Anthony Minghella: Interviews

The Man with the Epic in His Eyes: 2003

123 The Man with the Epic in His Eyes David Gritten / 2003 From the DailyTelegraph, March 1, 2003. © David Gritten/Telegraph Media Group Limited 2003. Reprinted by permission. It’s a trim Anthony Minghella who greets me at his office, an exquisitely converted Victorian chapel near Hampstead Heath, all sliding doors, hardwood floors, and open-plan work spaces. He’s lost forty-eight pounds in the last year, a fact I didn’t register when we met in Transylvania last October on the set of Cold Mountain, the new film he has written and directed; back then Minghella wore layers of bulky clothes to keep the chilly weather at bay. On learning he was putting on weight due to a thyroid condition prevalent in his family, he embarked on a radical new diet; lots of protein but no carbohydrates (and thus no pasta, a grievous loss for a man with Italian bloodlines). It’s tempting to call the new Minghella lean and mean, but it doesn’t truly fit; he’s known as gracious, charming, and nice in the film industry , a world where such qualities are rare. Yet beneath his affable exterior , he’s tough and stubborn. “I’ve had visions of films that have seemed overambitious or difficult to achieve,” he says. “I’ve often been advised they would never be realized. So many people in my career have put an arm around me and said: ‘Please give up on this, it can’t be done.’” It happened with his Oscar-winning hit The English Patient, which was abandoned by Fox before Miramax finally backed it. Minghella argued strenuously to convince Paramount about the virtues of The Talented Mr. Ripley, with its amoral, closet-gay hero. And he now concedes, “Cold Mountain, at some level, is a folly.” An American Civil War epic starring Nicole Kidman and Jude Law, the film required a massive $80-million budget and a grueling six-month shoot in rural Romania; the crew suffered blistering summer tempera- 124 anthony minghella: inter views tures of 105 degrees, twenty-one consecutive days of torrential rain, then snowstorms at twenty-five below zero. “All this has trained me to believe films are willed into being, often in unlikely circumstances,” says Minghella, forty-nine, in deceptively mild tones. “So I’m used to fighting hard for what I believe in.” He will need all his stubbornness for his newest task. Last month he succeeded Joan Bakewell as chairman of the British Film Institute, an appointment raising suspicions that he had drawn the shortest of straws. The BFI is an unloved body, resembling an octopus without a central nervous system; its several arms flail around independently of each other. Its library and archive are in serious decline, its Museum of the Moving Image on the South Bank closed three years ago and may never reopen, and the adjacent National Film Theatre needs replacing. Its monthly magazine for film buffs, Sight & Sound, manages to be provocative and thoughtful despite a dauntingly small budget. The BFI’s production arm is now defunct, and currently it has neither a director nor a finance officer . Shaven-headed, with an enthusiastic manner and a beaming smile, Minghella turns grim when he assesses the prospects: “It’s hard to talk about the BFI without sounding pious,” he admits. “People may think it might be like spinach—good for them, but not any fun. “It’s a tough thing to sell. Take the National Film Theatre. What goes on inside that building, the films they show, it’s extraordinary. But the building is awful—dilapidated, apologetic, squeezed under a bridge.” He also feels that the BFI is too London-oriented (“it should be called the LFI”) and frets that its core membership is ageing and dwindling. You wonder why he is so bothered about British film culture, when much of the population cares so little. He is, after all, one of our most successful practitioners in the industry. And besides, isn’t cinema attendance rather buoyant at the moment? Ah, he says, but it’s the films people go to see: overwhelmingly American , off some Hollywood conveyor-belt, viewed in multiplexes with medium-sized screens. “It’s like imagining Waterstone’s or Books Etc only stocked books written in the last year. What about world cinema, or cinema from the past? If I were to draw up a list of films that have had an impact on me as a person, I don’t think any...