Anthony Minghella, 1954-2008

Anthony Minghella, 1954-2008

One of the most eminent filmmakers in world cinema, Anthony Minghella died in hospital on Tuesday March 18 following a post-operative haemorrhage. He was 54 years old.

Minghella grew up above his Italian parents' café on the Isle of Man and soon discovered his passion for drama, studying theatre at Hull University then script-editing the BBC TV children's series Grange Hill, before finding his voice and his due acclaim as a prize-winning playwright. His debut feature film, Truly Madly Deeply (1991), was a huge surprise hit with audiences, and each of his subsequent pictures saw him grow in ambition, stature and acclaim, from the epic scope of The English Patient — which won 9 Oscars, including Best Director for Minghella — to the lustre of The Talented Mr Ripley (1999), and his monumental adaptation of Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain (2003). He was made a Commander of the British Empire (CBE) in 2001 and was Chairman of the British Film Institute from 2003 to 2007. In 2005 he directed Puccini's Madame Butterfly for the English National Opera, and with Breaking and Entering (2006) he directed his own screenplay set in London's King's Cross. The film that would be his final work is The No 1 Ladies Detective Agency, made for the BBC, which he produced, directed and co-wrote with Richard Curtis. He was married with two grown children.

In Minghella on Minghella (ed. Timothy Bricknell, Faber and Faber, 2005) Minghella discussed his unique approach to writing and directing, highlighting also the work of the team of gifted performers and technicians he had gathered around him over successive projects. What follows are some edited selections from the book, beginning with an extract from the Foreword by Minghella's producing partner in the company Mirage Enterprises — director Sydney Pollack.

Sydney Pollack on Minghella

There are many approaches to adaptation, most of them mathematical and quantitative, defined by deciding what should be kept in and what should be left out. Anthony's process, on the other hand, is one of literally re-imagining the entire work. When you see one of his films after you've read the book, you still feel like you don't know what's coming next. You're still having a 'first-time' experience.

His characters are full of yearning, full of a sense of loss, capable of great joy and deep feeling — and I say his characters, because even though they have often been originally created by someone else, in his films' final form, they have been re-imagined and fleshed out in ways that are uniquely his. He manages this, by the way, without violating the original authors' intent.

But I don't want to speak as though the 'it' of him as a director is his ability to adapt a book. It's in the final realization of the film that his extraordinary talents really shine. His movies are often lengthy, often lavish, sometimes epic, always complex. He is not in the business of visual or visceral economy. Instead he lavishes his viewer with story and scope, nuance and emotion, agony and beauty. The gamut.

About the man: He is a realistic romanticist. A kind of poet, disciplined by reality, an academic by training, a musician by nature, a compulsive reader by habit and, to most observers, a sunny soul who exudes a gentleness that should never be mistaken for lack of tenacity and resolve. He is capable of taking great blows without weakening.

The cliché that you don't know anyone well until you've lived through wars with them is an absolute truth. Sometimes making films is a form of war — with yourself, with an audience, with the film itself. Having weathered several with Anthony, I will tell you that his dignity never softens, his artistry never suffers and his mind remains as sharp and clear in wartime as it is in quietude.

Minghella on Writing

However long it took me to come to writing as an activity, that is the activity which has most defined me and still most defines me. I love writing. I find it very difficult, but it's the time when I'm most comfortable with myself, oddly, or I feel most like myself. I feel like such an amateur film-maker, but not an amateur writer. I will always feel like a writer who directs and not the other way round…

I play the piano a lot when I'm writing. I listen to music a lot. But just as you have to make peace with your voice, you have to make peace with your process as well. When I look at the madness of the way that I write, it would be very easy to get enormously irritated. Even if I did one page a day, that's only 115 or 120 days of work. So, why does it take me a year and a half? What is going on with me? But I realize that the time spent reading the Book of Job for a day is not specious. It's because that's where my own particular journey requires me to be. Or when I'm spending two days examining the Smithsonian collection of early American folk music, it's not just indulgence. I know that there's going to be a clue there somewhere that's going to feed the film. When I was writing The English Patient, I walked into a record store because I wanted to listen to Hungarian music, and found a disc by a band called Muzikacz. I put the disc on and the second or third track I listened to was called 'Szerelem, Szerelem', and that became the voice of the film for me. And I listened to that music repeatedly throughout…

Something, I think, that is common to all writers of fiction is that, at the moment you're writing a novel or a play or a poem, it appears as if all random events are feeding the piece of work you are making at that time… When I'm open, I'm dialled into writing. Everything comes at you as if it were a message.

Minghella on Adaptation

I think it's perfectly honourable to adapt material for film, because in the end the story is both the spine of every piece of dramatic fiction and also the least significant thing about it. I don't think the film-maker has any responsibility whatsoever to the novel. That's at the root of what I feel. And that could, I'm sure, get me stood up against a wall and shot.

When it comes to choosing a novel to adapt, I think it's about a day and a particular predisposition to something. You don't really know whether it's a good idea or a bad idea until you are much too far down the road to turn back.

The English Patient I read in one go. The last thing I was doing was looking for a job. I'd read everything that Michael Ondaatje had written, because I'd read his poetry. And then he started writing novels, and I'd read those. And I'd saved up The English Patient as a present to myself.

Sometimes there's silt in the bottom of the read which never goes away; there are certain ideas that you live with and luxuriate in and that you work from, and there were stars in the constellation of The English Patient that glittered immediately. One was that new lovers smash everything — the carelessness of being that deeply in love with someone, and the cruelty involved; then there was this dialectic between attachment and independence, its playing around with ownership, lack of ownership; boundaries, lack of boundaries; communities, the damage of communities; the value of tribes, the damage caused by tribalism. That's such a rich seam to mine in a film. There was an absolute certainty in my mind before I'd finished reading it that I wanted to get involved with it in some way.

I could try and disinter all the reasons why I felt that. I think that there is an enormous number of similarities in Michael's and my tastes, and in the way that we look at the world, and in our sensibilities, insofar as he is an uprooted Sri Lankan man who's become a Canadian via England. I have a rather over-elaborated sense of being a foreigner in England. I don't know how true it is, finally, but I've certainly fed myself from that. When I was a kid, I was very conscious of the fact that we had a completely different culture to all of my friends. It was an extremely homogeneous society, except for us. There wasn't any kind of mixture, and there was no pluralism at all. That made me feel intensely foreign, in a way that, I think, Michael has always felt intensely foreign.

Minghella on Collaboration

I think of directing as an activity with a crew, as an activity as one of a company of people creating a film. But the conundrum is that it's also extremely authorial in the sense that without there being a defining view of the material — defined by one person — the film collapses. By the same token, if the film is the point of view of only one person, it also seems to collapse. Alchemy is achieved when each person is both individually making the film and collectively making the director's vision of the film. And that is very, very hard to achieve, because if there are fifteen heads of department and they've each got their own departments, and you are encouraging all of those individuals to make a personal contribution to the film, it's very hard to corral that into one single, coherent vision. Lots of the problems in film occur when the people are not making the same film; where there are actors in one film and other actors in a different film, or where the production design is not supporting the costume design, or where the camera's not supporting the production design. The task is how you cohere a group of people without inhibiting their own voice, because, chorally, their voices are more interesting than yours is as a solo voice. As a director you must always remember that everybody doing a job on the film is better at that job than you are.

Minghella on Actors & Acting

I know as an absolute fact that the best moments in movies are acting moments. They're not shots, and they're not locations, and they're not effects. When I think about the moments in movies that I have loved, it's always about an actor revealing himself or herself…

It doesn't matter what you've spent on a film, it doesn't matter how much you've prepared a shot, none of it matters in the end. You end up with a lens and somebody doing something. It's all about that. It can be the lens on a little video-camera recorder or on the most expensive Panavision camera. It's all about somebody revealing themselves and letting you in to something. That's all I'm ever trying to do: to make those moments, or to allow those moments to happen, and to make an actor feel sufficiently comfortable so that they can be emotionally unadorned.

I've lost much of my attachment to rehearsal because I've learned that film is a nastier medium than we like to believe, in the sense that film is cruelly indifferent to how an effect is achieved. So much so that you can steal a reaction from another moment in a film and it feels totally organic and real. It doesn't matter, in the end, that the actor had no understanding at the time that that's what they were working toward.

John Seale and I have a process where sometimes he doesn't turn the camera off, or sometimes it's running for a long time before I call 'Action', and often Walter Murch and I have chosen those areas on the take in the cutting room…

Actors are very vulnerable in the cutting room, and many of them get aggrieved by what happened to their work; they see it as a series of lies because it was never meant for that. But, of course, the whole thing is a lie in the sense that none of it is real, nobody dies. Our soldiers in Cold Mountain were Romanian soldiers in American costumes, grey in the morning and blue in the afternoon. It doesn't mean that their run into the pit is dishonest because earlier that day they were Confederates shooting into the pit; it just means that, at the moment of looking, the film's truth is always going to overwhelm any particular actor's integrity. I say this as a director who has been blessed by actors, dignified by them, rescued by them. It's a conundrum and an important one to acknowledge because there has to be a profound respect on either side of the camera. Surrender to the actor during shooting; surrender from the actor in the editing room.

Minghella on Walter Murch & Editing

[Walter has] become the essential part of the film-making process for me. We've probably spent more time together than I have with my wife in the last years — day after day after day in some cutting room together: Berkeley in northern California for The English Patient and Ripley, and now in our new building in Hampstead on [Cold Mountain]. I think what's interesting is the degree to which what I'd learnt in the cutting room on The English Patient came with me into the shooting of Ripley and Cold Mountain. Although I have to say, before Walter says it for me, that I haven't learnt very much in the process, because if there was one signal lesson to be extracted from the process of cutting The English Patient it was that I overshoot. Walter gave me a stopwatch after that film which I could use to time the script of The Talented Mr. Ripley, and clearly I can't use the stopwatch either because that film was also wildly overshot. More thrillingly, it was also the case with Cold Mountain, although the length of the screenplay has crept down from project to project…

The writer and director cannot feel proprietorial in the cutting room. In the course of reducing a film to a manageable length much blood is shed and there are many hostages to the process. Many of my favourite moments from Cold Mountain, which I love when shooting, were clearly not consonant with what the film required and had to go... Walter has an unusual practice, which is to take something away in order to see whether it demands to be returned. The first time he did it to me on The English Patient I almost burst into tears! I came back to the cutting room after doing some looping in London and watched the film, and the sequence in which Hana flies up in the chapel with Kip swinging her wasn't there. It's a mischievous, antic way of working, but sometimes that happens and the scene does not come back in…

The idea of challenging the film at all times is something I love. If I worked now with an editor who didn't do that, I would feel very insecure. Also, having an intellectual opponent who you are fairly convinced hits a bit harder than you do is not a bad thing to have at any point in the film-making process.

Minghella on Classic Cinema

The only cinema worth talking about is the cinema which aspires to poetry. The poetic cinema of Kieslowski, Tarkovsky, Cocteau, Bunuel, Olmi, Fellini is often seen by very few, and I think it's an indictment that it rarely happens in the English language. There are so many different ways to tell a story, and we've confined ourselves to the very middle of the road.

Minghella on Movies & Morality

There's something about the camera as a window into other people's souls and other people's experiences. As an audience we want to watch other people engage in activities that we do ourselves and in activities we are afraid or unable to do ourselves. Why do societies all over the world make up stories of people doing things we do ourselves in one form or another? Why is it that we need to re-enact those things? At some level, it's a requirement for us to be able to experience without danger. We need to be able to stare at death and stare at love and stare at sadness and stare at violence and stare at fear — with a safety belt on.

The camera is not a neutral observer. The camera has nothing neutral about it whatsoever. Where you put somebody in the frame is as critical as what they're doing. You have to acknowledge that as a film-maker you are orchestrating the way that their action is being perceived. It's not just a neutral action which you are giving to somebody else. You are making a hundred decisions: how you will see it, how you will hear it, how long you'll see and hear it for. It's my job to manipulate every single one of those images so that it has the impact I think it requires. I think there's a moral way of doing that. There's a truthful way of doing it and there's a lying way of doing it.