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interview
in from the cold
From re-creating Cold Mountain to chairing the bfi, writer-director Anthony Minghella talks to Quentin Falk
“We wanted to make an exterior film so we had to accept what those exteriors were. You could say I wrote the climate.”
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Photos main: Jude Law taking direction from Anthony Minghella; and above right: Renee Zellweger and Nicole Kidman in Cold Mountain; Ralph Fiennes in The English Patient (Photo courtesy Moviestore)
As he does some last-minute tinkering to Cold Mountain, the premiere looms just a month or so away. Smiling but clearly strained, Anthony Minghella admits he has never been quite so close to the wire before.
“This,” he tells me, “has been without doubt the most difficult, tormenting and intractable proj- ect – and I think it is because of its subject. The content of a film seems to have some impact on how it is made. This is a story of endurance and attrition. What the film’s about has impacted the way we’ve made it and the way it’s been finished.”
Pulling hard on a cigarette, he adds, firmly, “it’s been a test of everyone’s endurance.”
Taking on Charles Frazier’s epic 1997 award-winning novel set against the background of the American Civil War wasn’t really meant to happen anyway. Minghella had just won a hatful of awards for The English Patient –
including the Best Director Oscar – and was about to embark on The Talented Mr Ripley. Enough adaptations, he thought. It was time to go back to his own origi- nal work.
But within the space of a week, he received three sepa- rate copies of Frazier’s book, from friends and film companies, which, he recalls, “must have meant something.” He read it and was fatally hooked.
Opening with a spectacular 1864 battle known as ‘The Crater’, Cold Mountain – at $80 million, twice as expensive as any of Minghella’s previous films - tells the story of Inman (Jude Law), a wounded confederate soldier who is on a perilous journey home to his North Carolina com- munity, hoping to reunite with his pre-war sweetheart Ada (Nicole Kidman). In his absence, Ada struggles to survive and revive her father’s farm with the help of an intrepid young drifter Ruby Thewes (Renee Zellweger).
Minghella sees it as the tale of two journeys. There’s the physical one undertaken by Inman – or Everyman, as he sees him – through a fierce often unyielding landscape populated by danger at every turn. And there is also Ada’s own hazardous rural odyssey from naivety to a kind of rustic wisdom.
“I have been long interested in the whole subject of pilgrimage and having originally intended to write a new film this was actually one of the things in the back of my mind. Then this book came along which was so clearly an attempt to create an American Odyssey – quite literally. That’s probably why I was so attracted to the story in the first place.”
He says he identified with Inman but, curiously, perhaps even more with Ada. “The thing that struck me was that Ada was an extremely vivid illustration of my own shortcomings in the sense that I have spent a great deal of my life in some kind of