HOWZAT

Is it, I ask, as has been said, an octopus with no central nervous system? Pause. “I think Amanda Neville (the incoming director, imported from the lively National Museum of Photography, Film and Television in Bradford) is going to be a real force and a real leader. I am not running the BFI. My job is to support her.”

What about just turning the whole thing into a giant Reithian mail order Blockbusters, where anyone can hire a classic? Pause. “Well, the irony is that that is probably the situation at the moment. It is just that not enough people know. The BFI produces fantastic DVDs.”

Born 49 years ago to the Isle of Wight’s foremost Italian ice-cream makers, Eddie and Gloria Minghella, he grabbed his first cornettos of high culture from BBC television and from the music Radio 3 played while he was waiting for Test Match Special. At university, his grasp of cinema history tightened thanks to visits to BFI-backed regional film theatres in Hull and Leeds. When he arrived in London 20 years ago, set on becoming a professional playwright, evenings were spent at the Everyman.

So which, I ask, are the essential foreign films? There is hardly a pause this time: The Tree of Wooden Clogs (Ermanno Olmi, 1978); I Vitelloni (Frederico Fellini, 1953); Raise the Red Lantern (Yimou Zhang 1991); The Leopard and Rocco and his Brothers (1960); and all the films of Krzysztof Kieslowski but particularly The Double Life of Veronique (1991).

The only thing these have in common, in so far as I have seen them, is that none resembles what we think of as a Minghella movie. Although his films have widened out from domesticity toward epic since Truly, Madly, Deeply, that 1990 debut still helps to identify his tone — in particular the scene where the bereaved heroine, played by Juliet Stevenson, weeps so hard that her nose leaks. Dry eyes are equally hard to maintain during the denouement of the central romance in The English Patient. The end of Cold Mountain should exceed even its tissue count.

Yet Minghella is reluctant to acknowledge that his films are emotionally charged. As a defining moment, the Stevenson scene was “a blessing and a curse” but the truth was that his budget allowed for only one take so he had “no selection over the degree of emotion”. He is clear about the degree to which practical considerations determine content. Postwar British plays were largely “triangles set in rectangular rooms”. Why? Because theatres demanded small casts and single sets.

“So, equally, I can’t make a quirky version of Cold Mountain. I can’t make an idiosyncratic film that would please me and nobody else because the negative cost is so high. The responsibility is to reach the largest constituency. I would like to find out what kind of noise I would make if I was not hostage to the cost of a film.” Yet his films contain plenty of Minghellaisms, I say.

“What interests me is to champion things,” he admits. “It is one of my great failings, a personality trait. I like Pablo Neruda. So in Truly, Madly, Deeply there is a Neruda poem. I like Bach, so there is some Bach in every film.” And he loves his parents so he gives them bit parts? “Yes, I feel I want to say, ‘Hey, there have been some things that have really been exciting to me. Can I share them with you? This book I loved, like The English Patient, I want to be its best advocate.’ But I think I have realised that what is most galling to me is that you can’t elect your voice. Obviously, the reality is that a film is the sum of a series of decisions I have made, probably a thousand every day, but most of them are subconscious. It is rather like wishing you were a tenor but finding you are a baritone. I love Beckett and the enormous resistance to emotion that is in Beckett, the downright hostility to emotion, which I think is informed by great emotion. I love Bach and the great resistance to emotion in Bach, which, I think, is also informed by great emotion. Those are the things that move me in the arts: emotion reined in. So it is bizarre that people have identified emotion’s release in my work.”

If the people are right there are plenty of reasons to explain why, if he does not cry readily in real life, his films do the crying for him. In the first place, his parents are Italian and exhibit that nationality’s “slightly more volatile temperature”. Secondly, his life was shattered early by the failure of his first marriage. “I was 25 and not quite ready to unravel. It was an unravelling experience. Everything has impact on your life and an emotional upheaval will resonate.” He wrote about the divorce none too obliquely in a 1986 Channel Four series, What If It Rains?, and says he still visits that “reservoir of emotion” when he writes. His un-English emotional range has been widened further by his second, happy marriage, to the choreographer turned film producer, Carolyn Choa, who is Chinese. “After nearly 25 years I have been as much informed by her sensibilities as she has been my mine,” he says.

Perchance, Frazier’s novel is prefaced by lines from a poem by a Chinese poet Han-shan: “Men ask the way to Cold Mountain/ Cold Mountain: there’s no through trail.” It confirms his view that Cold Mountain is a cultural and historical “palimpsest”: “It’s not just about a guy going back to Hampstead.”

He shows me a film he made after Ripley — a 15-minute version of Beckett’s Play in which three corners of an emotional triangle speak not in a rectangular room but from urns in an infinite burial plot. It’s as bitter and cynical as you like. Then, just before I leave, an assistant hands me a CD of a radio play he wrote last year. In it, Verdi’s Requiem is mixed up with the composer’s love life, modern day adultery and travel news flashes. It’s even odder than the Beckett.

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