Anthony Minghella would have us believe that he is lazy. And despite being “a very lazy person who works all the time,” as he puts it, he still doesn’t “feel very driven. I like lounging around, but I’ve somehow created a life for myself where I’m always behind, always being late.”
And yet, this “writer who directs”, is currently in the post-production stage of one film, Breaking and Entering, which stars Jude Law and Juliette Binoche, and in the advanced planning stage of another, The Ninth Life of Louis Drax.
He is directing a new production of Madam Butterfly for the English National Opera – opening next month – for which he collaborated on a new translation of the libretto. Plus he is involved with the day-to-day running of Mirage Enterprises, the production company he owns jointly with Sydney Pollack.
And uppermost in his mind right now in the run-up to The Times bfi London Film Festival there is the small business of being chairman of the British Film Institute. I’d hazard a guess that he also has at least half a dozen irons in the fire too new to talk about: something he has seen that has given him the germ of an idea for a movie, a twinkle in the film-maker’s eye.
So how does he do it all? By working every day, for a start. Minghella is “not a great riser”, but he works late most days, and unwinds by walking home. So much so that he is delighted that he and his wife, the Chinese choreographer turned film-maker Carolyn Chua, will be moving a further 15 minutes walk from his office in leafy Hampstead. It’s also a great way to arrive at solutions, and a well-earned rest. He quotes a Sufi saying that everything is solved by walking.
But Minghella – plump and engaging in manner – resembles nothing so much as a Laughing Buddha. He has also, by the sound of it, learnt to be a bit more Zen about the time-consuming business of making a film, explaining that he is trying to be less impatient and savour the journey itself, rather than an end result. “I realised that it takes a long time to do the jobs I do. So I’d better enjoy the process.” It is arguably this enjoyment of the process that transformed the drama lecturer and award-winning writer of BBC radio plays, via TV shows like Inspector Morse, into the extraordinarily successful director of big movies such as The Talented Mr Ripley, Cold Mountain and, of course, The English Patient, which in 1997 won nine Academy Awards.
“What I understood very quickly in film,” he explains, “is that the sentence changes very significantly from writing, to filming, to editing. The sentence isn’t finished until you’ve finished in the cutting room.” So Minghella became a director because he wasn’t content to let someone else finish the job. “What’s odd in a way,” he insists, “is that the corollary happens. That there are films in which people don’t write and direct. Because when you see what can happen to two lines in a screenplay – well, that’s to me like an architect who draws up the plans but then lets someone else build it. Letting go too soon was like letting someone finish your sentence for you.”
One early lesson was “realising that the most articulate moment in a film might be silence, the failure to speak”. Or, by the same token, music. Minghella starts thinking about a musical score from the outset of the film-making process. In this he collaborates closely with the composer Gabriel Yared, who has worked on most of his films. The producer Duncan Kenworthy, who got to know Minghella in the mid-Eighties when they both worked for Jim Henson, views the way he “uses sound or music to prefigure or link a scene” as one of the true joys of his films.
Presumably part of the pleasure of film-making for Minghella is that unlike the business of writing, directing a film involves many such collaborations. So while one motivation seems to be a desire to finish the job himself, by steering the project from screenplay to finished film, it also involves sharing the process with others, something that Minghella clearly enjoys. He is, by all accounts, a delightful boss, seeking to emulate Jim Henson’s intention of “creating a crucible for creative work, the sense that families somehow create things together”.
There is, he claims, “nothing complex about this. I know how vulnerable my confidence is, and how simple it is to undermine. So I have to assume that this is true of everybody, that if they are undermined they will shrink away from risk.” He says he wants happy, confident, empowered people around him – not least because he finds their criticism and input so useful.
This seems a far cry from the traditional view of a director as monarch on the set. But for Minghella, criticism is vital. “There is a saying that if nine Russians tell you that you are drunk, lie down. And when people are strong, they will tell you when they think you have f***** up.” Altruism? Maybe, maybe not. But Minghella seems to have a keen awareness of people’s potential. “The nicest thing,” he continues, “the thing I’m most proud of after The English Patient, is that when I needed help moving into a new office, I found someone via Henson: a young, able-bodied boy happy to cart books around for me.
And that boy produced Breaking and Entering and so is now to some extent my boss on the film. That gives me an enormous degree of satisfaction.” Minghella admits that the huge success of The English Patient was a heady moment. “But it wasn’t as if I was 12 when it happened, and I was lucky enough to have someone with me who I loved and who I have known since I was 19.” After that, the projects – and the budgets – got bigger, and Minghella admits that a “feeling of vertigo” has never left him. “I have it every day,” he insists.
“I’ve felt sick every day in the cutting room. I worry when I’m writing, and although I’m most comfortable when I’m writing, I dread this part of being a film-maker. Like this morning, when I realised I had to do an interview, because it is one of those moments when the submarine has to surface and you are forced into a place of summarising experiences, summarising yourself, which nobody is good at.” I ask Duncan Kenworthy why Minghella took up the bfi chair, and he suggests that perhaps Henson’s desire to “give something back” had rubbed off on him.
Minghella happily admits to Henson’s influence. “I’ve always been attracted to larger-than-life characters: Jim Henson, Harvey [Weinstein], Sydney [Pollack]. Tough men, interesting men. As a young academic I was searching out people I could look up to, and I’m still doing that.” He also credits a remark his father-in-law, a surgeon, once made to him.
“He said that no man worth anything doesn’t devote as much time as they can to giving to others. That sat with me. Not that I’m trying to dignify my role at the bfi, but it is the one thing I do that has no obvious rewards to myself.”
Minghella believes that for every eight or so big movies backed by Hollywood, there are “108 which wouldn’t get noticed without the bfi”. So he will try to get to as many films in the festival as he can – including, presumably, Bee Season, which features his son, Max Minghella. As with books, Minghella says, film can be “‘the axe that smashes the frozen sea within us.’ But it’s unlikely that there are any axes being sharpened in Hollywood right now.” And with that he goes back to work.
The Times bfi London Film Festival runs October 19 to November 3. To book, visit www.timesonline.co.uk/lff or call 020-7960 2111
