Anthony Minghella: Interviews

Behind the Eyes of a Killer: 2000

88 Behind the Eyes of a Killer David Gritten / 2000 From the Daily Telegraph, February 12, 2000. © David Gritten/Telegraph Media Group Limited 2000. Reprinted by permission. When the writer-director Anthony Minghella sets about adapting a novel for film—a task at which he is astonishingly skilled—this is how he goes about it. First, he borrows a country cottage; for his last two films, he has used one in Dorset owned by his friend, film producer Duncan Kenworthy. It was here that Minghella brilliantly molded Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient into an Oscar-winning big-screen epic, and where he also wrote his latest film, The Talented Mr. Ripley (released on February 25), based on Patricia Highsmith’s unsettling psychological thriller from 1956. He drives down to the cottage from his Hampstead home with a “truckload of books.” For The English Patient it was “a lot of stuff about Cairo in the early thirties,” he says, “about map-making, explorers, the Resistance in Italy, letters from soldiers in Anzio. Anything that fed the novel back to me.” For The Talented Mr. Ripley, Minghella’s books included the works of two photographers: William Claxton, the portraitist of jazz musicians, and the great Henri Cartier-Bresson. He took Remembering Denny, Calvin Trillin’s memoir of a dazzling young man who after Yale spent the fifties struggling with his sexuality; books about the New York jazz scene; and the diaries of Chet Baker, the legendary jazz singer and trumpeter. These volumes offer clues to his filmic vision of Highsmith’s novel. Its antihero is Tom Ripley (Matt Damon), a young upstart of humble origins who craves gracious living. In New York he encounters Mr. Greenleaf, a rich shipbuilder who wrongly assumes Tom was at college with his son Dickie (Jude Law), a dilettante living it up in an Italian coastal town. Greenleaf pays Tom to go to Italy to bring Dickie home to take over david gritten / 2000 89 the family business; but Tom falls in love with the charismatic, insensitive Dickie and becomes part of his clique, which includes his girlfriend Marge (Gwyneth Paltrow). When Dickie tires of Tom and rejects him, Tom kills him and assumes his identity, at last living the high life he always wanted. In other words, he reinvents himself. Minghella has stressed the homoerotic element of Tom’s attraction to Dickie; it remains coded in Highsmith’s novel, for all its dated references to “sissies” and “fairies.” A barely talented painter in the books, Dickie hopes to play sax in a jazz group in the film. Tom feigns enthusiasm for jazz to impress Dickie, but his tastes are loftier; in New York he works as a humble lavatory attendant at an opera house, though in Italy he makes it to a box seat. Highsmith made Tom Ripley a nihilistic, calculating petty criminal, but the film softens him; rather he becomes enmeshed in deceptions of his own making. Minghella also invented a major character for his film: Meredith Logue (Cate Blanchett), an heiress trying to jettison the trappings of her privileged upbringing, and therefore Ripley’s opposite. And Peter SmithKingsley (Jack Davenport), mentioned briefly in the book, is fleshed out significantly; he and Ripley enjoy an affectionate but doomed relationship . Lastly, Minghella sets the scene a few years later—making it 1958, when Italy was in the fleeting, heady, pleasure-seeking period known as “Il boom,” captured unforgettably by Fellini’s classic film La Dolce Vita. “You take enormous liberties with the novels,” I tell Minghella, whom I meet in an appropriately bookish setting—the reference library of Kenwood House in Hampstead Heath, north London, near his home. “I know,” he says firmly. “I don’t think you can be over-reverential. The novel will remain the same after I’ve made the film, so you don’t have to genuflect.” And what’s an authentic adaptation of a book, anyway? A book on tape is the closest you can get to it. Other than that, you have to do something different.” Intriguingly, he travels down to the country cottage without the source novel. “When I adapted The English Patient, I was so in awe of it I couldn’t have it near me while I worked. There would have been such temptation to corral chunks of material from the book and shove it into the script. “Part of adaptation is that you’re trying to write your way back to the book, to those...