Voyage of a Confederate Odysseus

Anthony Minghella, who won nine Oscars for 'The English Patient', tells Michael Dwyer about making 'Cold Mountain'.

On the eve of the London première of Cold Mountain, 10 days ago, the film's screenwriter and director, Anthony Minghella, is looking distinctly sleepy and jet-lagged as he arrives for his first interview of the day. It is shortly after noon, and he has flown overnight from Toronto. He is only half-joking when he asks where he is and what day it is.

This is the type of life that Minghella, who turns 50 in a fortnight, has had to get used to. Born on the Isle of Wight to Italian immigrant parents, he made his mark first in theatre and radio, writing Made In Bangkok, Love Bites and Cigarettes And Chocolate, then on television, scripting The Storyteller, Inspector Morse and What If It's Raining? He made his acclaimed film-directing début in 1991, with Truly Madly Deeply, starring Juliet Stevenson and Alan Rickman.

In 1997 Minghella was catapulted to the forefront of international film-makers when his third feature, The English Patient, which he adeptly adapted from Michael Ondaatje's novel, became a major critical and commercial success, winning nine Oscars, including best picture and best director.

He followed it with The Talented Mr Ripley, a stylish adaptation of the Patricia Highsmith novel featuring Matt Damon, Gwyneth Paltrow, Cate Blanchett and Jude Law, and, now, Cold Mountain, an accomplished screen treatment of the American Civil War novel by Charles Frazier. It features Jude Law as Inman, a deeply disillusioned Confederate volunteer on an eventful journey home to the town of Cold Mountain, in the Blue Ridge Mountains in North Carolina, and to the woman he has loved from afar, played by Nicole Kidman.

As soon as Minghella settles down to talk about his work, he switches from somnambulism to articulate enthusiasm. He is particularly pleased that the film has received Frazier's imprimatur; the writer saw it at the New York première a week earlier. Kidman has been equally effusive, describing Minghella as "a true poet who took this magnificent novel and turned it into a screenplay with its own life".

Minghella says bemusedly that he found Frazier's novel more straightforward to adapt than the novels for his previous movies. "The imaginative leap between the book and the film was much greater in both cases," he says. "The English Patient is one of the best examples of the novels of the last 100 years that are essentially arguments with the form. They're not novels in the strict sense of the word: they're debates about what novels can be. In many ways, I think, The English Patient is a poem disguised as a novel.

"There were different issues with adapting The Talented Mr Ripley. When you remove that incredible sense of atmosphere Patricia Highsmith evokes in the novel, the story is extremely piecemeal. When you lay out what happens for a film treatment, it takes a great deal of re-thinking and redesigning." He describes Cold Mountain as very story-heavy, "like a lost novel of the 19th century". The difficulties with adapting it lay in identifying the essence of the book, discarding other parts and working out how to structure more chronologically a narrative dense with characters, incidents and back stories.

"People don't say very much in the book, but they think a lot, and that's the hardest thing to convey in a movie," he says. "Film is not good at iterative narrative. You can have a sentence that reads: 'He was unhappy to see his mother on Fridays.' That's just seven words in a novel, but it's not so easily expressed in a film if you don't take the option of putting it in voiceover. However, film is very good at flexing between foreground and background, the private and the public, the very intimate and the epic scale."

Researching The English Patient involved reading a few dozen books about the story's settings and its period, he says. "But if you venture into the American Civil War you could be reading for the rest of your life and still not have penetrated a quarter of the literature that's available. I also didn't want to make a war film. I wanted to concentrate on the impact of war away from the battlefield and to pull out what's implicit in the book, which is like an American version of The Odyssey, to bring to the surface the idea of spiritual destinations, of life as a walk, and atonement."

Cold Mountain is a real place, he points out, and also the name of a spiritual place in Buddhist poetry, which prompted him to treat the film both as a real story and as a fable. And there was a real Inman: Frazier's great-great-uncle, who walked 300 miles home from the war. "Inman so resonates with Everyman, with The Pilgrim's Progress and The Odyssey. He is not allowed home until he is tested and proves himself, the way Odysseus is: it tests his courage, his fidelity and his vulnerability to the lascivious life and to the romantic alternative. He had to earn the right to be home."

The film's gruelling opening battle tested Minghella, who had never directed an action sequence on such a vast scale. "I was so apprehensive of dealing with what was foreign territory to me. I didn't want to show the battle as a war game or from the view of generals or politicians. I wanted to show how ordinary people are affected by it, how messy it is. I had some key images in my mind from very early on - the horse rising up on the battlefield and bolting, the army coming through the smoke - and I wanted the camera to be as subjective as I knew how.

"This was a real event, a day in which 4,000 men died in one morning in that crater, and even though the Confederates for once were on the winning side many of them were traumatised by what they had done. They felt tainted by the butchering that went on, even though they were the butchers. One soldier wrote in a letter home: 'Today I saw the devil in human form.' "

The film's antiwar message inevitably has a contemporary resonance. "It was the same in the civil war," he says. "You had men going to war, imagining it was just for a couple of weeks, a quick skirmish, and not having a full understanding of the reasons they were going. Those mountain farmers from North Carolina didn't own slaves. There were no slaves in the region. They were told the north was going to invade their land. In that area it was called the War of Northern Aggression. It was not about maintaining the right to own a slave. Once again you had poor men fighting a war for rich men. In fact, if you had more than 10 slaves you were exempt from conscription."

I mention a recent newspaper article that said: "Not since Notting Hill have black people been so comprehensively erased from a movie in which by rights they should loom large." The charge is ridiculous, says Minghella. "The whole point of it is that slavery was not an issue for those people. I actually tried to lever in some more of the argument about race and about slavery, but it just felt so revisionist. If the story had been set in a part of the south where African-Americans were present I would have been happy to address that. This was a criticism of the novel as well, but it's a criticism that doesn't understand the topography."

When it was announced that Minghella was to film Cold Mountain, he was inundated with calls from actors eager to be involved, but he was more concerned with finding the right combination for his ensemble cast than with concentrating on individual actors. "That's why I made an offer to the three principal actors and some others all on the same day, so that I could collect the group simultaneously. But it's an amazing cast. I'm sure I will never have a cast like that again."

The formidable ensemble includes two Irish actors. Cillian Murphy, who has a small role as a recent Irish emigrant and conscript, was marvellous, says Minghella. "Without almost any dialogue, you understand so much about his character." In one of the most substantial roles, Brendan Gleeson plays a charming fiddle-playing deserter. "When we met for the film all Brendan did was play," he says. "We didn't need to talk about the role, because I love him as an actor. He is so good in the movie and he has been singled out by a lot of critics in America."

In a most unlikely musical pairing, Gleeson performs bluegrass music with Jack White, of the rock group The White Stripes, on banjo. "I cast Jack because I wanted someone who was a singer more than an actor, but he proved to be a totally natural actor. I can see him going on to more films."

Cold Mountain was shot primarily in Romania, which offered more suitable and unspoiled locations than the US, as well as lower costs, which kept the very large budget down to $85 million. "Everything that worked in front of the camera was a nightmare behind it," Minghella says. "The weather was vile in Romania, there was no proper accommodation for the crew and organising the communications system and getting hot food on to the set was so difficult.

"When we started shooting the opening battle it was 107 degrees, and some of the men were fainting, and then at the end of the first day came a thunderstorm - which became a feature of every day shooting that sequence - and it completely washed out the battlefield we had built. Yet it helped in that it gave everyone this patina of siege and weariness from being marinated in all this mud day after day. It all fed the movie.

"This was a very happy film, and that came largely from Jude and Nicole, because they were there the longest and they are such great spirits. Jude, in particular, welcomed all the other actors as they arrived and explained how the film was being made. He is so selfless and good-natured that he made everyone feel very calm. If Ripley was the advertisement of what Jude might do as an actor, his work on this is the statement of that. He can do anything."

Cold Mountain is Minghella's third consecutive film for Miramax and Harvey Weinstein, its famously demanding co-chairman, even though they started as productions for other companies. "Everything about Harvey is true," he laughs. "He's a passionate, courageous, sophisticated, film-literate ally - and he's a fearsome adversary. His passion is great when it's running alongside you and can be terrifying when it's coming towards you. But I'm certain my next three movies will be with him as well, because I enjoy his company and I know that, if we fight, we are fighting for the same reasons.

"I can be hard work, too. It's not a one-way street. I'm demanding and I don't want to compromise. I have a vision of what I want a film to be and I don't want to sell it short. I'll fight tooth and nail if I believe in something. I'm sure I'm as troubling as Harvey can be. The obduracy is fairly well matched between us. We've laughed a lot on this project, more than we've ever done before, and we've enjoyed the challenge of it."

Cold Mountain opens on Friday