Anthony Minghella, who died unexpectedly Tuesday at the age of 54
, made some films that were truly great (“The Talented Mr. Ripley”), some that were madly overrated (“The English Patient”) and others that
were deeply flawed (“Cold
Mountain”). In all of
them, however, he demonstrated the same principles: reverence for the art of
film, 
ambition to push that art to its limits, a sincere humility and an
engaging sense of humor. Also as an admittedly more writerly than cinematic
filmmaker, he was one of the most articulate directors to interview. All of
these qualities came through in conversations with the man, and I was
privileged to talk with him when he was promoting “The Talented Mr Ripley,” his best film, in 1999.
Or rather, I shared that privilege with a room full of other journalists,
accounting somewhat for the disjointed nature of the exchange. One thing I do
recall about the free-for-all discussion is that I gave Minghella a bit of a hard time because the studio had
promoted the film as a romance between the characters played by Matt Damon and
Gwyneth Paltrow when in fact the sparks were flying between Damon and Jude Law.
Minghella was a good sport about it, though, and true professional that he was,
avoided answering the question. Also, many of the questions came off inaudible
or indecipherable on the tape, which in some cases is probably just as well.
Here’s an attempt at a reconstruction:
Q: [unintelligible, something to the effect that he sure knows
how to pick them when it comes to casting]
AM: I mean I think, like everybody else, I’m a film-goer and I
look at the images and I get excited and I manage to persuade and maneuver these
people into the film. I look around one minute and there is a crude, young cast
and I look around the next minute, there’s movie stars and talented young
actors.
Q: [unintelligible; sounds like, “Hey, that Matt Damon is one
cutie pie. When did you stop messing around with writing the script and other
dumb stuff like that and try to sign him up?”]
AM: It took me about a year. After I went back to the screenplay,
I started it before the motion picture [“Good Will Hunting?”] and I went back
to it, and it took me over a year to get the screenplay to point where I felt I
could shoot. By that time, I was casting. And it was just before “Good Will
Hunting” came out that I cast Matt.
Q: [unintelligible; sounds like: “Didn’t some old lady write a
book about this story? Booo-ring!”]
AM: She [Patricia Highsmith, author of “The Talented Mr. Ripley”]died
within a few days of my starting working.....I think it’s much easier to work
on a book while the author is still alive. I loved to spend time with Michael
Ondaatje [author of “The English Patient”]. It was one of the best times I have
ever had in my life, to be able to re-imagine the book and then send every drop
to the writer to get his comments and his guidance and his approval, because
then you know that the desicions you’re making are consummate with the world of
its original conception. And it was much harder to re-imagine this book without
the blessing of the author. So, I would have much preferred her to be with me
and to be onset and to be sure that......
Q: Are you afraid that fans of the book are going to be critical
or disappointed?
M: Well, all I can say is that I know for a fact that if we were
a reading group—let’s say that this is a reading group and our week’s project
is to read “The Talented Mr. Ripley” and then we all said, “Okay, what do you
think was great about the book?” I know that we would end up with one, two,
three, four, five, six, seven, eight different versions of, no the key moment
is this moment, no it’s not about that, it’s about this. And you have to
accept, with a certain amount of chastening, to accept that all I can do is to
record as passionately and enthusiastically as I can what I felt I was reading
and accept the fact, because everybody’s playing the perfect version of a film in
their head when they read a novel. That’s one of the wonderful things about
reading. It’s so intensely personal and perfect. All I can do is tell you about
my experience with that book and try and console myself with the fact that the
book remains intact, with respect to any misconception that I may have had. And
try and just feeling like I’m being a good reader of this book and reporting it
as faithfully as I can while understanding that every single decision I make
will betray as much about me as it will
about the film.
Q: [Unintelligible; I’m guessing it’s something like “was this on
Oprah’s Book Club or something?”]
M: No.
Q: With that reading group example that you’re talking
about..........
M: Well, let me say this. Let’s extend our reading group into a
screenwriting group now. The novel is, Patricia said herself, she felt as if
Ripley was writing the book over her shoulder, that he was typing the story for
her. When you go back to the novel, you’ll see that it’s entirely implicit.
It’s all about a way of looking at the world. It’s not really about activity
and the problem with film is that it’s explicit. It’s about people doing
things, so Ripley has to meet people. He has to do things. So, the minute you
start to make a screenplay, you’re going to be inventing. You’re going to be
inventing somebody he meets, inventing somebody he doesn’t. Because you don’t
have information in the novel that will say, “He spent six weeks in Rome. It
was glorious.” Well, unless I put a caption up on the screen, there’s no way of
dealing with it, except by saying, “What does it mean to be glorious?” I’ve got
to send him to an opera. I’ve got to try and do the things that I felt would be
consummate with his sense of enjoyment. So, I wasn’t trying to editorialize the
book. I was simply trying to pick it up from its interior experience and make
it an exterior subject to the film. It wasn’t about my saying, “Well, I’ve got
to throw in some characters I just thought of today.” It is simply the prosaic
business of, if you’re in a house, you’ve got to put a bathroom in because
you’re going to need to go to the bathroom at some point. So, that’s the job of
the builder is to make the house practical. It’s not about any sense of me
wanting to have my say, particularly. What I would say to you though, and I
think it’s a fair way of talking about this film, is that there seems to me
always a difference between what the story was and what the film was about. And
you could argue, and I would find it hard to defend, if you said, “You’ve made
the film about something different than the story.” Because it seems to me, I
love the idea of a film about a man who commits murder and gets away with it
because it’s so unconventional and so audacious. But, I’m also the least
nihilistic and the least cynical person and I want to think about what the
consequences of that are. There seems to me to be a distinction between the
public accountability and justice. Ripley very well may not be caught in the end, but he’s in a prison from which
there’s no escape, which is the prison of his own head. That isn’t necessarily
what the thrust of this sequence of novels was. It was what I felt was my
argument with the events of the film. I was reading about [Cosimo de Medici?] and he said that the
painter always paints himself. What one of the most disturbing things for a
writer and for a filmmaker is that whatever it is you think you’re doing, you
always end up feeling incredibly exposed because you’ve made a thousand
decisions everyday. Somehow, the .......always exposes what your taste is and
what you’re take on the world is. At some point you’ve just got to say, “You
know what? I may not be the best adaptor or this may not be the truest version,
but this is all I know how to do and I’ve given all I can to make
it as
interesting and as complex as I can. But, in the end, it’s some of my own
faults.
Q: [unintelligible; it has something to do with some joke or
comment made on the set of “Ripley” that was reported in a “Premiere” article
by Christine Spines. Apparently it wasn’t as outrageous as Minghella suggests
here because I can’t find any other reference to it anywhere]
M: Oh God, I just want to kill myself. I was on the set at the
time. It was about the seventh day of shooting. I mean, it was an entirely
specious remark and if I could go back and realize and there was someone on the
set who wasn’t part of the filmmaking experience, I would eradicate that moment
because it was a joke. And I think that what I was concerned with is trying to
make sure that we didn’t pull our punches. That there was a real sense of
romance in the film, irrespective of which gender was involved. Just as when
Ripley is with Meredith, I wanted to be as authentic and pungent a moment
between two people as I could manage. So, when it was a moment between Ripley and
Peter Smith-Kingsley [the character with whom Ripley has his most overtly gay scene] I want it to be as authentic and as glamorous a moment and
as truthful a moment. And not to try and comment on it. And so, I was working
and working to make that moment as pure as I could and when I felt that they’d
done that, then I made a joke, which was, “Now they’ve done it. Now we’re in
trouble.” It was only that. It wasn’t for publication and I have more faith in
an audience than that suggests, so far as I would make this movie if I felt
that the audience was sufficiently happy to think and to feel and to be
challenged as I am as an audience member myself.
Q: Do you have any problem with the studio pushing the film as a
romance between Matt Damon and Gwyneth Paltrow when it seems clear that the
romantic interest is elsewhere?
AM: This is a sort of
tough room. I can tell you one thing with absolute certainty, which is the
studio, both Paramount
and Miramax, have been incredibly supportive of this project and very
supportive of me as having a![]()
singular vision of a film. It could very well have
been challenged. I could be sitting here with you trying to explaining why
Ripley is caught in the end, why there’s no Peter Smith-Kingsley in the film,
and I’m not. They supported a view that I had on the material and the take on
it. Of course, there was apprehension and I think if I ever make a film in
which there is no apprehension, then I should stop doing it. I’ve got a journal
entry from when The English Patient
was released in which I wrote, “If there are more than ten people at this film, I will be astonished and I was
astonished. I hope that there will be the same sense of astonishment about the
degree of sophistication that the audience has for this movie. I think there’s
a great sense that people want to be challenged. After all, I’ve made four
movies. I’ve seen maybe 4,000 and I’m much more often a member of the audience.
I’ve got to assume sometimes that there are lots of other people like me in the
audience and all I’m trying to do ever is to try and make the kind of movie
I’ve loved myself, which I’ve revisited myself. I think that movies which
simply assert that status quo, which simply tell you that the world is exactly
the way that you imagined it was, are a complete waste of time. For me, I’m not
interested in them. I want to go and see a movie where I can say, “Well wait a
minute. The world is different today than it was yesterday for me.” I remember
going to see “Tree of the Wooden Clogs” and feeling like my head had been spun
around. I’ve always wanted to try and make a movie in which I felt that one’s
head would be spun around and what seemed to me is the center of the story,
which is an assertion of the fact that everybody feels alone. We’re so
encouraged to feel worthless and disappointed in ourselves; that we’re so
encouraged to believe that it is better to be a fake somebody than a real
nobody in our lives. Every magazine, every commercial says, “Don’t feel good
about the way you look. Don’t feel good about your nose or your eyesight or
your hair or you clothes or you lifestyle. Cash it in. It’s not good enough.”
Q: [Unintelligible. Sounds
like: “Does this ‘Ripley’ tee-shirt make
me look fat?”]
M: I think you’re very smart to say that. I would also like to
say that one of the reasons that I cast Matt was that I thought he was a Dickie
Greenleaf and that this character, Ripley, can’t see that everything that he
has is perfectly good enough. But, he’s
got such a distorted view of himself. And that the irony of the film,
the tragedy of it, is that he gets to a place in the film, finally, where
somebody would say, “Here are your talents. Here are your gifts. Here is who
Tom Ripley is.” and it’s too late. He’s annihilated Ripley. He’s annihilated
the possibility of a love. If only he could see exactly what he had to begin
with, none of this would have happened. You’re absolutely right to say that in
the middle of this film are some of the icons by which we are tormented. I’m
not being disingenuous to say that wasn’t quite what I thought I was doing when
I cast the film, but you’re right to say it’s one of the most complex things
about the movie, is it’s a film about people inventing themselves and making
themselves up and people are dissatisfied with themselves. The very things that
we are encouraged to think about and aspire to are these characters and these
actors.
Q: Why is Matt Damon the ideal person to play Ripley?
M: Well, first of all, to answer the question honestly, who
knows? When you cast it, it’s not really a judgment on other actors, it’s a
judgement like a blind date. You think, I could go on a journey with this
person. When they talk, I understand and when I’m talking, they seem to
understand. I have to tell you, if you allowed me to, I would spend the rest of
the day telling you about Matt Damon because I think he’s the most astonishing
actor. He is the best accomplice a director could ever wish for. We shot 96 days.
On the last shot, he was as excited, devoted, and focused as he was on the very
first. He’s as smart as can be. He’s as kind to the crew and he’s such an
example of a young American actor. He’s absolutely exemplary. And also, he
dignified the writing to such an extent. I mean, I’m a writer first as well as
a filmmaker and I hear every moment and imagine every moment. It’s so wonderful
when you watch somebody working and they give you back all you hoped for and
more. My one fear for him is that his performance is so new, so quiet, and so
unshowy, and delicate that people may not understand the what the
transformation of the acting performance is. It doesn’t have the sort of
pyrotechnics, which people seem to go for. It’s done very very carefully. In
some ways, I felt that he took responsibility.......It was a series of duets,
the film, in many ways that Ripley encounters. I think he welcomed every actor
into the film , welcomed every character in, but........
Q: Are you a fan of “Purple
Noon?” [Rene Clement’s 1860 adaptation of the same novel]
M: Yeah, you know I’ve talked about “Purple Noon” more in the
last 24 hours than I’ve ever thought about it in my life. I like the movie very
much. I thought it was of its time. I didn’t
seem to have very much to do with the novel, and I certainly didn’t feel
like I was treading ground that had already been covered in any way. I thought
that Alain Delon [Ripley in “Noon”] was probably the most beautiful person that
I’d ever seen in my life.
Q: Did the sexuality ever go further or did it play on the screen
exactly......
M: It was no more. We didn’t have any more material. In some
ways, I thought we dug out every possible moment that we had. I loved the idea,
I made a scene in “The English Patient” where
Kristen Scott Thomas and Ralph Fiennes were in the bunker and I thought it was
a scene in which the work was wonderful, and I wanted that to be an equivalency
between two men in this film, which was as delicate as that scene was and which
was as unabashed as that scene was. I think that Ripley is so at odds with
everything about himself, in terms of sexuality, so at odds with every part of
his being that anything more explicit than that would have terrified him.
You’ve got to remember that part of this film is about 1958, you know? What it
meant to expose your ideas and desires is very very different from now and much
more different, I think, than we can imagine.
Q: [unintelligible; something like, “Gwyneth Paltrow is so great!
How great would you say she is?”]
AM: Well, you know, she has such an effortless ability to summon
class and privilege and also a generosity of spirit. I have this whole notion
of taking Gwyneth as this welcoming sunny girl, this beauty, and saying, “What
journey might she go on?” And I had this notion that she had this kind of leak
in the emotional temperature. She started off at 82 degrees in the first scene
and then the second scene, it was 81, then 80. By the time she’s in Venice, she’s been
transformed from the Gwyneth that we knew into this woman who is so exasperated
and heartbroken and changed and cool and dangerous. And that just seemed
exciting to take what we know and transform it. I think that, again, I felt
very lucky in this movie with both Gwyneth and Cate [Blanchett], who I think,
as good as it gets, would be willing to sign on to a movie for the movie and
not for a particular part, but just to be part of an idea of a film. That was
very much her.
Q: .....What does this movie portray about you?
AM: That I’m a frustrated composer, that I’m a bad jazz pianist,
that I’m the worst player of Bach in the world, but that I love all these
things.
Just a footnote: Minghella died at the same age as did Krzysztof
Kieslowski in 1996, both after surgery — Kieslowski for his heart on March 13,
Minghella on his tonsils on March 18 .
So I guess the lesson is that if you’re a famous 54 year old filmmaker and it’s
March, hold off on that operation.
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