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Magazine
In the classical mould
PRADEEP SEBASTIAN
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Anthony Minghella, who passed away recently, made films that were about sustaining love in a fast-changing world. Pico Iyer opens up on what the movies and the man meant to him.
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Photo : Laurie Sparham
Crafting epic experiences: Anthony Minghella on the set of “Breaking and Entering”.
When a long-time editor at Time Magazine asked Pico Iyer recently to name all the people in the world he would be interested in interviewing, he named only two: Orhan Pamuk and Anthony Minghella. For Iyer, Minghella had been a hero, a one-of-a-kind filmmaker. The one director Iyer wanted adapting his novel, Abandon, for the screen. I knew all this, so when I first heard about Minghella’s death, I thought at once of Pico. In the past, we had often spoken of how much both of us loved Minghella’s first film (with its lovely title) “Truly, Madly, Deeply”.
He had told me once that after seeing “The English Patient”, he had been inspired to write the kind of fiction Minghella would have delighted in. I have no way of knowing if the filmmaker did read Iyer’s beautiful and radiant novel, but I have often fantasised about bringing it to Minghella’s attention. I would say, handing Abandon over to him, “Here is the book you have been looking for, stop looking elsewhere.”
Minghella’s most underrated film is “The Talented Mr. Ripley”. It is a film I have come to admire more and more, though Pico himself thinks it an interesting failure. (While telling me once, “Minghella’s failures are more interesting than most people’s successes.”) The week before he died, Anthony Minghella had just completed making a television film of Alexander McCall Smith’s The No.1 Ladies Detective Agency for HBO and BBC.
When I spoke to Pico Iyer about what Minghella’s life, work and death meant to him, he was caught up in writing about the recent events in Tibet. March 25th saw the worldwide release of Iyer’s new book, The Open Road: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama. Winning starred reviews in pre-publications reviews, the book has also already been called, by legendary non-fiction writer Bill McKibben, “as subtle and moving as any non-fiction produced in recent decades”.
What did Anthony Minghella’s work mean to you?
I really feel bereft. For many of us, Anthony Minghella was the hope of new millennium filmmaking, because of his rare mix of romanticism and rigor. From his earliest movies — such as the classic, and unforgettable, “Truly, Madly, Deeply”— Minghella seemed to be crafting a highly literary, very sophisticated, beautifully nuanced vision of England as it looks to outsiders, the immigrants (like his parents) who are remaking the island-nation in their own such vital image. Perhaps it was this mix of Italian blood and a British upbringing (albeit on the Isle of Wight) that enabled him to take classic English forms and infuse them with an almost Italianate vibrancy and lushness and sense of liberation. It was certainly this that allowed him to take Michael Ondaatje’s beautiful, outsider’s take on England, The English Patient, and turn it into the only film I’ve seen that completely remakes a radiant novel, and, by honouring its spirit as much as its letters, creates a completely different kind of radiant movie.
The English Patient has been a very special movie to you, hasn’t it?
I found myself going back to the cinema again and again to see “The English Patient” more times now than I can count. And in the scene of Hana swinging from the rafters of an old church as she takes in ancient frescoes by the light of a flare, there is a mix of wonder, of romance, of ancient setting and modern invention, that not only catches what is most transcendent in Ondaatje, but serves as an abiding image of what love or art or even the simple principle of flight and lift-off can do to the human soul.
Had you and Minghella ever met?
No… but though I never met him, I felt from afar that I was watching a truly sensitive member of the global community try to find how he could sustain love, possibility, the exploratory instinct in a world in which all the old verities were collapsing and cultures were flooding in upon one another and colouring one another as never before. The theme, of course, he pursued even in his last movie, “Breaking and Entering”.
What do you feel Minghella was attempting in his films?
His films were at once great epic experiences, that had many critics reaching for comparisons with David Lean and the old masters of the huge screen, and intimate stories of the back-and-forth of romance; at once romantic sagas that filled every inch of the big screen and modern explorations of — as in “The English Patient” — the running together of nations and genres. From his earliest plays, Minghella seemed to be chronicling the development of a new England and something abiding in the heart, that placed him firmly in the company of the distinguished writers — Kazuo Ishiguro, Michael Ondaatje, Salman Rushdie — who were also beginning to trace the outlines of a new kind of post-imperial culture, with new possibilities for the arts.
What have his movies, personally, meant to you?
No artist in any genre has caught the dialogue of lovers with as much maturity and quirky immediacy as Minghella — from “Truly, Madly, Deeply” to “The English Patient” (even in “Cold Mountain”) and he made the relationship between partners seem one of life’s great adventures. All I need add is that I once wrote a whole novel that aspired to be the kind of thing that a Minghella might imagine, and that when an editor recently asked me whom in the world I would like to interview, only two names came up, and one was Minghella’s.
What kind of a loss does Minghella’s death signify?
Till this week he seemed the best hope for a fresh, alive and emotionally unguarded England that would hold onto its established forms, but see within them the scope for something new, rare and strange. And what has so touched me in recent years is that even as he was one of the most sought-after filmmakers in the world, he was still conducting interviews with young film-makers at the BFI (British Film Institute) eagerly hunting down new talent with the excitement of a boy and making the business of life seem like a great romance. Gifts like his seem to enter the world of film only once a generation or so, and now some of us will spend all our days imagining the kind of films he might have made.
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