Anthony Minghella: Interviews

I Wanted to Make a Film about Home: 2006

148 I Wanted to Make a Film about Home Tom Charity / 2006 From the DailyTelegraph, November 3, 2006. © Telegraph Media Group Limited 2006. Reprinted by permission. Over the course of his fifteen-year career as a film director, Anthony Minghella has travelled far and wide. The English Patient (1996) took him to Italy and to North Africa. The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999) criss-crossed Sicily, Naples, Rome, Tuscany, and Venice. And, though it was set in and around South Carolina, Cold Mountain (2003) was largely shot in the Carpathians, Romania. All three films were lavish period movies adapted from bestselling novels. Now, for the first time since Truly, Madly, Deeply in 1991, Minghella has written an original screenplay and returned home to Britain. It is, as the film’s star Juliette Binoche puts it, “closer to his bones.” Breaking and Entering centers on Will (Jude Law), a landscape architect working on a regeneration plan for King’s Cross. Successful, and in a long-term relationship with the beautiful Liv (Robin Wright Penn), Will would seem to have all a man could ask for, but his domestic life is fraught—Liv’s daughter Bea has autism—and he devotes more and more time to his job. When the firm’s office is repeatedly broken into, Will stakes out the place at night, eventually following the teenage culprit back to his home . . . which is how he meets Amira (Binoche), the boy’s mother. “Even before I started Cold Mountain, I knew I wanted to make a smaller film at home,” Minghella says. “I thought, if I don’t write an original film now, it will never happen. Everybody else has already forgotten I was a playwright and I will too. I’ll get too frightened. “I had an equation in my mind that was a false equation,” he goes on, thoughtful and erudite as always. “Filmmaking meant packing my tom charity / 2006 149 suitcase, leaving my family and holing up in some remote place to do my job. I thought that wasn’t healthy and I should try to find a way to make films about where I lived. I thought I’ll go back to something I know about and start there.” He’s quick to add that he soon discovered how much he didn’t know—about King’s Cross, about architecture, and about Bosnia, which is where Amira and her son come from. “That was a surprise, when Bosnia came into it,” he says. “So I went to Sarajevo and spent some time there.” Watching the movie, you begin to see how this supposedly smallscale , intimate project keeps peeling off in unexpected directions as Minghella allows himself to be seduced by, for example, Rafi Gavron’s free-running teenage burglar, Miro; or Vera Farmiga’s east European prostitute, Oana, who takes to sheltering in Will’s Land Rover for a coffee during his nightly watch. For all that it takes place within “two pages of the A-Z,” as Minghella puts it, it’s every bit as cosmopolitan as his other movies. He quotes his producing partner, Sydney Pollack, who observed that the problem with Will is “he doesn’t know what he doesn’t know.” That’s what the film is about, Minghella reasons. In order to make it, he cut himself off from the close-knit production team who had worked on his previous three movies, including director of photography John Seale and editor Walter Murch. “By the time we did Cold Mountain, this team had a way of working that all just falls into place . . . the dynamic was preordained. I needed to find out whether I was too dependent. On this movie, we didn’t know how we were going to do anything.” He hadn’t realized—or had forgotten—the “confinements and prescriptions ” of period adaptations; “how imprisoned I had been.” He tells me about an incident during The English Patient, when he tied himself up in knots shooting a market scene in which the production designer had ingeniously doubled the size of the set with mirrors—only the actors wanted to walk the other way. In contrast, there is an improvised sequence in the new movie in which, instead of cutting from one scene to the next, as he had written in the script, he had the inspiration to hail a passing taxi, piling in with Jude, Juliette, and the camera and shooting en route. “There was nothing we could do that was wrong...