Anthony Minghella - Music Is a Big Actor
updated: November 11, 2009
Anthony Minghella has studied dramatic literature and history of fine art in England while he began writing plays and composing music for the stage. After beginning to write screenplays, he soon started his directing career 1991 with Truly Madly Deeply. Five years later he shot The English Patient which won eight Oscars, including Best Directing for himself. Anthony Minghella’s new film Cold Mountain is part of the Official Competition at this year‘s Berlin International Film Fest.
After your successfully writing for theatre you decided to switch to screenwriting. What charmed you?
Anthony Minghella: A sizeable proportion of the work I was doing was with music. I was writing music for theatre and for dance and I stumbled into writing plays through writing music. So I feel that by the time I got into film I had really experimented in various ways with some of the constitutional elements of film. I also studied history of fine art, painted and drew. I was making music, and I studied literature. I feel in some ways that I had been working towards the various elements which create film: music, writing, language, image. I think it took me some time to get into film because there wasn’t very much of a film industry to join or to learn about. In the mid late 70‘s there was very little active filmmaking in Britain and so most of the creative output at that time was in the theatre and in performance art.
How would you describe your development from a writer to a director: Was it a natural result of your artistic experiences in film? Or was it from the beginning on a dream, which just took time to be fulfilled?
Anthony Minghella: I wish I knew the answer to that. I tried to write and direct a film when I was 22, by myself. Quite an ambitious full length film with no experience whatsoever and I borrowed some money from the bank which took me ten years to pay back. But then I became very preoccupied with writing and was very happy to learn about writing. I suppose what happened increasingly was that a part of me was longing to go back to explore the film canvas in some way. I was a film lover and longed for the opportunity to move into the filmmaking. Finally I was able to because my career as a writer in Britain was developing, so the BBC were prepared to take a risk with me as a director. So in some ways I leveraged my reputation as a writer to give me the opportunity to direct my first film Truly Madly Deeply.
Last year we called you "The Talented Mr. Minghella" because of your various artistic experiences. Provided with all these talents, would you say that film is the most complete art form?
Anthony Minghella: What I feel is: There is beauty in every art form and very particular characteristics of each. It’s very hard to find anything better than the experience of reading. The privacy and the joy of reading is very hard to compete with. The beauty of music is very hard to compete with, and so is the purity of poetry – if you try to compare art forms. I certainly think that film is the most potent perhaps of all art forms but also the one that’s liable to be abused, in the sense that because it is so powerful and reaches out to so many people, and because the nature of the medium is so mysterious and extraordinary, it also has the most value attached with it in the commercial sense. Therefore it has traditionally been the most trivialized.
What’s your definition of independent film? Do you see yourself as an independent filmmaker?
Anthony Minghella: I think I do see myself as an independent filmmaker, in so far as I have looked for the money for my films from independent sources, from smaller labels like Miramax. But the provanence of the money is totally irrelevant to me. And the tag "independent" is irrelevant, too. I don’t know exactly, what it means, independent. I think, I try to make films for grown-ups, films that reflect my own view of the world, rather than embrace or buy into the status quo.
The English Patient was your third film as a director and brought you yet an Oscar for best directing. What would be your advice to young artists, whose work is accompanied with immense expextations from very early on?
Anthony Minghella:I think you have to live inside the work you do and not inside people‘s opinion of the work you do. I mean not inside the result but in the process, and if you can reside there then that is the healthiest place to be for a filmmaker. Spending too much time with the periscope up is probably not useful for any of us. The best place to be is with the periscope down and exploring. Being as rigorous as you can be, that’s the joy and privelige of what we do. The rest of it is people commenting on the work you do, and we shouldn’t be around the commentators, we should be with the people doing the work.
The main topic of this year’s Berlinale Talent Campus is “The Sound and Music?. Could you define your relation to both in your work?
Anthony Minghella: The music is in the heart of what I’m doing as a filmmaker, because I began with music, and so I‘ve never lost my own sense of the music as the most rewarding paradigm to study in terms of being a filmmaker. Film is much closer allied to music than it is to language. So I initally think about what music I might use and what the movie might sound like. But I also think of the film metaphorically in musical terms. Theme, exposition of theme, rhymes, visual rhymes. All those things really intrigue me as a way of looking and of thinking about film. Not to know how your movie is going to sound is rather like making a movie with one invisible actor whose face you can’t see and whose voice you can’t hear and suddenly, after you have finished making your film, there he is and that’s how he sounds. Music is a very big actor in the movies. So you should know as much about it as early on as you can.