Iam lucky enough to share a cup of tea with Anthony Minghella at Abbey Road before the world's largest sound studio opens to the public for its first ever film festival. Audiences will have the chance to enjoy such pictures as Live and Let Die, The Wall and Shrek in the same room as their scores were recorded. Minghella's The Talented Mr Ripley is in the programme, too, featuring Jude Law on sax and Matt Damon on piano.
Minghella is one of the firm believers that the EMI studios, Mecca for zebra-crossing Beatles maniacs and graffiti merchants alike, are a unique and hallowed place for making music. Ever since the first piece was recorded here in 1931 ("Land of Hope and Glory", played by the London Symphony Orchestra and conducted by its composer, Edward Elgar), Abbey Road has been at the centre of popular music culture, and not just because the Fab Four decided to name an album after it. The space, the acoustics and even the microphones are venerated. Anyone fixated with the recording of music has tended to end up at the former Victorian bordello that is the Abbey Road Studios - including film directors.
"I have always thought of myself as a musician working in another territory," says Minghella. When he was a drama student at Hull University, he had a composition spot on Radio Humberside every Friday lunchtime, which involved him making up an original piece and playing it. "It's how I supplemented my student grant," he says. The BBC should hurriedly search through Radio Humberside's archive.
Now an Oscar-winning and knighted director, Minghella acknowledges that he scores his films very early in the production process, almost before casting them. Music has had a central role in all his pictures, from Truly Madly Deeply's cello and piano duets through to the jazz/Bach scoring of Ripley and the crazy cotton-pickin' sound of Cold Mountain, both of which were composed by Gabriel Yared. Says Minghella: "Almost every film I have done has been, in some way, an opera. There is a musical argument going on throughout the picture." He even managed to infuse The English Patient with music - no easy feat given that much of the film is based in a monastery. "We put a grand piano in the monastery," explains Minghella, himself a pianist, "which gave the picture an organic musical source opportunity, and a connection with music from the start. I consider music an essential partner to film. Music and pictures were the original constituents of film, long before the advent of speech."
Minghella is currently in production with his latest picture, Breaking and Entering - which, he tells me, is the first contemporary drama he has done since Truly Madly Deeply. Again, the soundtrack will be scored by Yared, with whom Minghella clearly has a symbiotic artistic relationship, and will probably be recorded at Abbey Road. Indeed, so many film soundtracks are recorded here that they now account for 75 per cent of the studio's business.
As recorded orchestral music seems doomed to follow the same repertoire in a series of never-changing classical concentric circles - rather like Dante's vision of hell via Radio 3 and the cut-price CD company Naxos - film soundtracks written by the likes of Yared, Michael Nyman, Philip Glass and Howard Shore (who did the Lord of the Rings trilogy) probably now represent the best chance of life for that rare flower, modern classical music.
