Tag Archives: Anthony Minghella

Looking Back

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In memory of Anthony, who died five years ago today.

Photo by Brigitte Lacombe

Looking back

by

Edana Minghella

I said, we’ll both be in our bathchairs on the beach.

–   Do you think?

Yes. You’ll be really old and I’ll be sprightly.

But we’ll both be in bathchairs, wrapped in blankets,

on Brighton beach. Or Ryde. A beach somewhere.

Looking out to sea.

–   Do you think I’ve done all right?

(You meant the house

I think.)

I said, of course, it’s beautiful.

We’ll talk about gran. And mum and dad. And the shop.

I’ll say, what about the Aunts?

The time the priest came to see Auntie Jeanie in hospital and offered us holy communion?

Our panicked eyes, our open mouths.

I’ll say, remember the rock festival?

The topless girls wanting ninety-nines.

Your face averted, your hands shaking

When you put in the flake.

You at fourteen,

Smelling of chocolate and vanilla.

I’ll say, remember that film you made?

The sixth. Or will it be the seventh?

The one with Thing in. And that woman whose

Face doesn’t move.

–   Who?  Her face does move!

Whatshername.

I said, I’ll get confused, looking back,

And so will you.

We’ll both be a bit dotty.

Dottier. Chockful of dots.

And grumpy probably. Grumbling

in our bathchairs on Appley beach.

Or Puckpool.

–   Do you think?

Yes.

–   I hope you’re right.

Your garden; a freezing March Monday.

Huddled in your coat, the outside damp, mushroomy,

leaves scrunching underfoot –

like autumn –

The last time I saw you.

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I’ll Always Go Back To That Church

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6th January, 2013

Today is the birthday of my brother, Anthony Minghella. He would have been 59.

Last year someone sent me a link to a wonderful photograph of him on location, which I hadn’t seen before. I wanted to share it today, but alas I can’t find it. There are so many photos on the net, I’m just trawling through a million Ants, and after a full hour, I’ve given up.

Maybe it’s a lesson. Not to dwell in the past. Not to wallow in a patchwork of Google thumbnails.

He used to say that you should never let a day go by without creating something. That means something new. That means living, not dwelling.

Still, I confess, I do dwell, and please allow me to do so each year on 6th January.

Perhaps my failure to find the “right” photo of Anthony is indicative of a certain elusive quality. He was famously adaptable. He seemed to be able to turn his hand to anything: theatre, radio, TV, film, opera.

He hated, as all artists do, to be pinned down. Maybe that’s why I can’t find the photo. Maybe there isn’t just one.

Just as there isn’t ONE photo of him, there isn’t ONE photo that captures his work.

But there is a “movie moment” I find myself returning to. It captures his ambition, his originality, his soaring big-heartedness. On a day like today, this seems a good enough place to go.

I’ll always go back to that church.

English Patient

Jack Davenport on Anthony Minghella

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13th May, 2012

These memories of Anthony were written by Jack Davenport for a proposed book on Anthony’s work by Meghna Mudaliar. Many thanks to Jack and Meghna for permission to share them here.

The night I arrived in Rome to start work on Ripley, I met Anthony in an almost comically perfect family restaurant in Trastevere. He was so happy and excited to be setting out on what was clearly a labour of love in the most complete sense. The film would show his adoration of Italy, the home of his ancestors; it would be a meditation on how social exclusion can corrupt a sense of self.

My not-so-hidden terror at working with a man whose previous film had garnered nine Academy Awards evaporated almost instantly in his embrace. Literally. Ant was one of the most effusively tactile people I have ever met. He used touch the way other people use words. It is a measure of the gentleness of the man that his continual pummelling and kneading never felt like an invasion, but simply an extension of his not inconsiderable powers of communication.

My nervousness at working with Ant stemmed from the fact that he was the first true artist I had ever been directed by. I remember how alarming it was receiving notes from him on set. Often, the open-endedness of the emotional world one is trying to create, means that discussing variations in performance can be a relatively free-form discussion, almost a gentle negotiation. With Ant however, his note giving was positively laser-like in it’s precision. Much of this was of course to do with the fact he had written the script. It was a case of knowing the topography of his story so well that he knew exactly what he was after, at all times. Which is not to say he was bullying or domineering, he just directed with a clear-eyed exactness that was rare indeed.

Somebody told me early on in our rehearsal period for the film that my character, Peter Smith-Kingsley (who in the novel appears in only one scene), had become in Ant’s writing an amalgam of qualities that he most admired in people. I found this information frankly terrifying, but Ant put it to me slightly differently. He said that Peter was the only character in the story who was comfortable in their own skin, and it was this quality that attracted Tom Ripley. A big part of that attraction was also bound up in Peter’s profession as a musician. Music saturates the film, and is used by many characters to say things they cannot express themselves. Ant’s insistence that I learn to conduct the Stabat Mater piece and play the piano, was the greatest excavation tool he gave me for the character. He would give me beautiful selections of music to help me get inside Peter’s head. I’m sure Ant would have endorsed the Walter Pater quote about all art aspiring to the condition of music. Indeed, that idea seems to be one of the major themes of the film.

I remember a story Anthony told me about a gift he had been given one the first day of shooting by his editor, the great Walter Murch. Walter had presented Anthony with a lacquered box filled with tiny hand-tied scrolls, one for each day of principal photography. Each one contained an aphorism that Walter had chosen and written out. Anthony said he would open one at random first thing, and then ponder it while he stood in the shower. He told me how strange it was that whatever the scroll said, there would be a moment during the day’s filming where it’s sentiment would prove to be weirdly pertinent. I always thought you must be able to inspire friendship and loyalty of a higher order to receive a gift like that. I still get a kick out of thinking how much fun Walter would have got making those scrolls, and how much pleasure Anthony received every morning as he rolled ‘Professor Murch’s Thought for the Day’, around his head.

The last time I saw Ant, we bumped into each other on a bridge in Austin, Texas. I was shooting a movie, and he was in town to support his son Max at a film festival. He was so proud, and so easy in the role of not-being-the-centre-of-attention. It was an honour to know Anthony Minghella- he was a man of huge achievement who wore his success as lightly as anyone could. I miss him terribly.

– Jack Davenport, September 2008

A few of my favourite things

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21.4.2012

I’m emotional, suggestible, and – if not exactly superstitious – a romantic believer in signs and auguries.

So, today, as possibly the last ever professional game of football takes place at Fratton Park in Portsmouth, I celebrate this remarkable coincidence.

Growing up in Ryde, Isle of Wight, there was only one football club I could support: Portsmouth. My father lived in Portsmouth in the 1930s as a boy, and remembers the huge crowds, the FA Cup pride, and still follows Pompey to this day, at 90 years of age. My brother Anthony inherited this affection for the club, as, inevitably, did I.

We used to take “the football boat” from Ryde, and when Anthony’s fortunes improved, he would buy us ‘posh’ tickets in the middle of the South Stand. (Anybody who has been to Fortress Fratton will know that the word ‘posh’ can only be applied in the loosest sense, but that is very much part of its charm.) When Anthony died, my sister and I toyed with the idea of keeping his season ticket going, leaving his seat symbolically empty. Pompey is part of our story: our history, and, hopefully, our future. We’ll see.

WeddingInLugnano609In recent times, I have taken to spending a part of my year in Umbria, Italy, just north of Rome. There is no family connection there, just a love of the place. I have found an increasing sense of belonging in a wonderful hilltop town on our doorstep called Lugnano in Teverina. When I recently went to report a burglary to the police there, the carabiniere made me describe everything to him in painstaking detail, enjoying my comic struggle with Italian, before revealing that he knew everything already: word gets round in a town that small. You either love that kind of thing or you hate it, and I love it. It’s a totally brilliant community.

Finally, I adore red wine. I know next to nothing about white. But a wine dealer friend, the excellent Sebastian Peake, forced a case of a particular white on me a few years back. It’s a vermentino and it is a revelation, a small shipment from heaven. I associate it with a physical release of tension – that tightness in the pit of the stomach that tough days can induce dissolves with the first glug of this particular cool, minerally (but smooth) wine. Actually ‘dissolves’ isn’t the word. The tension snaps away before the wine even hits the back of the throat, in what can only be a pavlovian response to its aroma.

These are small things, I know, but the heart is somehow enriched by them. The community of club, of shared memory, or of a few hundred people in a hilltop in Italy who know your business. The way a flavour can become a friend. In the end these small things come to define us. Our habits and our homes. The places where we will be missed. The tables at which we no longer sit. The choice of wine no longer exercised.

I don’t know. I like small things. If, as Hume suggested we are just bundles of memories, then perhaps the small things, those tiny snippets of moments we can smell, are the most important elements of selfhood. The briny post-nasal hit of Portsmouth Harbour, up the ramp to the platforms and herding onto the Fratton train. The warm embrace of community. The bliss of wine unwinding. Elusive things. Intangibles. Spaces where we once were. Whiffs of us.

I mentioned a startling coincidence, and here it is. I won’t make too much of it. I won’t indulge my romantic side. But it feels appropriate today, when the future of Portsmouth Football Club hangs in the balance, and tens of thousands of hearts on the south coast may forever be broken, to share it with you: a common thread between some of my favourite things.  It’s as if the gods meant it all to be. Play up Pompey.

The logo of Portsmouth Football Club.

The coat of arms of Lugnano in Teverina.

The wine label.