Arts & Culture
The English director
Published 27 March 2008
Despite Hollywood success, Anthony Minghella never jettisoned his sensibility or his intellect
A woman ends her affair with her husband's colleague. As she walks away after breaking the news, her now ex-lover calls after her: "I'm not missing you yet." She pauses and glances back. "You will," she assures him. "You will." She turns to continue her exit, and walks slap-bang into a scaffolding pole. The jilted man starts to offer assistance. There's no need. The woman leaves.
For me, this odd, piercing scene from the 1996 film The English Patient distils the best qualities of the writer-director Anthony Minghella, who died on 18 March, aged 54. In each of his six features for cinema, Minghella fastidiously nurtured moments of intimacy that another director might have left on the cutting-room floor, or not shot at all.
"I've always been intrigued by the 'romantic' tag that gets attached to my work," he once told me. "I don't think I'm romantic. There are love stories in my films, but they're always treated with a certain amount of . . ." He stopped short of "contempt". "It's just about reminding myself that there is no free time. Nothing is allowed to exist without the context of a larger rift. In The English Patient, it's the fact that someone is suffering while there's joy. In Cold Mountain, it's the war. I feel myself not allowing characters or film to luxuriate in any moment."
I first met Minghella five years ago when he graciously agreed to introduce a screening of Terrence Malick's Days of Heaven at my book launch at London's Everyman Cinema (a favourite haunt of his). He spoke passionately to the audience about his concerns that the cultural landscape was being depleted, and our expectations along with it, by an emphasis on commerce rather than choice. This was by no means the party line for an Oscar-winning director.
But while Minghella had great success in Hollywood, his temperament and the tenor of his work shared nothing with the sort of brutish Brits who preceded him there (Ridley Scott, Alan Parker, Adrian Lyne). Nor did he pander to US demands. What made him not just unique, but a uniquely British director, was that he didn't jettison his sensibility or intellect over the Atlantic: the man who bridged the chasm between a woman and her dead lover in Truly Madly Deeply (1990) was still finding fresh ways to express how we are defined by the space between us in Cold Mountain (2003).
"I want my films to have some kind of moral gymnasium in them," he told me. "I've got to persuade myself that I'm not just telling a story - that there's something worth saying, a struggle worth sharing. There may not be, but that's what gets me up in the morning."
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