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.
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.
Q: What was the most extreme incident that showed this dedication?
A: It happened when we were shooting in South Carolina, in this swamp. We hadn't been able to explore the floor of this swamp, and every time we put Jude in, he fell under this vile, foul, slimy water. They would have to fish him out, take his entire costume off, hose him down, go off and wash the costume and put it back on him. Three times, in the space of an hour, he went under this swamp. It was dangerous and extremely unpleasant. There wasn't one second that he didn't go straight back in again and carry on where he left off. And Nicole, at the end of the film when the temperatures had really plummeted, was having to dig out potatoes on the farm. We did a couple of takes, and I could see she was turning blue. She was so thin and it was just punishing, this piercing wind rattling around the location. She was shuddering, but never complaining.
Q: Jude was a revelation in Ripley as was Juliette Binoche in English Patient. Who'll have the same impact in Cold Mountain?
A: Brendan Gleeson I would hope will come to the forefront after this picture. I was so lucky with this cast in that wherever you turn, you had an actor like Charlie Hunnam, who had a few scenes playing this albino character. Almost no dialogue, but he was such a presence. Jack White from The White Stripes, he was such a revelation. He's a natural actor.
Q: When you spend four years putting together these intricately layered epics, you must do something interesting to unwind. What do you do for laughs?
A: I do play the piano and have found it a meditative escape when I'm writing and thinking. I listen to an enormous amount of music. My favorite is Bach.
Q: Why Bach over, let's say, Beethoven?
A: It's very hard to say, other than that to me, there's never been a greater artist or inspiration in history than Bach. Pablo Casals said Bach is like a volcano. On some level austere and formal, but there is this huge reservoir, a lava of emotions. In my own work, I always aspire to make something formal with a classic quality but with a huge amount of emotion. I once wrote a play entirely about Bach, and there are always moments of Bach in the work I do.
Q: You must have a guilty pleasure, too.
A: Not a morning of my life goes by, whether I'm shooting or not, that I do not log on to the Internet site of my soccer team to catch up on the daily minutiae of who has been traded and what the latest game results are. I'm very, very delighted by the game of soccer.
Q: Are you a Manchester United booster?
A: No, the team I have followed all my life is Portsmouth, a famously mediocre team that has broken my heart many times. Soccer is the root of a very important bond in my family. My brother and father go with me to the games, share the same passion. It is a real tradition, meeting at the games--this coming from a season ticket holder who hasn't sat in his seat for several seasons because it has just been too hard to get there from Romania or the cutting room or wherever my particular madness takes me. But you will see me work 18-hour days, then struggle to complete my Internet connection to the south coast of England from Transylvania, spending hours when I should be sleeping.
The other thing I relish is, I've become the head of the British Film Institute and have spent an enormous amount of time in the last 12 months giving my attention to that. I am very passionate about an organization which is such an advocate of films from other countries and from the past. If I could contribute to the cinema of Britain a fraction of what Martin Scorsese has given to American cinema, that would be a dream. It sounds like I'm asking people to eat spinach, but those movies can change lives. They changed mine.
Q: Who were your biggest influences?
A: A diversity of filmmakers has thrilled me. Italian cinema in general is what made me fall in love with the cinema and want to make films. I began as a playwright and always felt that my sensibility was detuned to most British writing and what was popular. I'd see plays from David Hare and Harold Pinter, writers I grew up loving, and they were tough and cold--I'd get tripped up by the frailties of people and their foibles. I have very little cynicism as a writer and filmmaker, because I'm a believer in tolerance and that there is a quality of spiritual dimension worth trying to identify and encapsulate. Then I watched Italian cinema, directors like Fellini, the Taviani brothers, and I said, "Now I get it."
As a teenager becoming a young adult, I saw De Sica's The Bicycle Thief, and that was enormously important to me. This was during a magnificent time with the emergence of Coppola, Scorsese, Italian filmmakers from other countries. I remember the excitement I felt when I sat through The Godfather, Apocalypse Now, The Conversation, all of the early Scorsese films. They made me think it possible to make extraordinary films in English. As for other European cinema, Kieslowski is the filmmaker I would most like to have been. Like me, all of these men were raised as Catholics, and if you look at them and Fellini, you can tell the qualities that can only be called the blessing or curse of being Catholic. The cultural and spiritual imprimatur is certainly present in mind.
Q: Do you surround yourself with film types at home in London, or do you steer away from the biz talk in your spare time?
A: In the little time I have to myself, I am most interested in spending it with family and friends, not the movie community. I've been lucky to hold on to friends I had before I became a director. They are mostly all artists, musicians, choreographers, painters--people who work in other fields and in theater. I want to see them when I can. That is what I long for.
Q: What's your idea of a perfect day off?
A: Spending the day in bed. Though I've become accustomed to a degree of sleep deprivation and would probably feel guilty that I was not working, I would love it nonetheless. I also love poetry and have a lot of friends who are poets. One thing I've missed is going to poetry readings. I think if I could have a day that brought poetry, music and soccer, and didn't require me to get out of bed, that would be the perfect day.
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