Anthony Minghella: Braving The Cold

Director Anthony Minghella is plagued with anxiety over his new film Cold Mountain, just as he was with his previous Oscar-friendly films The English Patient and The Talented Mr. Ripley. At least there's always Bach.

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In the time it takes to matriculate a college degree or a president to complete a term, writer/director Anthony Minghella completes a literary adaptation that factors heavily in Oscar season. It's that time again.

Minghella has only just completed his adaptation of the Charles Frazier novel Cold Mountain, and the oddsmakers already are handicapping the chances of Jude Law, who was nominated for his last Minghella stint, The Talented Mr. Ripley, and Nicole Kidman and Renee Zellweger, who battled for the Oscar last year in The Hours and Chicago, respectively. And don't forget Minghella himself, who won Best Director for the Best Picture winner The English Patient.

Minghella is never in a hurry to release a film or even tell a story, whether he is making you curious about a man burned faceless in English Patient or getting you to feel empathy for a young man so troubled and determined to change his social station that he'll kill anyone in his way, as Matt Damon did in Ripley.

Cold Mountain is a love story between a quiet local named Inman (Law) and the delicate beauty Ada (Kidman), who arrives from the big city in time for the two to make sparks but not ignite a full flame before he heads off to fight for the Confederate army. Badly wounded in battle and weary of the nightmarish carnage, Inman up and walks home through the detritus of a battle-scarred South. His journey contrasts with Ada's struggle to survive back in Cold Mountain, where the scarcity of food isn't as frightening as the pillaging Union soldiers and the predatory home guard, a brigade of thugs who use their duty to herd deserters and protect families as license to plunder. Ada is aided by Ruby (Zellweger), a scrappy young drifter with strong survival skills.

Minghella's Inman is a loner protagonist similar to those in The English Patient and Ripley, one that seems honed by the British director's modest origins as the son of an ice cream-making family living in the relative isolation of the Isle of Wight. He has grown into an erudite and eloquent interpreter of literature, and the $80-million-plus Cold Mountain raises the stakes. The fact that he emerges from the four-year ordeal as anxiety-wracked as he was in making the nine-Oscar-winning English Patient might be a good omen.

MICHAEL FLEMING: Your track record adapting literature made you a smart choice for Cold Mountain, but your other films have shared a decidedly European feel. What sparked you to this Civil War story?

ANTHONY MINGHELLA: When I was reading this book, I'd gotten to the point where I didn't necessarily want to do another big period novel. But it spoke to me as a dramatist and had two or three things that made it irresistible. There is the story of Inman, a man walking back from the Civil War. It has a lot of the elements and the shape of an odyssey. I'd been writing in my own journal about making a film about pilgrimage and about the relationship between walking and atonement. That fit so well into Cold Mountain, which already had fantastic characters. It was hard to say no to that, this very strong love story set against an extremely pungent and volatile period in history.

Q: In interviews about the way you made Tom Ripley so sympathetic--even as he kills his friends and gets away with it--you said American film is preoccupied with public morality and punishing the guilty. Cold Mountain is much less ambivalent in that sense than either English Patient or Ripley. Is that a concession to a more standard American story that a U.S. audience would be comfortable with?

A: I'd like to say it was, but it would be a lie. I suppose I was examining my own conscience. I'd spent three years or more working on Ripley and felt like I'd been in a room with no air--an extremely fetid room where there were certain kinds of base desires and ambivalent moralities. Thematically, it annihilated me. Cold Mountain celebrated loyalty, dignity and honor. I thought the main characters of Inman, Ada and Ruby did everything they could to behave well. In order to dramatize that, you have to put it against a world of people behaving badly.

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