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119 Down from Cold Mountain Andrew Pulver / 2003 From the Guardian, December 11, 2003. Copyright Guardian News & Media Ltd 2003. Reprinted by permission. Strange as it may seem, Anthony Minghella regards himself as something of an outsider, cinematically speaking. “I live in London,” he says in his rich, sonorous voice, “but I’ve never made a film here since Truly, Madly, Deeply. I don’t know anybody. I’m so detached from what’s happening .” It’s hard to take this entirely at face value. At forty-nine, Minghella is arguably this country’s most blue-chip film director. He is an Oscar winner, double BAFTA winner and, with The English Patient, the maker of a landmark in the British film renaissance. Recently he was appointed chairman of the British Film Institute, the government-funded body charged with monitoring and protecting our film culture. Someone closer to the heart of the film establishment it would be hard to imagine. On the other hand, there’s some truth in what he says. Minghella is, if nothing else, a working filmmaker and, since his debut in 1991 with Truly , Madly, Deeply, his high-powered intellect and expansive imagination have taken him away from our shores, towards the bigger budgets and willingness to take risks of the US independent sector. The English Patient catapulted him into the front rank of global filmmaking. Its follow-up, The Talented Mr. Ripley, showed his ability to manipulate cinematic style as well as to bring out the best in A-list acting talent. And his latest, Cold Mountain, is conceived on an epic scale, its cost—$83m (£48m)—over double the investment of his previous film. All three started out as Hollywood projects, and all three were eventually financed by Miramax, the Disney-owned powerhouse of whose Anglophilia Minghella has been a major beneficiary. “The truth is,” he says, “I’ve never set out to make a film with Mira- 120 anthony minghella: inter views max. The English Patient was with Fox, Ripley was with Paramount and Cold Mountain was with MGM. Miramax was the one company, when these others abandoned the projects, that said: we’ll do it. No studio in Hollywood wanted Cold Mountain. None. No one wanted Ripley, no one wanted The English Patient. That tells you there isn’t really an appetite for ambitious movie-making out there. “You meet extraordinary anxiety about the negative cost. Look at it this way: if you write the novel of Cold Mountain, it costs exactly the same to produce and market as a novel set in a room. If you make the film, the disparity of costs is huge. Miramax have been one of the very few companies prepared to gamble on this kind of film. Without them I would have no career.” Minghella’s presidential detachment from the general run of British filmmaking is further reinforced by his own carefully nurtured production set-up. Though he is established in offices in a converted chapel in north-west London, Minghella’s business partner is Sydney Pollack, director of The Firm, Tootsie, and The Way We Were—as Hollywood as they come. And over the years he has worked regularly with such industry legends as editor Walter Murch, cinematographer John Seale, and costume designer Ann Roth. In front of the camera, he has earned the loyalty of Jude Law and, less noticeably, the likes of Philip Seymour Hoffman, who returns for a small part in Cold Mountain after a signature tour de force in The Talented Mr. Ripley. “It’s been a preoccupation of mine,” Minghella says, “to put together a film crew that will travel with me and help me. Being a writer-director can sometimes make you incredibly blinkered. You need to have a group around you sufficiently muscular and curmudgeonly to take issue with you, to teach you. I love the internationalism of it too—Australians, Italians , Americans, British . . . the film set is a passport-free zone. “And if you work with the same actors you can progress from film to film, rather than constantly having to start again in describing your film language, or describing the way you work best. I love working with Phil Hoffman—why wouldn’t you? He has made me better, and that’s all I’m trying to do. It’s self-serving in that way. But it’s also an issue of loyalty— they’ve helped me, and I owe them.” Cold Mountain, adapted from the novel by...

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