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145 Breaking and Entering: Screenplay by Anthony Minghella Jason Davis / 2006 From CreativeScreenwriting 13, no. 6 (November 2006). Reprinted by permission. “I’d never intended to divert into the role of an adapter of novels,” begins writer/director Anthony Minghella. “It happened because I had a great adventure with The English Patient, and, while that film took its time to find financing, I took a job adapting The Talented Mr. Ripley not intending ever to direct it. After I made The English Patient, I didn’t want to let go of Ripley, so I directed it and then found Cold Mountain almost as soon as I’d begun Ripley. There was a kind of queue of adaptations,” explains Minghella, who scored Academy Award nominations for his first two adaptations and a Best Picture statuette for The English Patient. While contemplating the scale of Cold Mountain on location in Romania , the filmmaker vowed to scale back his next project and do something original. Now, Minghella has turned his attention to Breaking and Entering, a story that had a lengthy period of gestation. “Many years ago, when I was writing plays, I had an idea for a play called Breaking and Entering. The idea was, essentially, that a couple came home from some kind of social event and discovered their house has been ransacked. When they did an inventory of what had been stolen, they discovered that things had been added. And what had been added were, in some ways, emblems of what was missing in their marriage.” Minghella struggled with the initial concept, but had difficulty developing a dramatic venue to contain the idea. “When I was in Romania [shooting Cold Mountain], the building that we worked from in London had some break-ins. It reminded me of the idea I’d had. It seemed to me that perhaps there was some way of using the notion of burglary to talk 146 anthony minghella: inter views about all kinds of issues to do with London, citizenship, rights, and responsibilities .” The same story also lent itself to “this idea of things getting broken to fix them, which is at the heart of the original idea—that somehow, not all breaking is bad in the long term.” The filmmaker clarifies his dichotomous conceit: “It’s a riff on the implications of damage to a relationship which might finally be the cause of its more permanent and robust repair .” “There’s a danger in the world that we work in, a sort of expectancy of what kind of film you’re going to make and that you’re locked into it. Like every filmmaker, I want to feel like I could do a comedy next, or do a thriller.” After three adaptations, Minghella found the writing of Breaking and Entering quite liberating. “You’re not enthralled to the obligations of the novel in the sense that the novel has created a map,” he explains, “Whatever you do [in an adaptation] is in a dialectical relationship to that map.” Calling the process a “delicate and precarious activity,” Minghella notes the difficulty in hewing close to the source material while still telling a filmic story, but says that the perk of adaptation is that “you know there’s been a big support in the past for the concerns of the story you’re telling. Whereas, if you’re creating a new narrative, you’re going to discover only after you’ve made the film whether anyone else is interested in what you have to say. There’s no security. There are blessings and curses both to original material and to adaptation.” Minghella explains that Breaking and Entering came from the idea of writing “a morality play with a strange point of entry,” from “the notion of a moral fable and then trying to find some way to animate it.” The film, which follows architect Will Francis’s (Jude Law) interactions with a young thief (Rafi Gavron) who burgles his office, takes its title from both the literal crime being committed as well as the emotional intrusions of the characters into one another’s lives. “The thrust of it, for me, was imagining a courtroom scene in which really no one was innocent. Perhaps the most innocent person was the person who was on trial,” says Minghella. “Often, the context of crime is unknown to us,” adds the filmmaker, who has his protagonist follow the young thief back to his home where he meets the boy’s...

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