Anthony Minghella is the director of "The Talented Mr. Ripley"

December 22, 1999
Web posted at: 3:52 p.m. EST (2052 GMT)

By Jamie Allen
CNN Interactive Senior Writer

(CNN) -- Anthony Minghella was about to to see his play "Made in Bangkok" open at the Aldwych Theatre in London's West End. Even then, the playwright of that show, "Whale Music," "Two Planks and a Passion" and other works had reason to be optimistic about his career.

In fact, a decade later, as a film director, he'd see his 1996 epic "The English Patient" win nine Academy Awards, including best picture and best director. Minghella's follow-up to that is this year's Christmas weekend release "The Talented Mr. Ripley," based on the Patricia Highsmith novel about a man named Tom Ripley whose opulent errand to Italy turns into a sojourn of murder and false identity.

But this was 1986. And while working on his Aldwych Theatre show -- it would win a best-new-play commendation from London's critics -- Minghella had gone to France. He and the play's director were swimming offshore. And although he had no idea that he'd one day tell Ripley's story on the big screen, he says something happened to him that would later help him understand Ripley's psyche.

"We were lying on our backs in the water and chatting away and dreaming of what this play might be like in performance," says Minghella. "And suddenly he said to me, 'Oh my goodness. I think the current's caught us and we're a bit of a distance from the shore.'

"I looked around and we were about a mile-and-a-half from land, and I thought, 'OK, I'm going to drown now.' And then I started to flail out and panic. I gradually calmed down and I got home. But the reality was that in that moment I was panicking and I feel like that to me was the clue about Ripley, that Ripley constantly finds himself out of his depth in the film and then reacts very, very badly."

In Minghella's adaptation, Ripley is played by a lithe Matt Damon ("Good Will Hunting," "Saving Private Ryan"). The story, set in the 1950s, starts when he's mistaken for someone else. He's sent to Italy to track down Dickie Greenleaf, a young American playboy played by the golden Jude Law, and bring him home to his overbearing father and ill mother. Of course, it doesn't work out that way.

When Ripley falls for Greenleaf, things get complicated. The film is not the typical murder tale, though, as any trace of tidy Hollywood endings is absent.

The film is already receiving Academy Award buzz, and was just nominated for five Golden Globes, including nods for best director, best dramatic actor in Damon, and best supporting actor in Law. Gwyneth Paltrow, Cate Blanchett and Philip Seymour Hoffman round out the stellar cast.

In a Tuesday interview with CNN.com, Minghella discussed his cast members' work; why he chose to make changes to Highsmith's novel in adapting it to the screen; and why he says he'll never film another murder scene on open water.

CNN: When did you first read Patricia Highsmith's novel, "The Talented Mr. Ripley?"

Minghella: I re-read it four-and-a-half or five years ago when producer Sydney Pollack's company Mirage got the rights to the book and they asked me if I was interested in doing the adaptation. But I actually first read it many years ago as a young playwright when the very first play I had performed -- the first thing that was written about it was that it reminded the writer of Patricia Highsmith's work. At that time I had never heard of her and so I went off to a bookstore and bought some books and discovered Tom Ripley.

CNN: There's a difference between reading a story for entertainment and reading it for adaptation. What were you thinking when you considered it for a movie?

Minghella: Well, what an extraordinary character, what a chilling story, what an unsettling story, what a sense in some way of a character who stood in for many of the feelings and anxieties that I felt myself, particularly in the process of becoming an adult -- the feeling of strangeness, the feeling of disconnection, the feeling of being shut out from the world. I think all the reasons why people become writers or directors or actors are tied in with Ripley's sensibility, the feeling (that) if people knew exactly who you were they wouldn't welcome you, that you have to try and reinvent yourself.

I mean, the making of fiction is a whole process of constantly reinventing yourself and re-imagining yourself, so it's very familiar territory -- not so much in what Ripley does, but how he feels about the world.

CNN: These are internal emotions that you're talking about -- that's difficult to show on film?

	VIDEO
Theatrical preview for "The Talented Mr. Ripley" Real 28K 80K Windows Media 28K 80K
	MESSAGE BOARD
Does 'The Talented Mr. Ripley' have what it takes for an Academy Award? Give us your take on the Oscar hopefuls.
	ALSO
CNN Showbiz Today's Sherry Sylvester finds out how talent isn't limited to 'Mr. Ripley'

Minghella: It really is. One of the problems with adaptation is however much you love the material -- and I loved this book enormously, as I had loved "The English Patient" -- there's a huge difference between the literary experience, the wonderful experience you have, the secret experience you have as a reader of a novel, and the very public experience you have to have in a cinema, particularly in a novel written from one person's point of view, as Ripley is.

It's very hard to convey that in the explicit medium of cinema, and so a lot of the job is to try to collect what most moved you and excited you about a book and retell it as a storyteller in front of a public audience. And so nearly every decision I make as an adapter is simply that.

I used to be a university teacher and I remember the very first lecture I ever gave and I was so nervous that I wrote out every single word. I think it was a lecture on contemporary European drama, and every single thing I was going to say I wrote down. I just stood in front of this body of students and read out my lecture. It was probably the most boring experience in the world.

And then suddenly I realized that the thing to do was to put your notes down and just try to be in the moment and tell the story of the idea in the moment. In a way, that's what I've done now as a filmmaker. It's not to look at the book and read from it. It's trying to convey with as much passion and enthusiasm the good news of the book.

CNN: You chose to add a few characters to the story, including Cate Blanchett's role as a well-to-do expatriate who keeps turning up and making things complicated for Ripley. Why did you do this?

Minghella: There are probably two dozen new characters in the film but they're not there in order to leave my imprint over Patricia Highsmith's words or ideas. It's really just a way of animating what is internal narrative in the book. I'm in New York now -- if I just said in a film, "He had a very good time in New York," it would just be a caption with me grinning. I have to demonstrate to you what that means, who I spoke to, what I did.

Whereas the novelist has the sort of privilege of describing events in summary often, in a film you can't summarize, you have to just dramatize. And so what I'm trying to do is find people for Ripley to meet, things for him to do. And in the process I have to invent things.

CNN: Some moviegoers might see this film from the surface as simply the story of a serial killer who keeps avoiding capture. How do you react to that?

Minghella: Technically, a serial killer is a person who takes pleasure in planning murders and is sort of a recidivist killer. The thing about Ripley is that he never plans to kill anybody. He stumbles into a whole series of catastrophes. But he's not a murderous personality, by any means.

I was interested in what was human about this character rather than what was inhuman, and what was familiar rather than what was monstrous about him. I'm hoping that the audience will inhabit the journey that Matt Damon takes you on. You don't have to applaud what he does, but I think if you don't understand what he does, then it does become reductive -- it becomes a headline film.

In a way, what the film is trying to say is there's a great difference between getting away with murder in public and getting away with it in private. I think the whole thrust of the film is toward the end and the way that the end phrases itself, which tries to talk about the fact that there's one prison you can't escape from and that's the prison of your own mind.

CNN: Was Matt Damon your first choice for Ripley?

Minghella: Whenever anybody asks me about casting I'm always tempted to sort of be glib or to say, "Yeah, he was the first idea." But the reality is, it's like getting married. Who are you looking for? You're looking for a soul mate, and you might date a hundred girls before you find the person who you feel you could go on your life with.

It means you're waiting and waiting and biding your time and some people want you and some people don't want you, and vice versa. And you're looking for the person you most feel comfortable with to go on the adventure with. And when I met Matt I was so certain he was the right person.

If I answer the question in a different way -- if you said to me today, "OK, the movie's come out, everybody loved it, you can make it all over again and every actor in the world is available to you." I would cast exactly the same group of people. I felt like they dignified what I had written. They gave me more back than I could ever hope for.

And as for Matt, you just can't imagine the extent to which he delivered the film with everything that I could have hoped for and in such an honorable way. He's an amazing advertisement I think for young American acting. The seriousness of his work, the intensity of his work, the courageousness of it -- I could bawl for Matt Damon for an hour.

CNN: Did Jude Law surprise you with his performance?

Minghella: I had followed Jude's work and I think he's just going to explode into movies. I thought, "This is the part that can really show to a big audience what he's capable of." I think he's an enormously magnetic old-style film star. He has everything going for him, he's the luckiest guy on the planet as far as I'm concerned. He's very, very talented. He's incredibly charismatic. That was a case of my knowing exactly who I wanted in that role and just going after him. I'm very terrier-like when I decide who I want.

CNN: The film includes a murder scene on open water involving Damon's Ripley and Law's Greenleaf. It was difficult to watch -- what was it like to film something like that?

Minghella: I can tell you I will never ever shoot another scene on water in my life (laughs). You've no idea.

First of all, you're in the middle of nowhere. There's absolutely no facility to do anything. You can work that out yourself, there's just nowhere to go. There's no privacy, there's no place to rest, there's no place to take a leak. You're just there. You're bobbing about, to keep focus with the camera is impossible because you're moving, the subject is moving, the horizon is moving. Everybody is getting queasy in the stomach.

The actors were frozen because they were in an out of the water. It was a nightmare. And they insisted, because they're both such troupers, they insisted on doing everything themselves. There were no stunts. It was just the two of them. They are such good sports.

We were on the ocean for four days and they never gave up and they never complained and they made what would have been an even worse nightmare into a tolerable one. It took us about two hours to get to the location and we stayed there until the sun went, and we were constantly waiting for the light because the weather gods laugh at you when you make film. They just say, "You want sun, here's rain. You want rain, here's sun. You want wind, here's calm. You want calm, here's wind." It's just like a joke.

CNN: You're now working on an adaptation of the Charles Frazier novel "Cold Mountain" -- when can we look for that?

Minghella: I think if I can make it and it's released in three years, I'll have worked faster than I've ever worked before.

CNN: Do you want to get back to writing original screenplays?

Minghella: I would like to very much. I never intended to get into this slew of adaptation work and even though I planned to do an original film next, I just fell in love with that book. I just thought it was magnificent and I was too greedy to let it go, so I'm going to do that next.