Anthony Minghella: Interviews

Mastering the Mountain: 2004

127 Mastering the Mountain Bob McCabe / 2004 From EmpireMagazine, January 2004. Copyright © EMPIRE MAGAZINE. Reprinted by permission. Anthony Minghella, the Isle of Wight’s most famous son, heir to his parents ’ famous ice cream empire and, lest we forget, Academy Award–winning director, would like to set the record straight on what he describes as “one of the great myths of my life.” He never wrote for Grange Hill. He was a story editor on the program for four years, his first post-university job in television. But still, as he laughs, “It doesn’t go away. Somehow I’ve acquired it as a great writing credit.” When Empire meets up with the delightful, softly spoken filmmaker, it is late on a rainy November night in Soho. He is only two days away from the 100 percent–finished cut of Cold Mountain, but tonight he has just seen a cut of around 99.9 percent of it for the first time—and Empire has had the privilege of watching with him. Needless to say, he is rather pleased and has every good reason to be. The movie, all 150 minutes of it, is both epic and intimate. “Today is the first day I feel I’ve surfaced with the film,” he says. “Soon it’ll be in front of people and they’re going to have to decide what they think about it.” Minghella’s travelled a long way from Tucker and his mates to the power trio of Nicole Kidman, Renée Zellweger, and his leading man, Jude Law. Law and Minghella are reprising the relationship that proved so effective on The Talented Mr. Ripley with another literary adaptation, this time of Charles Frazier’s sweeping, lyrical tale that revolves around a love story and an odyssey through the turbulent days of the American Civil War. Cold Mountain is a book—and now a film—that is both epic in scale and intimate in feel. It tells of Southern deserter Inman’s (Law) long walk home, returning to the love of his life, Ada (Kidman). In his absence, Ada sees her home in the shadow of Cold Mountain fall apart, only to find 128 anthony minghella: inter views herself saved, redeemed, and ultimately changed by her friendship with a young, wild mountain girl, Ruby (Zellweger). Cold Mountain is a haunting book and one that seems to have haunted its filmmaker, too. “It was really quite bizarre because I’d decided not to do another literary adaptation. Then I went to Toronto to visit Michael Ondaatje (author of The English Patient), and he gave me this book which his publisher had given him to give to me. So I rather reluctantly put it in my bag, and when I got back to London there were two more copies waiting for me, and subsequently I discovered that, four months before, they’d sent me the galleys of the book. So within days this book kept flying at me, and when I read it, it was very clear why people thought that I might be interested in it.” Minghella, a former university lecturer, had regularly taught on the subject of medieval theatre and was, at the time, discussing the idea of a story based on pilgrimage. “I was thinking about all these stories of spiritual journeys and walking as atonement,” he says. “So reading this book, which is so much about earning your return in some way, having to overcome a series of obstacles to merit redemption, it intrigued me. It felt like this was a fictional nod to a lot of things I was dealing with. It was just chiming so loudly.” As a screenwriter, Minghella avoids the slavish page-by-page, line-byline notion of adapting a novel for the screen. He educated himself about North and South Carolina, the battles and the people, reading countless letters from soldiers and brushing up on things about which he “was profoundly ignorant.” “I’d read the book many, many times,” he continues, “so, in the end, I thought the best thing to do was to leave the book to one side and just go off and create the film and the narrative, with as strong a recollection as I could muster, in the ways that stories get passed on. That’s how storytelling originated, it was a vernacular. On a practical level that’s the only way I knew how to do it. I was too superstitious to sneak a peek at...