Ripley and Peter Kingsley -Smith about the locked room that contains your past, and later Ripley gives Peter his room key. Do you think that Ripley knows what’s in his own room, and would he unlock the door if he had the key? AM: I think he’s terrified. He says himself, “If anybody knew how awful [I was]. . . .” His view of his own personality is so distorted and so childlike. I constantly talked to Matt Damon about the fact that Ripley is very much the child who makes a small mistake, tries to cover it up, and in the process, sets off on a journey of bigger and bigger mistakes. And the way he deals with what happens to him is very much with the lack of responsibility that a child learns to grow from. Part of the way that we adjudicate somebody moving into adulthood is their ability to take responsibility for themselves and for their actions. I think that Ripley doesn’t confront that until the very end of the film. DA: So when you were working with Matt Damon [who plays Tom Ripley in the film] on the character, you two approached Ripley with the attitude of “here’s what’s on the page, and in these pages we find everything we need to know about Mr. Ripley?” AM: I think there are certain circumstances which formed his character, most of them to do with class. The way we began was to investigate the architecture of class in this period, to talk about what it meant to feel on the outside...

Share