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3 Anthony Minghella: In Conversation (Part 1) Mario Falsetto / 2003–4 From TheMakingofAlternativeCinemaVolume:DialogueswithIndependentFilmmakers, Mario Falsetto. Copyright © 2008 by Mario Falsetto. Reproduced with permission of ABC-CLIO, Santa Barbara, CA, and the author. Mario Falsetto: Can you talk about your background and growing up on the Isle of Wight. Anthony Minghella: My father migrated to England when he was nineteen in 1939. And like many young, slightly dispossessed Italian boys, he was imported by more successful local families who had already immigrated and set up various forms of business. The business of choice in England was ice cream so my father worked for a fairly wealthy family in Portsmouth, which is close to the Isle of Wight. He eventually left that company with one ice cream van to start his own business on the island. He married my mother who was from a neighboring village near Monte Cassino where my father was from. They formed this business and had five children fairly rapidly. The whole focus of attention was around the business and a little café that they opened as well. The Isle of Wight was flourishing at that time so the preoccupation of my childhood was working with my father. My father is unschooled, and my mother was taken out of school very early because there was a great deal of privation in her family as well. So there were almost no books in our house. Ironically, of course, the five children were all rather academic, or became academic in various ways. My first encounter with cinema was selling ice cream tubs in the local cinema which backed onto our café. The projectionist of that cinema rented a small cottage that was at the back of our building, so I got to know him very well and I was a frequenter of his projection room. The 4 anthony minghella: inter views fare on offer in those cinemas was extremely banal and prosaic. There were a great number of “B” pictures around at the time. I would say that my education in film began when I left the Isle of Wight at the age of eighteen to do a drama degree at university. The things around me at home were more musical in so far as my grandfather was passionate about opera, and my mother inherited that interest in music and played music herself. We all learnt to be musicians and played a lot together. In my mid-teens I found that the way to express my particular anomie was to hammer away at the piano, and so I started writing music and songs. I played in various groups and managed to make some kind of living in my late-teens by playing music. MF: What attracted you to a drama degree at university? AM: A very significant thing happened in 1968 when I was fourteen. There was a pop music festival on the island and it had a huge impact on me. It began an early fascination with America because a lot of American bands came over and brought with them an undertow of peripheral cultural documents: fashion, magazines, and music. There was this record store that would import American and West Coast music and some of the magazines that attended that music. I started to subscribe to Rolling Stone, It, and Oz, and that was my secret discovery, and then the festival happened three years in a row and that really started to give me a sense of a different world and a different way of thinking. My interest in drama was very minimal. I thought I was going to paint or play music or maybe go to an art school. Music was the great attraction to me and I was in a band that got a recording deal. As a sort of palliative to my parents, I went through the motions of applying to university . I happened upon this course in Hull (England), which was a brand new course. I went there because it was away from my parents, although I enjoyed a very good relationship with them. I thought, “Well, that’s too far away to have me in an ice cream van on the weekends,” and it seemed like an interesting course. For three years I enjoyed this extraordinary opportunity to educate myself because it was a department which had a brand new building with a theater, a radio studio, and a television studio. It was expected of all students that they would explore as...

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