Anthony Minghella: Braving The Cold

Q: Did that ambiguity and the fact that you kind of sympathized with Tom even as he murdered three people perhaps hurt the film's performance in the U.S.? Were you pleased or disappointed by the reception?

A: Well, I think Ripley is a very hard movie for people, as we are not often asked to empathize with somebody who behaves in a way that exposes our own worst qualities. Some of us can understand and feel Ripley's sense of isolation and dislocation and this extracts the worst that can happen when you get preoccupied by those perceptions. Looking at it from another perspective, it was miraculous that the movie did as well as it did. In a way, I hope that Cold Mountain is as poorly received, if $81 million in domestic box office is a measure of poor performance.

Q: You explored doing Ripley with Leonardo DiCaprio and Cold Mountain with Tom Cruise. You gave those two American parts to Jude Law. His Dickie Greenleaf was this irresistible bronze guy who was all emotion and charisma. Inman is comparably stoic and repressed. Why Jude?

A: I felt that Jude was capable of anything--he's an incredibly physical actor. In Dickie, he captured the glamour and the aura of the very privileged. In Inman, he is a heavier, darker and more solid presence, and the weight of the narrative just bears down on him. But the contradiction is that he is this enormously romantic character, an idealist, a man who holds his values close to him at every moment. We've rarely seen Jude in love, or in an ardent relationship with a woman. One of the great joys of the film was seeing how much he could dignify that kind of role and how absolutely plausible he is as a soldier and a lover.

Q: Why Nicole Kidman for Ada, Inman's love interest, who's this pampered woman forced to fend for herself? And why Renee Zellweger for Ruby, the scrappy half-breed who teaches Ada to survive? How did you decide who played whom?

A: Part of the storytelling of Cold Mountain is the appearance of an unsophisticated community and this truly aristocratic and special person who arrives in their midst. I needed to cast someone who'd make an immediate impact. Nicole in any community makes an impact. Her physical presence is so extraordinary that it's easy to understand in the broad brushstrokes at the beginning of the film that the whole community could just be stupefied by her arrival. Nicole is also quite earthy and practical, and I knew she would be plausible as a woman who has made contact with the land and learned to become a worker and become integrated into that community, as happens to Ada. She probably is much more at home in that kind of community than a more rarified atmosphere.

On the other hand, I felt that Ruby was a character who is feral and...if I said a troll, that would carry too many weird connotations. But sort of a mountain spirit. When I met Renee, she was so diminutive that I felt that she would go well with Nicole in a two-shot. We emphasized that by rounding Ruby's costumes out--we turned her into somebody who is heavier and more dowdy. Then comes the joy of changing those shapes as the lissome and elegant part of Renee begins to emerge as she becomes more feminized. And the more boyish shape of Nicole emerges as her character changes. In some ways, they change places.

Q: You said Jude's physicality in Ripley surprised you. Were there any qualities in either actress that surprised you?

A: I was so impressed by Nicole in The Others that I actually wrote a piece in the New York Times about it. It was astonishing and revealed a febrile, skinless intelligence that I hadn't attributed to her. I thought her performance was mesmerizing. Like most filmmakers, I have a jealousy bone. What I mean is, I'm a film fan as well as a filmmaker. I'm a fan of directors, of writers and of movies. When I see a film with great work in it, part of me wants to reach into the screen and grab the person or the designer or the cameraman and steal them. When I saw Nicole in The Others, it made me want to reach in and grab that. With Renee, Jerry Maguire was made around the time of The English Patient, so I saw a lot of that film and the filmmakers. I was very taken with her. The transformation to Bridget Jones was so huge. And perhaps more important was that Renee tried to buy the rights to Cold Mountain. That's why I'd met her in the first place, because I wanted to know what it was about the book that she was so taken with.

Q: Is there a very collegial camp-like feeling when you go to a place like Romania to make a film? What's your best memory about the experience?

A: We enjoyed, if that's the word, an incredible vicissitude of weather--extreme and interminable periods of rain to violent passages of cold. There were days where there was no water because the pipes had frozen, days when they were drenched by rain that was nonstop. Temperatures were in the 100s sometimes. No one complained; they soldiered on with a great deal of camaraderie. Had there been any reaction of not putting up with it, the movie would have stopped.

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