Anthony Minghella Discusses "The Talented Mr. Ripley."

Show: FRESH AIR
Date: DECEMBER 22, 1999
Time: 12:00
Tran: 122201NP.217
Type: FEATURE
Head: Interview with Anthony Minghella
Sect: Entertainment
Time: 12:06

This is a rush transcript. This copy may not
be in its final form and may be updated.

TERRY GROSS, HOST: From WHYY in Philadelphia, I'm Terry Gross with FRESH AIR.

On today's FRESH AIR, "The Talented Mr. Ripley." We talk with Anthony Minghella about writing and directing the new movie, which is adapted from a novel by Patricia Highsmith. It starts Matt Damon as a young man who is so envious of the charmed life of his wealthy and handsome friend that he appropriates his friend's identity. The film also stars Gwyneth Paltrow, Jude Law, and Cate Blanchett.

Our guest, Anthony Minghella, also made the movie adaptation of "The English Patient," which won Academy Awards for best picture and best director.

Anthony Minghella coming up on FRESH AIR.

First, the news.

(NEWS BREAK)

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross.

My guest, Anthony Minghella, wrote and directed the new film "The Talented Mr. Ripley." It's based on the Patricia Highsmith novel of the same name. Minghella also made the movie adaptation of "The English Patient."

"The Talented Mr. Ripley" begins when a wealthy industrialist wants to convince his son, Dicky, to return home from the bohemian life he's living in Italy. The father mistakenly believes that a young man named Tom Ripley is his son's old friend from Princeton. The father offers to pay for Ripley to go to Italy and persuade Dicky to come home.

Ripley, who's a broke musician, wants that free trip, so he decides to let the father believe that he really is Dicky's good friend. In this scene, Ripley, played by Matt Damon, has just arrived in Italy and is meeting the wealthy son, Dicky, played by Jude Law, and his girlfriend, played by Gwyneth Paltrow.

(BEGIN AUDIO CLIP, "THE TALENTED MR. RIPLEY")

MATT DAMON, ACTOR: Dicky Greenleaf?

JUDE LAW, ACTOR: Who's that?

DAMON: It's Tom, Tom Ripley.

LAW: Tom Ripley?

DAMON: We were at Princeton together.

LAW: OK. Did we know each other?

DAMON: Well, I knew you, so I suppose you must have known me.

LAW: Princeton's like a fog. America's like a fog.

This is Marge Sherwood. Tom -- sorry, what is it?

DAMON: Ripley.

GWYNETH PALTROW, ACTRESS: How do you do?

DAMON: How do you do, Margie?

(END AUDIO CLIP)

GROSS: Once Tom Ripley sees Dicky's life, his money, his freedom, his charisma, he wants it for himself. Rather than bringing Dicky home, Ripley stays in Italy, attaches himself to Dicky, and finally appropriates Dicky's identity. In this scene, one of Dicky's friends, played by Philip Seymour Hoffman, is looking for Dicky, who has disappeared. The friend pays a visit to Tom Ripley, who's now living in a fancy apartment.

(BEGIN AUDIO CLIP, "THE TALENTED MR. RIPLEY")

PHILIP SEYMOUR HOFFMAN, ACTOR: Did this place come furnished? It doesn't look like Dicky, no. It's horrible, isn't it? (inaudible). You know, in fact, the only thing that looks like Dicky is you.

DAMON: Hardly.

HOFFMAN: (inaudible) you've done something to your hair.

DAMON: Is there something you'd like to say, Freddy?

HOFFMAN: What?

DAMON: Do you have something you'd like to say?

HOFFMAN: I think I'm saying it. Something's going on.

(END AUDIO CLIP)

GROSS: "The Talented Mr. Ripley" is the story of someone who crosses the line in trying to recreate himself and live the kind of charmed life he envies.

ANTHONY MINGHELLA, DIRECTOR: The film asks the question, I think, a central point, asks whether it's better to be a fake somebody than a real nobody. And I think at the heart of the film is a kind of debate about the cost of giving up on yourself, the cost of in some ways buying into what are I think even more pressing messages now than they were 50 years ago about personality, about the value of who you are.

I think we live in an age where there's so much of a barrage of messages from the media about changing ourselves, about in some way feeling that we are intrinsically inadequate as human beings, and that what we have, our actual talents, are things we should trade in in favor of better hair or better bodies or better lives or better wives or better couches or better something.

And so I think I think what attracted me to this story was the opportunity to look at the moral phrasing of this, and also the fact that, as a narrative, it talks about somebody who perhaps appears to get away with what he's doing. And I think the film tries to examine the difference between public accountability and private justice.

GROSS: What is it that Tom Ripley most envies and wants, that Dicky, the wealthy young man in Italy, seems to have?

MINGHELLA: Well, I feel that if you are trying to compare the two characters, one of them is a man who walks into a room and says, "Hello, I'm Dicky Greenleaf, love me," and people do, and Ripley walks into a room and says, "I'm Tom Ripley, might you love me? I know you won't." And so I think in some ways what he aspires to is the sense of being selected that seems at the heart of Dicky's personality's expectation of being embraced.

Whereas I think that Ripley has an expectation of being rejected. I think he feels that he has to lock away who he intrinsically is, because if people actually saw him, they would reject him.

And I think that's something which I certainly can relate to, and I think is part of the human condition in some way. I think that one of the -- I suppose phenomena of traveling from childhood into adulthood is an essential recognition that we're alone and an essential desire not to be alone.

GROSS: You know, as you said, Tom Ripley, the character, says, "It's better to be a fake somebody than a real nobody." Frank Rich, writing in "The New York Times" magazine section said, "In this age of rampant reinvention, when political candidates, entrepreneurs, and criminals change selves like quicksilver, `The Talented Mr. Ripley' may be Hollywood's most chilling and up-to-date portrait of our national character."

What do you personally relate to about the character of Tom Ripley? Because there must be some personal connection there.

MINGHELLA: Oh, I think I felt huge connection to Ripley when I read the -- well, had reread the novel, and I came to (inaudible). I think it -- essentially it's this feeling of being on the outside of things, of being strange in some way, or feeling too that you have to be secret about what makes you particular, that -- I suppose it goes back to the sense of being in a schoolyard when teams are being selected, and the fear of not being chosen, the fear of not being admitted, really, to a life that you aspire to.

And particularly in Britain, where I was brought up, where I think the issues of class are tattooed on your forehead. You walk around with "Second Rate" and "Second Class" imprinted on your forehead. Then I think, I think that I'm very, very alert to the striations of class and to the sense that there's a better life being led, that your nose is pressed up against the window of a life.

And I -- you know, my family is Italian, and I was growing up on a small island off the coast of Britain. And so I felt there were so many membranes between me and what seemed to be the center of things.

And that -- you know, I don't want to make any special claim for that, because I think all of us have within us some reference to what it feels like to be on the outside. And those are my particular things. And I was perfectly happy growing up, it's just that I always felt in some way that I didn't entirely belong. And I think that feeling of not belonging is particularly exacerbated in, you know, late adolescence, early adulthood, which is really where this story is situated.

It's very much a story of young people trying to reinvent themselves in the country of Italy, in Europe, which I think was -- had a particular attraction to Americans over the course of this century.

GROSS: But what's different here is that, you know, the main character takes these feelings that many of us experience of lonely -- loneliness and alienation and jealousy. He takes it to extremes. He crosses the line and becomes kind of pathological.

Why do you think it's interesting to build a story around a character who we can all identify with, but have him go much further, in horrible ways, than we would hopefully go?

MINGHELLA: Well, because I think it's a parable in some ways. I mean, I couldn't help thinking (inaudible) where Ripley says, "I'm Dicky Greenleaf," that it was rather like a Grimm's fairy tale, like a contemporary Grimm's fairy tale, that be careful of what you wish for, (inaudible) the gods laugh at him when he says, "My name's Dicky Greenleaf," and they say, Well, if that's what you want, you can have it.

And it sort of tries to examine the toll involved in giving up on yourself. And so in some ways, it's a nightmarish version of feelings that we've all had. And I think that's what fiction is for in some way, to reflect some of the journeys we might make.

I mean, to -- where I understood this film in some way was, you know, partly connected with something that happened to me many years ago, which was I had written a play, and it was about to be produced on the West End in London. And the director, Michael Blaymore (ph), had invited me out to share his house off the coast of France, where we talked about the film -- about the play.

And we went swimming, and it was a wonderful day, and we were sort of on our backs and speculating about the production of this play and what might happen and what I might rewrite. And then at one point he said, "Oh, my goodness, I think we've drifted out from the shore." And I looked back, and we were about a mile and a half from land. And I thought, Whoa, gosh, I'm going to drown.

And I started flailing out and panicking and thinking I'd never get back.

And in some ways, that seems to me to absolutely corral the emotion and sensation that Ripley experiences in this film, which is that from a series of rather small missteps that he makes, small lies, they accumulate into, you know, a tangled web. And it's -- in a way, it's, I suppose, exacerbating and polarizing, the journeys that we all make. We're all guilty of sings of omission and commission about ourselves and our aspirations.

And fiction in some ways can give you back an exaggerated version of the consequence of those ambitions and desires.

GROSS: Now, this is a way in which your adaptation differs from the novel, "The Talented Mr. Ripley." On the first page of "The Talented Mr. Ripley," the novel, we know that he's done something wrong. He thinks the police are following him. We know he's committed some as yet unnamed crime, and we're not surprised when he's on the verge of committing more.

And he's a much more intentionally devious character than your Ripley is. Your Ripley is more of a blank slate. We don't know anything about his past in the movie. And he does get into his crimes in a kind of step-by-step, unpremeditated way.

MINGHELLA: Well, I would say that for me, what's interesting about film fiction is, I suppose...

GROSS: Let me stop and say, and then that makes your Ripley a more kind of likable fellow who we empathize with before he kind of gets to the point where he kind of crosses the line. Did -- is that part of the reason why you made him more likable, so that we would identify with him more?

MINGHELLA: Well, precisely. I think that it's important -- the film emphasizes what is human about Ripley rather than what's inhuman, and what's familiar about him rather than what's monstrous, because it seems to me that fiction is not significant if all it does is to confirm your prejudices or confirm your sense of the world as existed before you sat in front of the film.

I mean, in some ways, I suppose, I'm trying to take film very seriously and say that fiction bears some kind of moral responsibility, that I think after a while, it's very hard to distinguish between fictional information and factual information. And it all flows into a reservoir of experience from which we draw.

And the great and the marvelous thing about drama is that it forces us to reevaluate and reconsider the world from, you know, a variety of perspectives. And so I'm always trying not to adjudicate character, because then it's -- it prevents the audience from adjudicating or having any kind of argument with the document, the fiction.

And so I'm interested in what is human about Ripley, and I'm interested in how I can relate and understand and think about my own actions in terms of his. And if you write somebody off, or if you just simply turn him into a sociopath, if you just allow the audience to say, Well, I don't recognize any of the instincts in this character, and so when he does things which are heinous in some way, they have nothing to do with me, I think that diminishes the possibility.

And there's a moment in the film where Ripley, I suppose speaking for me, says, "I've never met anybody who thinks they're a bad person. Inside your head, it all makes sense." And I think so much of the damage which we do, you know, both politically, publicly, and privately in life is because of the fact that inside our heads, there's a kind of solipsistic reality, and everything makes sense to us. And at the same time these volitions that we have collide with other people's volitions. And that's where pain is caused.

So I'm trying to allow the audience to step inside the head of somebody who might be very, very different from them in their actions, but perhaps not so different from them in the way that they view the world, with this sort of skinless (ph) sensibility and a kind of tenderness.

GROSS: Anthony Minghella is my guest, and he wrote and directed the new movie "The Talented Mr. Ripley." He also wrote and directed the movie adaptation of "The English Patient."

Let's take a short break here and then we'll talk some more.

This is FRESH AIR.

(BREAK)

GROSS: My guest is Anthony Minghella, and he wrote and directed the new movie adaptation of "The Talented Mr. Ripley." He also did the movie adaptation of "The English Patient."

Now, this started off as an assignment. Sydney Pollack was -- wanted to produce a version of "The Talented Mr. Ripley." He asked you to write it. This was before "The English Patient" was made. You agreed to do it, and then you decided you loved the material so much you wanted to direct it yourself. Were there (inaudible) and whether any passages from the novel that guided the tone of your movie, passages that were -- kept coming back to mind?

MINGHELLA: Well, that's really interesting that you should say that, because my honest answer is that what happens with me when I'm about to adapt a novel, which might sound like a have a theory when I have no theory, but I know that the way that I seem to have fallen into working as an adapter for film is that I try and in some way inhabit the story as best as can, try and become the ideal reader of the book, and then imagine there was no novel, and that my job is to run towards a new audience advertising the good news of the writing that I've read.

And it would -- I'd be very hard pressed to say there was one passage in this book. I think that what you feel from the very beginning is this airless, irascible prose that Patricia Highsmith has, which is absolutely brilliant and entirely uninflected. So it's a tonal quality which starts on the first page and ends on the last, which is, it doesn't surrender to adjective, it doesn't really surrender to description.

It's so inner, the writing. It's -- you feel like you're -- as she said, the -- it felt as if Ripley had appropriated her typewriter and written his own story. It has this interior angst and unease and disquiet that I think pervades every single paragraph of it.

So I think it was just the quality of the prose, which is so distinctive. Plus, I think, the audacity of the concept of the book, which really appealed to me. I just loved the idea of wanting to be somebody so much that you actually become him, and then suffer the consequences.

It seemed like a Dantesque story to me. And so I'd be hard pressed to elect a particular passage and say, That is a definitively, you know, Ur-Ripley passage.

I do know that one of the clues for me, and in fact it resulted in my completely enlarging a character who's mentioned only in passing in the novel, is that when Ripley fetches up in Venice late on in the story, he goes to rent an apartment, now that he's, you know, living off Dicky's money. And as -- it appears as if he's experienced absolutely no remorse whatsoever for what he's done. And as this character, Peter Smith Kingsley, is pulling the drapes off this dusty old Venetian palazzo, he turns round to find Ripley collapsed in sobs on a couch.

And it seemed to me to be a great index of what the film might be, which is to hint at the fact that there is some consequence, an internal consequence, that there's a prison that you can't escape from, which is a prison of your own head. And no amount of talent to improvise your way out of trouble will ever get you out of the trouble that you have inside your own mind.

And so in some way, I thought it could be a story about the sentence of escape, rather than the sentence of being caught.

GROSS: Now, Matt Damon plays Tom Ripley, the character who desperately wants to be this young, wealthy man who he's become acquainted with. And I think it's really an excellent performance. In a way, the role is about acting, because Tom Ripley takes on the character of somebody else. And Matt Damon's face is really interesting to watch in this. You see him as he tries to cover up emotions. You see certain emotions kind of wiping across his face and then disappearing. It's -- his face just registers all kinds of interesting fleeting thing. (laughs)

And I'm wondering if you auditioned him for this at all, or just assumed, based on other performances, that he could do what was needed for the role.

MINGHELLA: Well, I think the casting process is rather like dating blind. You know, you meet somebody, and you try and extrapolate from a few hours with them whether you could go on a relationship with them, on an adventure with them. And obviously you have some prior information with an actor, because you've seen the work that they've done, although at the time that I cast Matt, none of the films which had made him Matt Damon had actually appeared. I was lucky enough to see an early cut of "Good Will Hunting," and I got to meet him and talk to him.

And what struck me about him, really, was his own passionate conviction that he was well cast in this part, and his really transparent understanding of the screenplay. And I felt great fellow feeling with him. And it was vital in this film that I did have an accomplice on the other side of the camera, because Ripley's in every single scene of the film. I've never really written a character who so dominates proceedings.

But the thing that you mention is very true about the fact that a great deal of Ripley's performance, of Matt's performance as Ripley, is about watching and observing and reacting. He doesn't have a great number of lines in the film. He's very much a presence rather than a voice. And I think it needs an extraordinary performance to let you in to him.

And I tried in a way to make the camera an inquiring camera in this film, inquiring into Ripley's mind, but also in some ways trying to look at the world through his eyes. The film is full of distorted self-images. It's full of a very particular way of seeing. And I kept imagining that the camera was simply reflecting what it was that Ripley saw in the world.

And I think that as a performance, it's an absolutely extraordinary one, because it has none of the frills and bells and whistles and pyrotechnics which, you know, normally dignify a great piece of acting. This is all about staying still and allowing the events of the film to wash over you, and let people somehow into the secrets that are going on in your head.

And I think he has that amazing transparency. He reminded me a great deal of Juliette Binoche, in a way, who I think is another actor who you feel privileged when you look at, because you feel that she's inviting you in to the soul in some way. And I think that Matt has pulled off exactly the same remarkable feat in this film, which is that he's -- first of all, he's transformed himself from who he actually is. I mean, he's a very centered, blessed person, very intelligent, very articulate, stands very -- and steady on his feet, and is -- has that sort of heavy-footed contemporary gait to him.

And he's invented this extremely delicate, skinless, febrile character. And that in itself is extraordinary, and sustained throughout the film.

But also, as you said, there's something that you feel that you have access to, the inner being of this character, without using any of the tricks that you might need to suggest that. And he also, within the film, recreates himself as somebody else. So there's a whole series of acting exercises going on, and it's a real dignifying, I think, of the screenplay.

GROSS: Anthony Minghella wrote and directed the new film "The Talented Mr. Ripley." He'll be back in the second half of the show.

Here's some music from a scene set in a jazz club, where the characters played by Matt Damon and Jude Law are singing with the featured singer.

(AUDIO CLIP, "THE TALENTED MR. RIPLEY")

(BREAK)

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross.

My guest, Anthony Minghella, wrote and directed the new film "The Talented Mr. Ripley." It's the story of someone who is so envious of the charmed life he sees around him that he crosses the line into amorality to reinvent himself.

Ripley, the character who reinvents himself, is played by Matt Damon. The wealthy friend, Dicky, is played by Jude Law. Dicky is a jazz fan and amateur saxophonist. In a scene set in a jazz club, Dicky sits in on saxophone and invites Ripley to sing. Here's Matt Damon, singing.

(BEGIN AUDIO CLIP, "THE TALENTED MR. RIPLEY")

DAMON (singing): My funny Valentine,
Sweet comic Valentine,
You make me smile with my heart.
Your looks are laughable,
Unphotographable,
Yet you're my favorite work of art.

Is your figure less than Greek?
Is your mouth a little weak?
When you open it to speak,
Are you smart?

(END AUDIO CLIP)

GROSS: When the Matt Damon character of Tom Ripley prepares to meet Dicky, the wealthy young American who's living in Italy, he studies up on some of the things that Dicky knows so he could kind of impress him and be on the same wavelength. So he studies up on jazz, because Dicky is an amateur jazz saxophonist.

And so he gives himself his own, like, blindfold test. He plays records and tries to guess, like, who's playing on it. Did -- how did you choose which performances you wanted to use? Were there certain, like, iconic figures of the time, or records that were special to you that you wanted to get in?

MINGHELLA: Well...

GROSS: I mean, for example, there's a scene where he sings, a la Chet Baker, "My Funny Valentine." Why that particular performance? Why make that the centerpiece?

MINGHELLA: Well, I would say two things. One of them is that you can imagine the fun and also the arguing and difficulty that the filmmaking group had on this movie about what music we could use, because I worked with the same composer as I did on "The English Patient," Gabriel Yared. The producer of the film, or one of the two producers, Bill Horberg, is a jazz flautist. We were working at Sorzantes (ph) Studio in Berkeley, which is also the home of Fantasy Records and of Jazz (ph), and Paul Zaentz was our co-producer.

And so there were so many noises in my ear about what music to use. And I'm also a huge jazz fan myself.

GROSS: And a pianist, I understand.

MINGHELLA: And a pianist. And so it was a question of, you know, who won out on their particular choices. I thought particularly about Chet Baker. First of all, there's something so intimate and secretive about that song, the performance of that version of the song.

GROSS: Yes, well put, uh-huh.

MINGHELLA: And I think it was an opportunity for Matt to sing to Jude, or Ripley to sing to Dicky, in a way that I think really illuminates the whole business of the popular song. Because, you know, if you look at any dance floor when a ballad is playing, and you see lovers crooning into each other's ears, and they're saying things in song that they would never have, you know, the nerve to say without the cloak of music around them. It's very hard, you know, for a man to say to a woman, "Your lips are laughable, unphotographable, but you're my favorite work of art." But you can say that if it's sung to a simple melody.

And I think the whole allure of popular song is it enables us to speak from our heart, but with the ballast of music.

And so that seemed to be, you know, a very good choice of song for Ripley. And it also, finally -- it's -- it -- I always felt that Chet Baker acted his songs rather than sang them, and so I felt confident that Matt could act as Ripley that song to Dicky.

GROSS: Now, Anthony Minghella, I know you started off writing plays before making movies, and you won the London Theater Critics Award for most promising playwright in 1984. Do you think that the dialogue you write has been different for the stage than it has been for screen?

MINGHELLA: I think that I've always felt this enormous emphasis on dialogue as being what a dramatist does, either in the theater or in film. And to me, it doesn't have any special place, by which I mean, that I think some of the most wonderful writing is fractured and incoherent. It's about identifying the fact that people mostly find it hard to communicate what they're feeling, that often in their silences or in their collapsed language and the fracture of language, truth will out.

And I've always been very nervous of epigrams. And I think, you know, the French have a wonderful way of describing drama as the mise en scene. And I think that in a way, the dramatist is responsible for the mise en scene rather than for anything that anybody says to each other. I think that the epigram, to me -- where somebody says something stupid in order for somebody else to say something intelligent -- has no real appeal to me.

I'm always very nervous when I seem to have written a good line, because it seems to me that it suggests that we're able to say what we think and to say what we feel. And on the whole, most of the time, I'm neither able to say what I think or say what I feel. (laughs)

GROSS: My guest is Anthony Minghella. He wrote and directed the new film "The Talented Mr. Ripley." We'll talk more after a break.

This is FRESH AIR.

(BREAK)

GROSS: My guest, Anthony Minghella, wrote and directed the new film "The Talented Mr. Ripley." He also made the movie adaptation of "The English Patient."

Now, you said that part of the reason why you kind of have this sense of empathy for Tom Ripley is that you felt a bit of an outsider growing up in an Italian family that had emigrated to Britain and lived in the Isle of Wight. Now, what brought your family -- which part of your family came first there? Was it your grandparents, your parents?

MINGHELLA: Well, it's a very convoluted story, but essentially my mother had fetched up on the Isle of Wight just after the war, but basically on the advice of a priest. Her family had settled from a small village in Italy near Montecassino, and her father had disappeared after a while, and -- I think to lead a completely new life, and had abandoned my grandmother and her three daughters.

And so with the wisdom and the navigation of the local parish priest in Scotland, where they for some reason for living, they were redirected down to the Isle of Wight, a place they'd never heard of and probably just wanted to get rid of them. And so the -- which is far south as you can go in the British Isles.

So they went down to the island. And my father, meanwhile, was living in a village very close to Valvru (ph), where my mother came from, and was brought over, as many young men were, were brought either to America or to Britain, where the wealthy families would, you know, would pay their train ticket or air fare, and in a way to provide cheap labor. And he was taken in by an ice cream-making firm in Portsmouth, which is a few miles from the island.

And the people there said, Well, you know, there's a girl who come from a village next door to you in Italy across the way. And so they ended up courting each other on the Isle of Wight ferry on the -- there's a long pier and ride. And then they would troll up and down the pier in the morning, and my father would go back to the work. And eventually he married, and they settled on the island, and I was born a couple of years later.

GROSS: Well, as a story teller, it must have been interesting to grow up with such an interesting story about your own family. Were there a lot of stories in your family about the grandfather who took on a new life and disappeared, abandoning the wife and kids?

MINGHELLA: Oh, absolutely. I mean, that was the whole stuff of my childhood. My grandmother, with whom I was inordinately close -- in fact, you know, I don't think -- it's the closest relationship I've ever had with anyone, probably -- and she and I would walk every morning along the beach on the island, and she would, I suppose, explain the world to me as far as she understood it. She was a very naive and wonderful woman, and I don't think ever fully accepted that her husband wasn't going to come back to her. And even though that they'd been separated for 30 years, always imagined he was about to come home.

And I think that that was the first insight I had into this whole business of the fact that probably my grandfather had a completely new and perhaps fulfilling and perhaps honorable and perhaps appropriate life with somebody else in Ireland, while my grandmother was fantasizing about his return.

And the inordinate amount of pain that they caused each other, and which stayed with them right up until after my grandfather's death, where there was some extraordinary scenes in Dublin where my grandmother and her children went to -- are now grown women -- went to retrieve the body of their husband and father and bring him back, as it were, because their notion was that this woman might have had him for his lifetime, but they would have him for eternity.

I mean, the sort of whole drama of that, and the -- and just the impact that it had on everybody's lives was, I'm sure, the beginning of my interest in trying to examine the -- you know, just the frailty of people pursuing what they feel they need and what they feel they want, and just the yearning that people have for each other and the amount of pain they carry around with each other.

GROSS: Did you ever allow yourself to identify with your grandfather, who left the family, and think maybe he was really unhappy in this life, and it was -- this life wasn't who he really was deep down inside, and the -- for -- person who he became, who your family might have thought of as the false person, was maybe more of the true person of who he was deep down inside...

MINGHELLA: Well, exactly.

GROSS: ... maybe he found -- uh-huh. Did you allow yourself to think that when you were close with your grandmother, who was so heartbroken?

MINGHELLA: Well, in fact, so much did I think that that I wrote a play, in fact, the play that you mention that won an award in the mid-'80s, was called "A Little Like Drowning," and it was about this relationship of my grandparents. And it was very much imagined from the point of view of my grandfather, because it always occurred to me that there were probably other children and a whole life and a woman who was, you know, nursed him when he was dying and then lost him to these banshee Italian women who came to collect him.

And so the play was very much imagined in the dialectic between my grandmother's point of view, which I obviously inhabited and learned from, and from his point of view. And it was a kind of family tragedy, and it was a way of my working out my own feelings about that particular story and history.

And it was very interesting to go -- my grandmother had died, unfortunately, by the time that the play was done. But my mother came with me, and I remember very much her trying to take home the implications of this story, but still not shrugging of her prejudices about this woman at the end.

And both of those things are easy to understand, I think. It's all very well and good for dramatists to talk about frailty and to talk about the fat that from everybody's point of view, things make sense. But when you've suffered...

GROSS: Right.

MINGHELLA: ... at somebody else's hands, it's much harder to be -- you know, to have some equanimity towards them.

GROSS: Two -- two of your movies, "The English Patient" and "Truly Madly Deeply," are about people who have -- who've lost the person who they love most in the world, lost, like, the real love of their life. And I'm wondering if that impulse to follow stories like that came from watching your grandmother, or whether that's something that you had lived through too.

MINGHELLA: Well, I think that it's very hard to detect your own sensibility. And I think one of the hardest things for a writer to do is make peace with your own voice and with your own particular preoccupations without, in a sense, trying too strongly to identify their origins. Because it -- in some ways, the reason why I've been attracted to adaptation is because it gives me the opportunity to reimagine the worldview using different stories rather than constantly trying to dredge up my own.

So I think I've got some sympathy. And, of course, like everybody else, I've -- my heart's been broken. I'm sure I've broken other people's hearts, and I'm sure I've trampled all over other people. But I'm not conscious of working out a particularly, you know, biographical neurosis. It's rather more, I think -- I mean, I'll say something which might sound daft, which is that I'm not somebody who dwells a great deal on my own inner being, as it were. You know, I don't find my own life particularly interesting, and I've got an incredibly settled and happy family life.

And it's really, I think, the privilege that gives you of having some center, of being able to look at the world and think about it from -- not entirely from your own perspective.

GROSS: I want to ask you something else about your family. I know your father ended up making ice cream?

MINGHELLA: Yes, he's a great ice cream maker. He's doing it even as we speak now.

GROSS: OK. And I think that there was a brand called Minghella ice cream, is that right?

MINGHELLA: That's absolutely true, yes.

GROSS: So were you -- I mean, would this have been, like, being the son of Ben and Jerry's or something, or the son of Sealtest when I was young, or...

MINGHELLA: I wish it had been the son...

GROSS: ... son of Haagen-Dazs, or...

MINGHELLA: ... of Ben and Jerry's, I would never have got a job, I just would have retired by now. I mean, it -- funnily enough, I think, one of the Ripley experiences I had when I was growing up was that on the island, which is essentially a very poor place, it's a wonderful place, but the -- 90 percent of the population live from hand to mouth, but it has this border of lard (ph), you know, of rich people, extremely privileged people who descend in the summer months.

It's always been, since Victoria, Queen Victoria's time, it's been a place where the wealthy and privileged have gone to spend their summers. There's a big reg -- you know, you -- boating regatta there every year, cows (ph), which is the home of sailing. And so it was very much the experience of my growing up that the island had become full. I wouldn't use the word "infested," but that was the word that came to my mind. It was full of the young and privileged and gorgeous and wealthy every summer while we were toiling away.

And my summers were always spent behind the glass of an ice cream van serving ice cream, and I certainly remember the feeling of not being inside the world I wanted to be in, but rather imprisoned in the cage of this ice cream van. I remember once driving along delivering some ice cream in my father's van and being stopped by two young, very beautiful people who could work -- very well have been Dicky Greenleaf and Marge Sherwood, who wanted to go -- wanted me to give them a ride.

And so they got into my van, and after awhile I asked them where they were going, and they said, "Oh, we're not going anywhere, we just wanted to sort of feel what it was like to be picked up by a local and taken somewhere." And I never felt so humiliated and so clear about my own social standing. And I remember vowing then that I would escape from the prison of the ice cream van and try and reinvent myself. So I suppose that was my most defining Ripley moment.

GROSS: When you were trying to reinvent yourself, and when you were becoming, you know, a young writer and everything, did people meet you and go, Oh, Minghella, is that like the ice cream family Minghella?

MINGHELLA: Well, unfortunately, I'd like to say that was true, but my father's ice cream was really only sold on the island, and just in the -- the sort of vicinity. And I'd run away far enough to the universe of (inaudible) -- (laughs) not to be identified as the sort of purveyor of raspberry ripple.

But I remember...

GROSS: (laughs)

MINGHELLA: ... one -- one -- one thing that was -- and, I mean, first of all, you know, you know, you talk a lot about, you know, where the Ripley element in you comes from, and this feeling of alienation as a child or whatever. But I had the, you know, the best childhood, and my parents are incredibly close to me. In fact, they're in the movie. They were in "The English Patient" as well, and they're...

GROSS: Waitwaitwait. Who were they in the movie? Who are they in "Ripley"?

MINGHELLA: Well -- You see my father playing bacce in the square with Jude Law. He's -- they're standing next to each other. My mother's sitting in a seat beside them. And they're just in that scene, because they came out to visit, and they were in "The English Patient" playing accordions and singing. And they're a very, very significant part of my life. I talk to them every day. And so I would hate it to sound like I was bewailing a childhood which was in fact, you know, a wonderful one and a rich one.

And I think that often the very things which make you feel strange as a child are the things which become incredibly precious to you as an adult, and the feeling of being a foreigner, and the feeling of -- we had a cafe, and there was never really any private life. Our private life was played out in, you know, the environment of a cafe kitchen. So every triumph and every failure was always paraded in front of the staff or in front of some customers.

And that was, you know, is sometimes quite soul-destroying as a child. But looking back on it, I think it was the most wonderful way of understanding myself and understanding the way the world worked. And so I feel now it's all privileged.

But I remember the reading about Fellini, who's one of my, you know, cinema heroes. And his father was a seller of olive oil and sausage and salami and prosciutto. And he would talk about his father coming home from selling -- carrying a, you know, a big piece of prosciutto and -- or a bottle of wine and saying, I make the best wine and the best this, and then I can't sell it, and what's wrong with people? And Fellini quietly vowing to himself he would never, ever sell anybody anything.

And I had exactly the same experience when I used to drive around in my ice cream van playing "The Happy Wanderer" on the chimes and thinking, One day, one day I'll escape from all of this, I'll never sell anybody anything. And just like Fellini, 20 years later I find myself in Hollywood, you know, trying to sell my own brand of ice cream.

So I think we all come back to ourselves in some way.

GROSS: Was "The Happy Wanderer," like, the theme of the truck or something?

MINGHELLA (singing): Da-ding ding ding, da-ding ding ding.

It used to drive me out of my mind.

GROSS: Oh, God!

MINGHELLA: In fact, in fact, I must...

GROSS: Oh, gee!

MINGHELLA: ... I must say that when I was with Gabriel Yared and we were talking about the music for "Ripley," and I was trying to think of some way of finding a noise that would be intensely nostalgic and disturbing for Ripley, we came up with something which is perilously like the tune on my ice cream van. I mean, it's just a music box sound. And I know it's partly because of -- and it's partly because my grandmother had a music box in her room which was from Venice. It was just a gondola with a ballerina dancing on it. It was the saddest, saddest tune. And I think somehow those two sounds -- because when Gabriel and I were working on the score, we worked together in his studio. And I'm sure that the provenance of both -- you know, of that particular theme in the film, this very strange and music-box-like theme comes both from the ice cream van and the gondola in my grandmother's bedroom.

GROSS: Wow. I'm still registering on me having to drive all day with "The Happy Wanderer," Valdaree, valdara, my knapsack on my back?

MINGHELLA: That's it.

GROSS: Oh, gee!

MINGHELLA: Except that they were clockwork chimes, and so you would wind them up. And by the time you'd got to the end of your street, they'd begun to wind down, and so it's given me a particularly...

GROSS: (laughs)

MINGHELLA: ... sensitive ear to pitch as I've become an adult.

GROSS: My guest is Anthony Minghella. He wrote and directed the new film "The Talented Mr. Ripley." We'll talk more after a break.

This is FRESH AIR.

(BREAK)

GROSS: My guest, Anthony Minghella, wrote and directed the new film "The Talented Mr. Ripley." Before the break, he was telling us about growing up on the Isle of Wight, working in his family's ice cream business. When he left that world, he became a writer.

So when you were reinventing yourself, did people accuse you of being a phony, people who you knew from childhood, or your parents or relatives? And people who couldn't understand why you were changing?

MINGHELLA: I remember being obsessed with Samuel Beckett when I was a student and reading in one of his novels his discussion -- there were two kinds of fools, the fools who stay where they are, and the fools who keep moving. And I think that coming from an island, many of the fools stayed where they were, and I was one of the fools that kept moving.

And when I go back, I'm always conscious of that, that really, you know, there's no real journey that you make in life that needs to be measured in miles. I mean, some people's journeys are a few feet and some people's journeys are apparently, you know, large ones.

And I remember going back to where my father came from, and his sister still lives there in the foot of Montecassino, and she's living in the tiny house that he was raised in, and she still goes to the market with her corn and her oil and grapes that she grows there.

And I remember thinking about 10 years ago, when I went to visit her, well, what -- how extraordinarily intrepid my father was that he'd gone on this massive journey, got himself across Europe, he's made a business and a life for himself, and she's just stayed exactly where she is.

And going back there recently, I realized that she's had as profound and as rich and as wonderful a life as he's had. She just hasn't moved anywhere. And I think that that's the way that I feel, is that the journeys we make don't have to be, you know, externally impressive. The important journey is the one you make in your head.

And so I'm not under any illusions, and I don't think that the people around me and the people that I stay close to on the island are any illusions that my journey's of any more import than theirs.

GROSS: Before I let you go, (laughs) I have to ask you, did you ever see the "Seinfeld" episode? Everybody must ask you this. (laughs) In which Elaine wanted to see "The English Patient" and didn't like it...

MINGHELLA: (laughs)

GROSS: ... but her boss, Peterman, loves it. And so rather than get into a fight with him, she tells him she didn't see it. So if he, of course, has to do everything in his power to get her to go, because he's sure she's going to love it. Everyone must ask you if you've seen the episode. Did you see it?

MINGHELLA: Well, you know, I saw a piece of it when I was in Los Angeles. I haven't seen the whole episode. I was enormously flattered that they took the trouble even -- it was an index to me of how much "The English Patient" had pervaded the public consciousness, that anybody would be remotely amused by this.

And in fact in Britain, there was a much more sort of devastating and just devastatingly funny attack on "The English Patient." It was called "The Toy Patient," in which they dressed up some bears and, you know, woolen rabbits and played out the story with puppets. And it was much funnier and much better than my film. So, I mean, I just took it as a great compliment, really, that anybody cared enough.

(LAUGHTER)

GROSS: So what...

MINGHELLA: But I think the other thing I would say is this, you know, is the -- I feel so uniconoclastic as a filmmaker, and it's always very strange to me that people can either be so passionately for or against what I'm doing, because I feel like the most equivocal person in the world, and when I made "Truly Madly Deeply," I remember that it -- that in one week, I remember reading a list of tests, you know, somebody's 10 favorite films of all time, and getting that glow of pride in reading that somebody thought this was one of the 10 best movies ever made.

And the next day on BBC television, they had a wonderful program where people could consign the things they most hated to Room 101, this program was called, and the very first thing on the next day that I saw was this guy saying, "And the first thing I'd put in Room 101 is `Truly Madly Deeply.'"

GROSS: Oh!

MINGHELLA: So it just seems extraordinary to me that such a -- I don't know, such an equivocal person and such an equivocal filmmaker should excite, you know, such extreme reactions in people.

GROSS: Now, your next film is going to be called "Mountain," an adaptation of "Cold Mountain," the Civil War novel?

MINGHELLA: That's right. I mean, I had no plans to go on another adaptation. It seems like I'm in danger of harnessing myself to other people's good work. It wasn't intentional. In fact, I was spending a weekend with Michael Anduchly (ph) in Toronto, and he gave me a copy of the book, and passing it on from his publisher. And then when I got home, there were two other copies waiting for me in London from two other sources. And I thought, well, three times in a week must be some kind of clue.

And I read the book, Charles Frazier's book, and it's so amazing, I think. And I have a kind of kitchen cabinet of readers whose response matters to me. And one of them said to me that after she'd finished reading it, she cried so much that her son came in in the middle of the night to find out what was the matter with her. And the other one said that he hated and got so angry when he finished the book that he threw it across the room.

And I think to get such a visceral reaction to a novel is very encouraging to me. (laughs) So I've -- and it's a fantastic story. It's probably the cruelest book I've ever read. And it will be a great adventure for all the filmmaking family that I've managed to acquire around me to go on. And so I'm looking forward to it.

GROSS: So just one more thing. In your years of playing piano, have you ever done a jazz version of "The Happy Wanderer"? (laughs)

MINGHELLA: I don't think that that could pass through my fingers, that particular tune. (laughs)

GROSS: Well, Anthony Minghella, thank you very much for talking with us, and I wish you happy holidays.

MINGHELLA: And to you. Thank you very much, Terry.

GROSS: Anthony Minghella wrote and directed the new movie "The Talented Mr. Ripley."

FRESH AIR's interviews and reviews are produced by Naomi Person, Phyllis Myers, Amy Salit, and Roberta Shorrock, with Monique Nazareth and Patty Leswing. Research assistance from Brendan Noonam. Our engineer is Audrey Bentham. Anne Marie Baldonado directed the show.

I'm Terry Gross.

TO PURCHASE AN AUDIOTAPE OF THIS PIECE, PLEASE CALL 877-21FRESH
Dateline: Terry Gross, Philadelphia, PA
Guest: Anthony Minghella
High: Director and screenwriter Anthony Minghella won the Academy Award for best director for the 1996 film "The English Patient." His new film, "The Talented Mr. Ripley," opens December 25th, and stars Matt Damon, Gwyneth Paltrow and Cate Blanchett.
Spec: Entertainment; Movie Industry; "The Talented Mr. Ripley"

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End-Story: Interview with Anthony Minghella
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