Hey everyone. Capone in Chicago here. I'm pretty sure that for most of us in the U.S. and A., writer-director Anthony Minghella's latest work, BREAKING AND ENTERING, won't be hitting theaters until early February (I believe in Chicago it opens Feb. 9). But since the film opened in a couple cities late last year, I figured I'd go ahead and run this interview I conducted with Mr. Minghella last week sooner rather than later. Minghella, of course, is best known for adapting and directing a little Oscar winner called THE ENGLISH PATIENT a few years back, and did the same duties (minus the Oscars) with THE TALENTED MR. RIPLEY and COLD MOUNTAIN. But it's his first feature, TRULY MADLY DEEPLY--a film that introduced many of us to a wonderful young actor named Alan Rickman--that remains my favorite. It also happens to be Minghella's last original screenplay until BREAKING AND ENTERING, a troubling, sensual, and multi-layered work, which just happens to feature Jude Law's finest performance to date. I caught Anthony as he was being driven to a radio interview in New York where he was doing press for the film, and since it was rush hour in NYC, I actually got a little bit more time with him than I thought I would. Enjoy...
Capone: I have to say that as much as I have enjoyed and anticipated your films over the years, I was especially excited about BREAKING AND ENTERING because it was an original screenplay, your first since one of my all-time favorite films, TRULY MADLY DEEPLY. How long have these stories been gestating in your mind before you felt it was time to commit them to a screenplay, and make it your next project?
Anthony Minghella: You’re dignifying my process so much even in the question. I had never intended to become an adapter of novels. It’s just a testament to how tortoise-like I am in my process: it takes me so long. I basically fell in love with three books in 10 years, and it’s been a career, but that was never my intention.
I started to write a story called “Breaking and Entering” after TRULY MADLY DEEPLY, immediately afterwards. And, it was a bit of a cul-de-sac, because I had this idea that a burglary would somehow break into a marriage. But, I was very tied up at the time of TRULY MADLY DEEPLY with magical-realist devices, and I wanted it to be quite a strange account of a burglary. It was going to be one in which the burglar left things, rather than took things. But, it just felt too much like I was straining for an effect. Still, I held on to the idea of this story for a very long time.
Then, when I was making COLD MOUNTAIN, somebody pointed out that it was over 10 years since I’d written an original film. Simultaneously, as I was making a vow that I should write an original film, a contemporary film, our offices were being renovated in London and began to be burglarized on almost a weekly basis. And, it reminded me of the couple of notebooks I had with BREAKING AND ENTERING rather authoritatively written on the front cover, with only three or four pages dwindling away inside. I thought perhaps there was a way of harnessing some of the issues from the original idea with a story about contemporary London.
Something which really intrigues me…I suppose that when I was experiencing the consequences of these break-ins, I came into contact with a whole rosary of agencies whom you suddenly meet when there are crime victims: the police and social services and welfare workers. And, I was astonished by what was going on in London, just in my neighborhood, and particularly, this notion of conciliation. When I became first aware of it, one of the people came and said, “If we were to capture these people, would you be prepared to meet with them, because we’re trying to practice this new ‘healing’ technique, where victims of crime and criminals meet each other, and learn about an event from more than one perspective?” I must say, I thought that was the most absurd idea I had ever heard. Except that the more I thought about it, the more I thought, well, isn’t that what fiction tries to do all the time? It tries to create encounters which can’t really happen in life. It tries to bring antagonists and protagonists into the same world, and we learn about the person planting the bomb as well as the person who has experienced the bomb, as it were. It’s one of the things that you do in make-believe that you can’t easily do in life. So, I started to think about the issue of conciliation and how it might be the stuff of a movie, that not only would a marriage be reconciled, but that a series of social wounds would get healed, and that everybody in the movie would be given some kind of second chance, and, I think, that became a binding armature, in a way, for the movie.
C: Any one of these stories could have been its own film. You’ve just talked about the fact that there are many levels and many different story lines in the film. How did you decide to sort of weave them together in one film? Did you get to the point where you said, I’d better do all this in one film, because I may not write another original screenplay for 15 years?
AM: [Laughs] Oh dear, that sounds like the desperation of somebody unloading everything in his head. I think the point was, for me, that if you’re looking at a city in the 21st century, particularly a city like London, the truth is that what happens inside rooms only makes sense with what’s going on outside the window, and vice versa. And, we are so striated, you know? We know about one kind of person and one kind of life or another, but very rarely do stories cut across and try to say, On any street, at any given time in London, there are people with different values, different expectations, different hopes. Even literally, in terms of how much it costs to live in one building, next to the next building--one is a project, one is social housing, one is a $5 million apartment. But, all are jumbled together, and most of the time, we keep our heads down and live these shared geographies in totally independent existences. Occasionally, something happens which lassos a group of people together. That’s what I meant about the unlikely scenario where there is conciliation on both sides of a problem. So, it was necessary for me to try and pull a group of people together who were uneasy bedfellows. And, you said you could have made a movie about Amira [played by Juliette Binoche] and her son and the problems of being a refugee, or a movie about a progressive architect [Jude Law] who starts to lose confidence in his vision of London. But, it’s much more interesting to me that they are forced to share the same landscape in the movie.
C: The conciliation scene is actually a really tough scene to watch. I’ve seen things like it before, but something about Jude Law being put in that position where he finally has to ’fess up to everything that he’s been involved with. Was that a tough scene to shoot? Almost all of the cast is in that scene.
AM: That was the idea. The structure of the movie is that all these people meet in one rather formal way at the end of the movie. And, I was heading always towards that moment, from the first meeting being this extraordinary circumstance, where, to some extent at least, the least guilty person in the movie is in dock with the a group of the most guilty, certainly the most culpable. Oddly enough, somebody was asking me about that scene today, and I was saying something I had forgotten about, which was that it was the most uncomfortable scene, literally, to shoot because there was no air conditioning, and it was extraordinarily hot. I remember Robin [Wright Penn] wasn’t well, and it was just a really claustrophobic, overheated room. And, I think some of that sort of discomfort--and it was a very ugly room as well--it all had an impact.
And, Juliette Binoche has this ability to just let go of all of her…she’s so exposed and naked in that scene, and so desperate. It was very palpable. She finds it very hard to pretend anything. She’s not somebody that when you call, Cut, she can just start reading the newspaper. She is completely enveloped in the circumstances of that character. And, it was very uncomfortable to be around her, particularly when you’re shooting all day, and she is miserable and anguished all day.
And, Robin has this fantastic moment in the scene, I think, where she forgives her, or she lets go of whatever antipathy she had towards this woman who had fallen in love with her husband. It’s a very peculiar sequence. And, Jude was very discomfited by being caught between the two of them, as it were. It was fascinating, but of course, in the end, as Sydney Pollack [one of the film's co-producers], my partner, always says, “Everything is technical.” And, it’s all about, How do you maintain an emotion for a whole day? How do you maintain an emotion when you’re repeating the same scene from 20 angles? How do you maintain an emotion when it’s so hot that everyone just wants to run away from you? So, it was a day when the apparatus was somehow more present than the emotion.
C: Certainly, you were dealing with more than one emotion in that room, because there were about a half a dozen different emotions.
AM: Yes, exactly.
C: People may see this as a film partly about the immigrant situation in Britain and partly as a family drama or story about adultery, but as I was watching, it kind of revealed itself to me as a story about--and you alluded to it earlier--modern-day Britain. Tell us about returning to the present day after a succession of period pieces, and then, just returning to London again.
AM: You know TRULY MADLY DEEPLY, right? I think if you took away all the movies in between and watched TRULY MADLY DEEPLY and watched this movie, you’d know it was the same filmmaker because, in a way, there’s a kind of humorous version of this movie in TRULY MADLY DEEPLY. There is the same preoccupation with migration, I mean, in TRULY MADLY DEEPLY, everybody’s from another…I mean, literally, the lead is a translator of other languages, the character, and I’ve always been intrigued and delighted by London as a sort of hotel of many different cultures. And, people checking in and checking out. It has always been a welcome for migration. I might say my family is a migrant family. And, my wife is a migrant woman. I have a great sympathy for the condition of the person who comes from another culture and lives in London.
It’s also the case that contemporary London is much less easy with this complex provenance of people than it has been in other decades. We’re perhaps in a moment when…certainly, I had occasion to think very carefully about this film after 9/1. We were bracketed by the bombings in Kings Cross where we were shooting. And so, you can’t help as a person, not as a filmmaker, just as a citizen, to notice that we’re much less comfortable with not knowing where somebody’s from or what they care about, or what they might think than we were five or six years ago. We’re more likely to blame people. In the last election in Britain, the conservative party fought their campaign on the basis of an anti-immigration ticket. They said, it’s not racist to talk about immigration. And, I’m trying to, in a way, as I said to you earlier, to use this movie to say, The minute you think you can pass a judgment on somebody by the color of their skin or their accent or their job, you’re lost, because it’s never the way you think it is.
The very first week I was ever in London, I was actually sleeping on a friend’s couch for a week, and they had a cleaner, and I talked to her, and she was from Argentina, and I was saying, How did you show up here? And she said, well, actually, I’m an analyst, a Freudian analyst, but I was exiled from Argentina, and so I’m trying to find work here. In the meantime, I’m cleaning somebody’s house. That’s the most common story you’ll find in London, which is that nobody really emigrates unless there’s a reason. You know, we’re all very comfortable in our own familiar landscape, and most people leave their countries to try and better themselves or escape from something. And, I’m trying to use this movie as an opportunity to say, Think twice before you condemn anybody, because they’re Christian, Muslim, black, white, Serbian, Balkian--find out some more and give them a chance to tell you their story. There’s a lot of second chances, in a way, in the movie.
C: The other "migrant worker" in the film, who’s only in a little bit, is the prostitute character that Vera Farmiga plays. First of all, thank you for including her in this film, because I love her, I think she’s terrific. It’s great that she’s now starting to get some recognition. How did she land in this film?
AM: Actually, when I was writing the screenplay…I go away to write, because I’m finding it harder and harder with the production company and directing to carve out the real time and space you need to write, so I go off to write in the country, and I tend to write sometimes through the night. And, one night I went into the kitchen to make a cup of tea, and I turned on the little TV while the kettle was boiling, and there was an American cop show on, and I got so engrossed with the show because of the woman in it, and when it finished, I went on line and found out the name of this actress called Vera Farmiga. And, so when I went to L.A. to do some casting, I met her, and then her agent showed me DOWN TO THE BONE.
C: Yeah, that’s a great film.
AM: Absolutely sensational. And her work there was sensational. And, then I met her and asked if she could be in this movie. The one thing that I know is good acting, and I saw, I mean, literally, I saw one scene of that TV show and I knew that that was a really substantial performer. And, so I was thrilled, and she’s been with us today doing the press, and it’s just great to see her growing into herself. And, she’s going to have a fantastic career now.
C: It’s an interesting role, too, because she doesn’t really do a whole lot to forward the plot, but the film wouldn’t be as strong without her.
AM: [Laughs] There’s my problem. There’s an expression, isn’t there, that I’m sure you guys are all very familiar with, which is “cut to the chase,” and, of course, if ‘cutting to the chase’ were the business of filmmaking, I would never be at work again, because the thing that interests me least in any movie is the chase. I like the bit in between the chase. I’ll give you an example: there’s a sequence in the movie where Juliette goes to confront Jude at his place of work with the fact that she’s got his lap top, and then, they end up instead going to a friend’s house and beginning this affair. In the ‘cut to the chase’ version, they meet and the next thing, they’re in bed, and actually, that to me was the least interesting part of the story. And, I wanted to see two things: one is, what happens if you say to somebody, We can go to a room together, and they agree. Well, the first thing is, you have to get to the room, and what’s that like. What’s it like after you’ve made the plan, because you’re not allowed in life to say, Let’s cut to the chase. You have to get somewhere, you have to take a subway, or you have to take a cab…
C: A lot can change in that chase.
AM: Yes, a lot can change. Also, you borrow somebody’s bed. Do you make the bed, is the bed made? I think, in the initial cut at least, I strained everybody’s patience wanting all of that and really had no interest in what happens next, because the next bit is the bit that’s, in a sense, the most difficult thing to make credible in movies, which is sex, you know, that the preparation for it is familiar and tender and strange. And so, when you say that Vera’s character doesn’t advance the plot, well, because the plot to me is almost the least significant part of the movie. And, maybe that will be why some people won’t like this film.
C: I wasn’t kidding when I said TRULY MADLY DEEPLY was one of my favorite films, and I used to always show it to my female friends who were getting over being dumped or divorced. I always felt the film wasn't really about death, but more about coming to terms with what a love one was really made of. BREAKING AND ENTERING seems less willing to be sentimental about the subject of a crumbling relationship, so love and desperation seem to be common elements in all your films. Is that a fair thing to say?
AM: Well, interestingly enough, I think I’m more optimistic now than I was at the time of TRULY MADLY DEEPLY. And, some people, I think, will resist the optimism at the end of BREAKING AND ENTERING. But, to me, it was always about how something could get fixed, even that which had been damaged. In some ways, it might be stronger after that damage. I’d always imagined this idea of healing, the crucial petrol of the movie, whereas in TRULY MADLY DEEPLY, you’re absolutely correct to say it was never to be a movie about grief, it was always a movie about having to let go, having to let go of the past. And, there’s a kind of terrible nostalgia about something that is gone. I just thought, well, what if you had a second chance at it, would it feel as great the second time around? And, this woman is so paralyzed and marooned in TRULY MADLY DEEPLY in the memory of somebody that she simply can’t move. And, the sort of kindness of this returning ghost to say, Look, this is what it was like, remember? And, you need to move on. That I believe in.
But, I also believe, too, in the fact that damage is not the end of the story. We’re living in a culture which is so disposable. And, we’ve also made, I think, a very dangerous correlation in our view of fiction, which is we think that misery is real, and happiness is Hollywood. We think that the nihilistic ending is one which is authentic, and we think that the ending in which somehow people are able to move on is a kind of add-on. For me, I wanted the movie to go through all of the agonies of what people have to suffer when they’re trying to live with each other and to make sense of each other. Not that the stream adds up to nihilism, or being impossible to make things work,. Working at a relationship has become an unfashionable idea. But, this was certainly, not only working at a love relationship, but working at the relationships with each other, because if there had ever been a fracture, the fracture right now is not between a man and a woman. It’s between cultures and religions, between ideologies, and if we just assume it’s not fixable, then we’re lost. We have to learn to love again.
C: Thank you also for Jude Law’s best work. I think his best work to date is in the three films that he’s done for you. And, you don’t have to agree, but there’s something…
AM: No, no, I agree…I think this is his best. To me, I felt it the day I finished. He’d never been as good for me as he was in this movie. He’s honest. He faces his own demons in the movie, and I adore him. So, thank you for seeing that.
At this point Minghella arrived at his radio interview, and our brief interview was over. BREAKING AND ENTERING is a substantial work from a master filmmaker who knows how to dig our every human emotion in the book for his films. Look for the film to open near you soon.
Capone
I was Gwyneth's Double in Shakespeare In Love!
