Anthony Minghella: The Talented Mr. Minghella

Q: With four attention-getting, award-winning thoroughbreds in the lead roles, did you have your hands full?

A: It's always a happy thing when the director feels that at the end of a long haul of the job, there are none of his passengers he'd like to throw overboard. That caucus of Jude, Matt, Gwyneth and Care is an auspicious one for me. I feel, "How did I get them all for this movie at this time?"

Q: Do you have any notions about chemistry, of blending the right casting elements and creating magic?

A: Executives are concerned with chemistry, Filmmakers arc concerned with honoring the idea of the part. If you cast carefully, the film sort of takes care of itself in terms of those various alchemies that need to happen.

Q: This is a bigger film than one might have imagined, with extraordinary locales.

A: Roy Walker and I started looking together for locations in January and we didn't start shooting until August. We scouted from the very top of Italy to the toe to try and find the village of "Mongebello" in the book. We shot in Tuscany, Venice, Rome, Naples, Ischia, Palermo. We shot Naples for Rome, Rome for Naples, Rome for Venice, Venice for Rome. During the shooting on the island Ischia, one of my fillings dropped out and I had to have an emergency appointment with a dentist. The very nice dentist knew who I was and said, "You know, 50 years ago, Alain Delon sat in this chair to have a filling replaced when he was making Plein Soleil." I said, "Why here?" And he said, "They shot here." I said, "No, I don't think so." But I looked at the movie again and, sure enough, although you can barely see it, they used a corner of Ischia to make their "Mongebello." So, having searched throughout Italy, we ended up using exactly the same location as they did.

Q: Why have you reset the book in the late '50s?

A: Because it's the era known as "Il Bourn" in Italy, a time when Italy was changing, surfacing from the war. That period in Italian culture has a patina of elegance and style, with a very pagan underbelly. That's what the film is about in some ways. Also, I wanted all of us to be shooting this picture as if, if we just walked around a corner, Fellini would be there shooting La Dolce Vita with Marcello Mastroianni and Anita Ekberg. A lot of American photographers were working there at the time. On my wall while I was writing, I put the Ruth Orkin photograph called American Girl in Italy. I later showed it to Gwyneth and Cate and Matt to try and show them how American the Americans were and how European the Europeans were. The whole way the girl is walking, the way the men are sitting, I kept trying to get mat earthiness into the film.

Q: How else have you found ways to make the novel more cinematic?

A: People were making themselves up in the '50s in Europe, including writers like Highsmith, Tennessee Williams, Gore Vidal--just as, before them, Edith Wharton and Henry James had done. Ripley is in some ways an updating of Henry James's The Ambassadors, almost a commentary on it in that it walks into the whole tradition of "the American in Europe," of people going off to cast away the ties that bind them. It occurred to me early on that one way to dramatize the combat between Dickie and Ripley was through jazz, the great noise of freedom of mat period. In the film, Dickie has taken his alto sax to Europe and aspires to be a John Coltrane or Charlie Parker, an improviser who could, literally, make himself up in the moment. Dickie can articulate all the concerns of the Beat generation, of being on the road. Ripley is a classically trained pianist who, as far as hipper-than-thou Dickie can see, is straight, conventional, conservative. What the film tries to say is that one of Ripley's great talents is to extemporize. While Charlie Parker is a great musician, he's in the tradition of Bach, Beethoven and Mozart, The musical joke of the movie all the way through is that Dickie thinks jazz is the hip, free sound of personality, but go back and listen to Bach. I've tried to sit the entire film on a kind of musical architecture.

Q: One hears that in the past few years, you might have done any number of projects, including Four Weddings and a Funeral, Sliding Doors and Shakespeare in Love. Have you found yourself surprised, delighted, bemused by what projects were offered you?

A: No, because I knew what I was going to do next. I'm not really in the marketplace for the kind of opportunities which accrue to directors who have some success. I'm not for hire. There's nobody and nothing in The English Patient I didn't want in it, and it was made entirely the way I wanted. If it didn't work, it was my problem. I feel entirely the same about Ripley. I'll stand passionately by the result.

Q: Are you optimistic about Ripley's chances to find an audience and to find success?

A: I have no sense of it. My little notebook records my anxieties about The English Patient just as we were coming to its release, with such things as "Nobody in the world is going to want to see this film," "It doesn't work," "It's too ambitious." I feel the same way about this film. There isn't a place on the shelf in the video store where I can picture it very easily. And that's what it ought to be like. Films should want to jump out of categories. They shouldn't want to be one thing. Audiences are capable of laughing and crying at the same movie, of being frightened and entertained at the same thing.

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Stephen Rebello interviewed Christina Ricci for the November issue of Movieline.

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