Page 27 - 24_Bafta ACADEMY_Anthony Minghella_ok

contemplation of trying to devel- op certain skills, none of which have any real function.”
This came home to roost as he’d sit in his country retreat, “with all the appurtenances of the imaginative life”, surrounded by a very working farm of sheep and cows.
“Here I was reading, drawing and planning while men and women were actually working the land. For me, all films should be about what you can learn. I knew nothing about the Civil War, mountains or nature. So I felt there was a real possibility of edu- cating myself.”
He would learn at very first hand probably more than he
ever really wanted to know about nature when the decision was made, for both good eco- nomic and meteorological rea- sons, to eschew North Carolina, which had been substantially scouted, for points much further East. Romania, to be exact.
Minghella explains: “Not only would the cost have been astro- nomical but North Carolina hadn’t had a severe snow winter for about nine or 10 years. So we did this rather quaint exercise of taking location photographs and then going on to the Internet to try and find mountain ranges and topog- raphy which matched them.
“Transylvania seemed the nearest theoretically. We went to
have a look and it seemed per- fect, and appeared to have had reliable snowfall at a particular time of the year for nearly a dozen years in a row.” So Romania it was.
Except they’d strangely neg- lected to factor in the law of Sod. “The year we went,” Minghella went on, “was, of course, when they didn’t have any snow!”
In fact they would actually encounter one of the “most extraordinary sets of climatic con- ditions they’d ever had in Eastern Europe”, including enormous floods, plummeting temperatures and in one, especially disagree- able, passage of time, 23 straight days of rain.
“We made the decision we’d shoot every day whatever hap- pened and I’d somehow work it into the film because we didn’t have a single cover set. It was a question of shut down or shoot. I was endlessly re-writing, re-jigging and re-engineering scenes. We wanted to make an exterior film so we had to accept what those exteriors were. You could say I wrote the climate.”
And yet, Minghella fervently believes, his film is “blessed rather than confounded by that. It’s not just the director’s perseverance but how the crew supported that view and were prepared to endure many of the privations that the characters endured. Nobody held back from their commitment – and that’s all in the film.”
Minghella’s other big commit- ment is to the British Film Institute whose chairmanship he assumed almost a year ago. He insists that he finds the time to combine his roles as filmmaker and bfi figure- head. “I come in very early to do a couple of hours a day on the BFI and in fact earlier in the year I was doing 20 to 30 hours a week. You can’t take on that job and then have it simply as something to put on a letterhead.
“I really care about the place, always have done, and now I have an enormous opportunity to make a difference. The advoca-
cy of films outside the main- stream has become so muted and the opportunities for audi- ences to experience world cine- ma and cinema of the past are becoming increasingly rarified.
“The cost of releasing films is in some cases so prohibitive that many are simply slipping under the radar. I believe the bfi’s role as an advocate of that secret cinema is vital – vital for industrial film and vital for film as art.
Closer to home, he stresses, “we don’t have a flagship cine- matheque or a regional film the- atre system which is really sup- ported. Here’s the most important art form of the last, and this, cen- tury which is, in a sense, the least supported as a cultural entity.”
Minghella confidently predicts “real serious movement in the next two or three years” for the much vaunted South Bank Centre. “We have plans immediately to refur- bish the NFT and MOMI and I think the industry is beginning to come onside for the bfi.
“I’m quite an obdurate person; I’ve had to be to make the sort of films I’ve wanted to make. I’ve learned to be persistent. In a sense my role at the bfi is irrele- vant. I just want to see the bfi as a big project in the way I see Cold Mountain as a big project. I want the bfi to flourish – and it will!”
Minghella will be 50 next month but, he laughs, “I feel that as a filmmaker I’m still only a teenager. I’m hungry to learn, to make more films, better films. I go to work feeling I’m still in the early stages of something.”
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