Anthony Minghella: Interviews

Italy: The Director’s Cut: 2000

81 Italy: The Director’s Cut Anthony Minghella / 2000 From the Guardian, February 26, 2000. Copyright Guardian News & Media Ltd 2000. Reprinted by permission. Last year I spent a great deal more time in Italy than anywhere else, but on reflection it’s clear to me that I wasn’t really in Italy, but in a country of my own imagination. Film directors are thieves; magpies. They resemble barbarians bringing home the spoils, ransacking each city for its treasures. They plunder landscapes, corrupt geography, redraw maps, and invent villages. Screenplays, too, are notoriously hieroglyphic. They resemble architects’ blueprints and collide with many of the same practical obstacles when translating ideas into reality. In my screenplay of The Talented Mr. Ripley, adapted from Patricia Highsmith’s mordant 1950s novel of the same name, Tom Ripley (played by Matt Damon), a young American misfit, is sent to Italy to persuade Dickie Greenleaf (Jude Law), the errant son of a wealthy industrialist, to return home to New York. Instead, he becomes obsessed with the glamorous life Dickie is leading in Mongibello and stays on, first befriended and then rejected by Dickie and his fiancée, Marge Sherwood (Gwyneth Paltrow). Eventually, Ripley assumes Dickie’s identity and takes himself to Rome and Venice where, as is often the case with holidays, he samples the life he’s always wanted. His catastrophic adventure begins innocuously enough with a blue Fiat bus, 1940s vintage, puttering along a coast road, Ripley inside, having hauled itself up from the harbor at Naples where the Queen Mary has just delivered him from New York. Collecting the half-dozen shots that create this sequence was less straightforward. The Queen Mary is long becalmed, the New York skyline irreparably altered by fifty years of vertical aspiration. The oncemajestic Arrivals Building in Naples is derelict and—most exercising to 82 anthony minghella: inter views the filmmakers—Mongibello, Ripley’s destination, notionally situated on the Amalfi coast, is a figment of Highsmith’s imagination. But there it all is on film. A departure from Manhattan, an arrival in a teeming hall of passengers, a short bus journey, a picturesque fishing village complete with villagers, fishermen, fish. And none of it, except perhaps for the fish, is real. So the Italy I explored for the past year is available to the traveller only through the distorted frames of a movie. I lived in the land of Ripley, and that mosaic of dream images, half-remembered moments from Italian movies, photographic references, travel diaries, documentaries and anecdotes , was my guidebook as I explored modern Italy and reimagined it in the service of the film. The shooting of The Talented Mr. Ripley, set in the Italy of 1958–59, was continuously confounded by progress: buildings mentioned in the adaptation were no longer there, or were hemmed in by modern neighbors or decorated with the ubiquitous green canvas of Rome’s makeover for the millennial celebrations. In the 1950s, travel was largely the privilege of the moneyed class, and this had particular significance when it came to shooting in Italy’s landmark locations: there were simply fewer people then. We were faced with the problem of clearing piazzas swarming with tourists. By locating the movie a year or two later than the novel, there was an opportunity to explore a significant moment in Italian history, Il Boom, where a thin veneer of the modern, the sophistication of La Dolce Vita, had glossed but could not entirely hide the more primitive mores of the country. Italy is a place I love above all other places, but it’s always possible to detect a darker note sounding under its breezy melodies. And this dissonance seemed to speak of the film itself: apparently sybaritic, but lounging on a volcano. Mongibello, as it happens, is a local name for Mount Etna. As Dickie, Ripley takes a suite in the Grand Hotel. This hotel has one of Rome’s few genuinely impressive hotel exteriors and lobbies and so, for once, we were able to shoot an only semi-modified reality. But for Ripley ’s hotel suite we used the breathtaking interiors, frescoed and ornate, of the Palazzo Tiburna. The same building has a staircase of grim beauty, austere and colossal, like Escher’s Möbius etchings. Here we filmed the halls and stairs of Ripley’s Roman apartment, where bad things happen; while its evocative courtyard served as the exterior of an apartment belonging to Meredith Logue (played by Cate Blanchett), a young...