Anthony Minghella

Speaker 10:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive. For rights reasons we've had to shorten the music. The programme was originally broadcast in nineteen ninety seven, and the presenter was Sue Lawley.

Presenter0:31

My Castaway this week is a playwright and film director. Brought up on the Isle of Wight in a close family of Italian descent, he claims never to have felt wholly English. He went to Hull University first as a student, then as a teacher, and started writing successfully for radio and television. He wrote the first Inspector Morse and won an award from the London Theatre Critics for his first West End play, Made in Bangkok. The huge success of his first major hit, the film Truly Madly Deeply, which he wrote and directed, took him to Hollywood, and the familiar difficulties of the artist battling against commercial hype.

Presenter1:05

The next project he vowed he would make his own, and he did, triumphantly. It was called The English Patient, a film which has won nine Oscars. He is Anthony Mingella. It um it was a great triumph, Anthony, and a beautiful film, but in that sense, of course, it was do or die for you, because it was absolutely what you wanted to make, wasn't it?

Anthony Minghella1:26

Well, that's right. I'd had an experience in Hollywood, uh in between Truly Maddie Deeply and that film where I felt that I'd learned that it's easy to make mistakes making films, it's better to make your own mistakes. And I felt that I'd surrendered the compass somehow. And once you've given up your own taste in film making, it's very hard to know what's good and what's not good.

Presenter1:43

'Cause you're trying to second guess the money men or the audience or whatever.

Anthony Minghella1:44

I was trying to behave myself actually and I felt quite green when I went there and I wanted to be helped and and directed and by the time I'd finished that film that I'd gone way off course really. So I thought that I should go home and think very carefully about what I was going to do and follow my own passions and that's what I did with this film.

Presenter2:02

But you must have come under enormous pressure. I mean, we're told that that that the money men of Hollywood always want you to have the standard big names. I mean, they they tried to make you have to me more, didn't they?

Anthony Minghella2:12

Well, what happened was, I think, is that the money they're prepared to give you for a project diminishes in concert with the casting choices you make. And I felt very strongly that I wanted actors that I believed in who were committed to the project and who weren't necessarily big marquee names. They disagreed rather politely with me and the money kept getting less and less and less until there wasn't enough to make the film. And I was faced with a very clear decision either to cast one of the actresses or actors they had in mind or give up. And we actually sent people home from Italy. We sent 150 people home three weeks before we were due to start making the film.

Presenter2:46

You did get the people you wanted in the end. Did you rave Fiennes, Christopher? And Scott Thomas, July Bernache.

Anthony Minghella2:48

Did you know that?

Anthony Minghella2:50

Kristen Scott Thomas, Julia Binoch, yeah.

Anthony Minghella2:53

Exactly the cast.

Presenter2:54

So how did you get it back together again if you were sending people home?

Anthony Minghella2:57

Well, I went to New York and I went to Los Angeles and I got down on my knees in front of everybody that I knew and said, You must help me and Harvey Weinstein who runs MirrorMax Films read the screenplay and said, I'll do it.

Presenter3:07

The film is unashamedly emotional, isn't it? And you that seems to me to be very much part of you that you don't mind putting all that on view. It's not very English.

Anthony Minghella3:18

It isn't English. I've never felt particularly English. Although, peculiarly, my own sense of what I'm doing is not quite the same as is often the case with writers or directors and their audiences. What I think I'm doing is not necessarily what's received by an audience. I think the film is quite cruel, actually, and quite austere. It carries this lava of emotion on quite a formal surface. And one of the reasons why in my life I've loved Bach so much is because I think he too has this combination of an extremely formal structure and apparent austere sound that he produces, but underneath that there's this emotion boiling away. And I think that one of the purposes of fiction is to exercise the emotional muscle. You know, I think that's what we go for. We go to think and to feel. And I think that feeling somehow in England is at a premium. People are embarrassed to feel in public. Whereas I think that that's the luxury of fiction. You can inhabit areas of existence which are not your own, but which

Anthony Minghella4:19

Afford you the possibility of being able to go to places naked really. And I feel my own nakedness in the work that I'm doing. In fact, one thing which is absolutely true is that I never watch anything that I've been associated with after I've done it because I feel so exposed, I feel like I'm standing there for everybody to look at. So I haven't seen the English patient since I finished it.

Presenter4:39

Tell me about your first record.

Anthony Minghella4:41

The first record I've chosen is Glenn Gould, who's been a hero for me all of my adult life, playing the aria from the Goldberg variations.

Anthony Minghella4:49

He was an extraordinary, extraordinary musician, and the combination of Bach in him is irresistible to me. And he has this ability to play music as if he's actually creating it. There's a sense of the music being formed by his fingers.

Presenter5:56

Glenn Gould playing part of the Aria from Bach's Goldberg variations. Bach very much appears in your work, Anthony Mangela. That piece was in the English Patient, there's Bach in Truly Madly Deeply and Cigarettes and Chocolate and You said that music is a trampoline for you. What does that mean?

Anthony Minghella6:15

Well, I I think that dignifies my enthusiasm for music really. I mean I I've been a rather mediocre musician all my life. I've written music. I listen to music when I'm writing. I surround myself with music and I think it's helped me structure the work I've done. I mean I think of the English patient in a musical form rather than a dramatic form.

Anthony Minghella6:36

It's a sort of symphonic piece of writing in the sense there are themes which recur and and and there are variations of those themes rather than the manner of the Goldberg variations. And that's why I used the piece of music, because it seemed to me to be the great clue. For instance

Presenter6:48

I thought the great clue there was the Hungarian folk music which the Count plays to Catherine when they're in bed in Cairo.

Anthony Minghella6:54

Well that's right, because when I'm researching, particularly period films, I try and research via music. I think it's a great key into a culture. And when I was working on the English patient, I listened to as much Hungarian folk music as I could as well as Arabic music. And I stumbled across Marta Sebastienne, she works with a group called Musicash. And the funny thing is that I thought I was listening to an Arab song. And as the English patient plays so much with issues of identity, it seemed to me extraordinary that I should find a piece of music which in itself was a kind of mystery. And so not only did I listen to it a lot when I was writing, but I also incorporated it as a sort of narrative piece.

Presenter7:30

And what about the people who take part in the project with you, the actors and the other people involved in the film? Do they also have to take on board this feeling about the music? Or is it just something that you do?

Anthony Minghella7:43

Well, it's a private thing for me when I'm writing. But certainly, for instance, in the scene in English Patient where the nurse Hannah, played by Juliet Pinoche, administers this lethal morphine injection to the English patient. I actually had that Goldberg variation playing during the scene because I I felt that was the mood that I'd created that that moment in and it was a mood that could help the actors find the tone of the scene. So I try and use music as much as I can. So yes, it's played a huge part in my life, a huge part as a performer and also as a writer.

Presenter8:16

You were in the band, weren't you?

Anthony Minghella8:17

I was in a vand.

Presenter8:19

Huh.

Anthony Minghella8:19

Pop band.

Presenter8:20

Confess, confess.

Anthony Minghella8:22

Well, when I was at school, all I wanted to do was play music. I played in bars, I played in a jazz band, I played in a pop band, I played by myself in folk clubs. I found that music was a way of explaining something about myself to myself. I was quite a tortured adolescent. I think I sulked a lot. I remember patrolling the beaches at Ride on the Isle of Wight, feeling very sorry for myself. And I think that music was my escape route. I felt I found a voice literally by singing.

Presenter8:49

Tell me about your next record.

Anthony Minghella8:51

John Martin is a voice that I've listened to since I was seventeen or eighteen. I tried very hard to sing like him.

Anthony Minghella8:59

And he too sings entirely from the heart and is not ashamed of the degree of passion that he feels.

Speaker 49:11

If you love me.

Speaker 49:14

Till my eyes could no more shine for yell

Speaker 49:17

If you're walking beside me all the long way home.

Speaker 49:23

If you're what he's dead over

Speaker 19:24

Yo

Speaker 49:27

Time.

Speaker 49:29

I could love you more.

Presenter9:35

John Martin and Couldn't Love You More.

Presenter9:38

Give me a a feel for your family, then, Antony, surrounded by lots of females, strong with women about you.

Anthony Minghella9:45

Well, I'm one of five children. I have a a much younger brother and three extremely powerful and formidable sisters, marvellous sisters, and my parents. And wh when I was growing up on the Iowa Vietnam my grandmother also lived with with us and she was probably the most important person in my growing up. She was a woman whose husband had left her and she never stopped loving him and never stopped expecting him to come home. He'd gone off to Ireland.

Anthony Minghella10:12

And for thirty years I think she just was waiting for him. And it it caused in her because she was an extremely generous and and spiritual woman, it caused a rather sort of distorted world view which she shared with me every morning. We used to go to the beach together. She loved to paddle.

Anthony Minghella10:28

And uh in fact I wrote a play about this this um procession we took every morning.

Anthony Minghella10:34

Because it struck me that she paddled in water and in some ways it was

Anthony Minghella10:39

Connected to the idea that drowning people remember their whole lives as they drown. Well, I felt that she was remembering a piece of her life every morning by paddling.

Presenter10:47

This was a little like drowning.

Anthony Minghella10:48

A little like drowning. And she was the first person close to me who died and it had a tremendous impact on me.

Presenter10:55

But you all live together in in the cafe, I think, or be above or behind the cafe.

Anthony Minghella10:59

Until I was about ten, my parents had a very small cafe in Ryde and uh my sister Joya and I and then later Adana, we all slept above the shop as it was called. And my parents who worked almost twenty-four hours a day, three hundred and sixty-five days a year, would be downstairs and there was a little intercom and uh they could hear us and we could hear them in the kitchen.

Presenter11:22

Not a lot of privacy, then

Anthony Minghella11:24

But fun.

Presenter11:24

But fun, happy.

Anthony Minghella11:25

Absolutely. I mean, it was a public life. I mean, that's something that was very clear to me as I got older, that we'd lived out our entire life in public, because obviously our kitchen table was also the table for the restaurant. And obviously, it can't be very complex to work out why I then spent the next ten years of my life in the library or trying to live the life of the mind, because I'd felt that it had been impossible to have a second to myself all the way through growing up. But it was a kind of carnival, and it was extraordinary to be there. And I look back with great love for those times.

Presenter11:55

But if anyone had said, you know, this boy will become an academic, a university lecturer, your family, teachers, friends would have laughed, would they?

Anthony Minghella12:04

I think they were quite surprised about the turn that that occurred when I went to Hull to university because I was never a great student at school. But as soon as I got there, I felt so welcomed in this brand new department in Hull and surrounded by people who seemed to be interested in what I had to say and in what was personal to me and distinctive to me as opposed to what was necessary to pass an exam. And I flourished there. I was the worst kind of swat as a student. I went to every lecture, every tutorial for the whole time I was there. I was just passionately involved in being a student, and I was delighted they asked me to stay on there as a teacher.

Presenter12:34

Yeah.

Presenter12:38

Next record.

Anthony Minghella12:41

My wife ten years ago.

Anthony Minghella12:44

Eleven years ago now, when our son was one, I was working with the Royal Opera House and involved in a production of Turin Dot.

Anthony Minghella12:53

She wanted to go on the tour that they took to the forest. They went to to uh Japan and Korea and our son was very small and so she asked me if I would go with her and I was the babysitter on this tour. So I went to this production of Turin Dot many, many times and it it it's indelibly etched into my psyche and this particular aria is a particularly beautiful piece of music.

Speaker 413:18

It will save you more.

Speaker 413:36

Yeah.

Presenter14:15

Barbara Hendricks as Liu singing part of her Aria Tulque di Gelsei Cinta from Act Three of Puccini's Turrendott with the Vienna Philharmonic conducted by Herbert von Karrion. You stayed on at Howell, you you taught drama, theatre history, medieval theatre, dramatic literature. But you said um you had no instinct to write plays, you only wanted to write songs, is that right?

Anthony Minghella14:37

When I was there as a student particularly, I wanted to write songs. And then I d as with most things things in my life, I stumbled into writing plays. I wrote something around a series of songs I'd written. I adapted a tiny short story by Gabriel Giuseppevici called Mobius the Stripper. And it was on in the university and was quite successful. And I got a call from a writer called Alan Plater, who was enormously significant in my life, because he called me and asked me if I wanted to go to his house for a cup of coffee. I'd never been to a real writer's house before, and he invited me, and at that time he was extremely, still is, extremely prominent in television and drama.

Speaker 114:58

Uh

Presenter15:10

He'd originally written Zcar for a semblance.

Anthony Minghella15:11

That's right. He said, so you're a playwright. I said, no, no, I'm a student at the university. He said, no, you're a playwright. I saw your play last night and we want to commission a play from you.

Presenter15:20

When was that then? Because you were in-half from seventy one to eighty one altogether, student and then teacher.

Anthony Minghella15:24

A student and then teacher? Uh it was I suppose in about uh seventy two I went actually, and it was about seventy five, early seventy six maybe.

Presenter15:32

But you still stayed there until'eighty one. What happened then to make you say, Right, that's it, I'm handing in my resignation?

Anthony Minghella15:39

Well, several things happened. One was that my work was beginning to be done. I started to write for a series called Maybrey, where I wrote a very important job for me because it was my first television job and it was also the first time I met Juliet Stevenson.

Anthony Minghella15:52

And also, I was in a very young marriage which went wrong.

Anthony Minghella15:57

And

Anthony Minghella15:58

Uh

Anthony Minghella15:59

which was a a a quite difficult time for me in my life. It was the first thing that I felt had gone really wrong for me.

Anthony Minghella16:07

And I had a very young child, a a year old daughter.

Anthony Minghella16:12

and they went to live in London and I felt that I didn't want to be a long w way away from them.

Speaker 116:17

Yeah.

Anthony Minghella16:19

And it was a difficult moment for me which proved to be full of blessings because I went to London, gave up my job, much to everybody's horror.

Anthony Minghella16:29

I committed absolutely to the writing life. I committed to trying to make my way in the theatre. I hadn't really been to London very often. And it also achieved something very important, which is that I was able to maintain a relationship with my daughter, who's been a few yards from me ever since, and it all worked out fine.

Presenter16:48

Tell me about record number four.

Anthony Minghella16:51

I have had a passion for the Matthew Passion box in Matthew Passion.

Anthony Minghella16:58

And in fact, this aria, Marketiechman Hetzer Rhein, is one that I know and I have this fantasy that one year at the Festival Hall on Good Friday when they're performing it, they will call out for a replacement and I'll put my hand up and say, I can sing this, I want to sing this. I've had many dreams about this, I've sung it in the shower many times, I I don't think I'm quite as good as Mati Salmanen who's singing this.

Speaker 417:21

Ah burden hurts a moment

Speaker 417:37

Hafen each while handsome Each wound Each wound.

Speaker 117:46

Please take love.

Speaker 417:59

I'll head each my hand up.

Presenter18:09

Mattie Salmanen singing the Aria Macher Diech Mein Herze Rhein from the Interment part of Bach St. Matthew Passion with the Munich Bach Orchestra conducted by Karl Richter, a piece around which you've written a whole play, Cigarettes and Chocolate, which has been broadcast here on Radio Four, in fact.

Presenter18:25

in which acted Juliet Stevenson. She's acted, I think, in ten of your plays, and most memorably, I think, in in Truly, Madly, Deeply.

Presenter18:34

Why is she such an ideal portrayer of your work? What is it about her?

Anthony Minghella18:40

I think that the great shock to me when I first met Juliet was that

Anthony Minghella18:44

She was the first actor I'd come across that when I wrote a line I heard the noise of the line, I heard the music of the line. When I heard her speak, she instinctively reproduced that. I felt that she was the voice I'd heard of women inside my head.

Anthony Minghella19:00

Uh and I started to write for her increasingly. I think everything I wrote after that had her in mind. Even made in Bangkok, I think, when I was writing it, I thought this is a j a Juliet Stevenson part.

Presenter19:11

You mention um Made in Bangkok, which was elected best new play by the critics, and so on. It seemed to be a great success, but in the end it it lost money. Y you lost heart then, didn't you?

Anthony Minghella19:22

I didn't lose heart, I just was very conscious of the fact that

Anthony Minghella19:27

It was a very serious play, and it was a large cast play.

Anthony Minghella19:31

And one of the the the characteristics of the writing that that I was producing for the theatre at that time was they were all big plays. And the consequences of that is that you have a huge wage bill every week, and that's why I think that The Made in Bangkok wasn't a financial success, even though it was a critical one.

Anthony Minghella19:46

I didn't so much lose faith as get distracted and then lose confidence in that I would love to go back to the theatre, I'd love to write another play, but it's 11 years since I wrote a play. And I think you lose the way of it. It's a very difficult thing to know what plays are now, what they're for. They're so much enthralled to the techniques of film and television. The audience they attract is a very particular one. And I always want to speak to a larger and less defined audience than the one that tells me that.

Presenter20:14

So you prefer the scope of of the big screen, but the small screen too?

Anthony Minghella20:19

Well, the game. I film I think and for a very simple reason, which is that the nature of film, the syntax of film, is small shots and large shots. It's intimacy and epic. And I'm very interested in the details of personal behaviour and the minutiae of it. But I also love the opportunity to look at the public world. And because the nature of film is it can give you a close-up or it can give you a long shot, then it lends itself perfectly to the kind of writing I produce, I think.

Presenter20:19

Film, really.

Presenter20:46

And you did your apprenticeship, as it were, for this kind of technique, on Morse, Inspector Morse, didn't you?

Anthony Minghella20:52

I wrote the very first one and then one per series for four years. And there's a it's an interesting story about Morse because I I was a reluctant visitor to that idea. A friend of mine, Kenny McBain, who died very soon after Morse began, but was really the person who initiated Morse, asked me to adapt the book. And I'd never made an adaptation before, and so I was quite nervous of doing it, but I did the first one. And what happened was around the fourth or fifth series, they came back to me and said, You must write one next year. And I said, I can't, I really can't. They said, Well, why don't you direct one?

Anthony Minghella21:24

And I said I'd think about it and the same very same day Robert Cooper, who'd been another longtime collaborator of mine, and Mark Shivers, called me and asked if I'd like to write a screenplay for Screen Two. And I said, well, I'd like to, but I'd been asked to direct and Inspector Morse and they said, well, why don't you direct this screenplay? And that was truly Madly Deepplay. And it was out of cowardice that I agreed to do that because I felt that so many people were watching Morse that if I screwed up a lot of people would know, whereas if I did this very small PBC film, perhaps nobody would notice.

Presenter21:52

Meckle number five.

Anthony Minghella21:55

Glen Gould again playing from Bach's sonata for Wau de Gamba. I I think I have every recording that Glen Gould ever made.

Anthony Minghella22:05

His life was extraordinary, his playing was extraordinary, and he, in a sense, made me listen to Bach in a particular way. He makes you rehear it, I think.

Anthony Minghella22:15

So much so that I had an idea to make a story uh in which people met up to play duets. And that was the tiny germ of an idea that became truly Matty Deeply, and this is the music they played on the film.

Presenter23:24

Glenn Gould and Leonard Rose playing part of the third of Bach's three sonatas for Viola de Gamba, number three in G minor, and it was played in truly madly deeply.

Presenter23:36

Just as Alan Rickman, the the the the lover returns um from the dead, as it were, behind um Juliet Stevenson playing the piano. For those who haven't seen it, it's about a woman whose lover dies and um she can't stop grieving for him and

Presenter23:50

In the end he he he comes back.

Presenter23:52

From the Dead, which is was a bold move, really. Stretching it a bit, wasn't it? Because it's really about the end of an affair, isn't it?

Anthony Minghella24:00

Well, I'd been working for two years on a series of short films for Jim Henson's company called The Storyteller, being suffused with the way the boldness of narrative ideas that occurs in fairy tales. People go to sleep for a hundred years, awoken by a kiss. A woman wants a child so badly she has a hedgehog for a son. And I think that had I not done that series, I couldn't possibly have thought about the structure of Trillium Adibi, the architecture of it, which is a fairy tale. It's if you want something so badly, then find out what happens if you get it. It was about the paralysis that happens when people get stuck in the past and their emotions, so they can't let go of things that have happened to them. This seemed to me to be the boldest way of describing and characterizing it. And it also has a kind of comedy implication, which was important to me, because it was so painful, the story.

Speaker 124:47

True.

Anthony Minghella24:51

That it needed some way of energizing wi with humour. I mean and I felt that the idea of all these ghosts turning up in somebody's flat unwanted uh

Presenter25:01

And being very chilly and having to have the heating turn on the market.

Anthony Minghella25:01

Yeah.

Anthony Minghella25:03

Exactly. Would would leaven um a serious piece of work.

Presenter25:06

But um

Presenter25:07

It was good, fruitful, emotional territory, and the the the kind of constipated English critics, I think, rubbished it a bit, and they called it sniffly snottily damply um in in instead of truly madly deeply.

Presenter25:20

which was incredibly unfair and in the end was proved quite wrong because it became an international hit. The Americans loved it. Now is that what the trick is? That

Presenter25:30

You've got to find a way if you're going to not stumble as so many English filmmakers have done when they've got to Hollywood. You've got to somehow.

Presenter25:38

Make an emotional piece, but make it with your own kind of integrity. Then you can cross the great divide.

Anthony Minghella25:46

I don't think there's any sense of purpose in the work that I do in terms of audiences. I I'm helpless in the face of my own voice. Sometimes I hate my own voice, but you can't elect it. It's the voice you're given. You can fight it. I think when I first started writing, I wanted to write like all of my heroes, like Beckett or Howard Barker, or you know, much cooler appraisers of life than I am. But if you cut me open, there's a certain emotional temperature and it leaks into every page and every character that I write, and there it is. And I think I've made some kind of reconciliation with the fact that what I want to see, which is after all what I write, what amuses me, what moves me, what makes me laugh, is there and I have to make peace with it.

Presenter26:29

More music.

Anthony Minghella26:30

I've chosen Van Morrison. I could easily have chosen every piece of music by Bach. I could easily have chosen every piece of music by Van Morrison. He has gone with me in any bag that I packed over the last ten years to any place I've gone to.

Speaker 426:54

Amen always

Speaker 426:59

Such a lady should last forever.

Speaker 427:07

We are in love with sure I'm Oh yeah.

Presenter27:16

Van Morrison, and here comes the night. The um the English patient carries with him a book, a copy of Herodotus, um the Greek historian, and it's stuffed with cuttings and tickets and notes and pictures and mementos and so on.

Presenter27:30

It's it's a lot of his life in there, and it's an important part of the film. Have have you got such a book?

Anthony Minghella27:37

I do have such a book. In fact, the Herodotus book was based on um a notebook that I carry around with me in the film.

Presenter27:45

It's a notebook or it's a book?

Anthony Minghella27:46

It's a it's a notebook. It's a hard buy I mean, I collect notebooks wherever I go. In fact, one of the bonding moments for Michael Andaje and I was that every time we went to a new city we would all d try and rush off and find a stationery shop so we could buy some more of our little books that we we use.

Presenter28:01

Just a jot down.

Anthony Minghella28:02

Jot down things, collect things. I've always done it. Most of the time it says things like, you know, um call mum ten o'clock. You know, I mean it it it's not anything grand, but sometimes it's a a quote or an idea that I've got.

Presenter28:02

Joe Downs

Anthony Minghella28:15

Um

Anthony Minghella28:16

The book also to me in the film represented Michael's book. It represented the novel. It was a reminder to me constantly that this was a literary piece of work. It was a very good idea.

Presenter28:25

Michael Londarchy, who wrote the English book.

Anthony Minghella28:26

Yes, that I loved the book and that we needed to honour it in the film and so on.

Presenter28:30

Honour it, you certainly did. But of course a lot of it ended up on the cutting room floor, didn't it? Because it's so complex, there's so many threads in it, you couldn't possibly have made a film that was absolutely true to the book in the literal sense.

Anthony Minghella28:43

No, nor did I try to. I mean, I I think the very first time I met Michael I said, I'm going to trample all over this novel and I love it, but there's no absolutely no way that I can collect it in a film. The film has to stand in its own right. People are not going to be sitting in the audience looking at the film over the pages of your novel.

Presenter28:59

And now are you inundated by people sending you what might be termed intellectual or heavy books?

Anthony Minghella29:05

Long book.

Presenter29:05

X Longbox.

Anthony Minghella29:07

I've been sent a lot of books you know, how nice it is to be in a position where people want you to read what they're writing and what they're publishing. And I've I feel fantastically charmed at the moment by what's going on in my life.

Presenter29:21

Why don't you write one of your own? Why don't you write a novel instead of a play or a screenplay?

Anthony Minghella29:28

Because I love the idea of my voice being mediated by other voices, I love the fact that in the dramatized fiction.

Anthony Minghella29:37

You're wrenched from one perspective to another. It's a much more healthy.

Anthony Minghella29:42

Form, I think, than any other, because it forces you as a writer to reconsider something you may have a very fixed opinion on, because you have to inhabit an opposing viewpoint. You have to inhabit all kinds of opposing viewpoints. It's why I think traumatic fiction is so important, because it means that a woman can consider a man's lot, a man can consider a woman's lot, a child.

Presenter30:02

You can do that in a novel.

Anthony Minghella30:04

But not in exactly the same way.

Presenter30:06

Well, there's less privacy in a novel, is that what you're saying? You you have to expose yourself directly on the page. You can't hide behind actors or anybody else.

Anthony Minghella30:15

You certainly can't hide behind actors in a novel, and you certainly can in the theatre or in film.

Presenter30:20

I could number seven.

Anthony Minghella30:25

Cheek to cheek, we talked earlier about the fact that I like to bring music onto the set to create and evoke a particular mood for a scene. And this was a wonderful scene in the film of Joy, one of the few times that the joy note came out. And this is where the other residents of the monastery in Tuscany take the English patient for a run around the garden in the rain. And even though it's completely out of context of historical context, it's the wrong period, this arrangement. It was just irresistible.

Speaker 430:58

Heaven, I'm in heaven.

Speaker 431:04

And my heart beats so that I can hardly speak.

Speaker 431:11

And I seem to find the happiness I see.

Speaker 431:18

When we're all together dancing cheek to cheek

Presenter31:26

Ella Fitzgerald and Irving Berlin's Cheek to Cheek. If you had to choose, and you know, that's the kind of programme this is, so we can ask these questions, between being a a film director or a writer, which would it be?

Anthony Minghella31:40

I think that when I'm making films, I'm the writer from the very first day of work to the last day, to the last day of the cutting room, and I think I'm a director from the first day of writing to the last day in the cutting room. I don't see the two things as mutually exclusive. I know that I want to make, I've made three films, I like to make 33, but I also wouldn't stop writing for that. Because I feel most myself when I'm alone and I'm writing. That's the time when I feel most connected to who I am.

Presenter32:06

So if you had to give one of them up, it would in the end reluctantly be the direction would it?

Anthony Minghella32:11

It would.

Presenter32:13

Tell me about your last record and what it means to you.

Anthony Minghella32:16

When I first went to Hull I I'd got so wrapped up in the noisy world of pop music and rock music and and and really had lost all contact with serious music which I'd learned to play as a as a child.

Anthony Minghella32:31

And WH Smith had a a a bargain basement sell out of all their records, and I ended up sort of walking away with a lot of Suprafon recordings for about a pound each, I think, including, unexpectedly, um a Janicek quartet. Um

Anthony Minghella32:47

I also owe a great deal of my understanding of music to listening to the radio. I think that the institution of radio in this country is so magnificent. It's absolutely the best thing about England. And when you're away a great deal as I am, then it's the thing that most registrates with me, what I miss about being in England. And this is a little thank you.

Presenter34:04

Part of Janicek's string quartet number one, the Kreitze sonata, played by the Smetna Quartet. If you could only take one of the eight, Anthony, which would it be?

Anthony Minghella34:14

The Matthew Passion.

Presenter34:15

Hmm.

Anthony Minghella34:15

It's the longest and the best from the mm.

Presenter34:17

I was going to say it's not the only reason it's the longest. What about your book as well as the Bible and Shakespeare?

Anthony Minghella34:23

I think I would take this uh all of uh if I could find a huge fat book which i accommodated all of Bach's writing for the piano.

Anthony Minghella34:31

And I'd have probably all the notes and uh um um comments in Italian which would force me to improve my Italian while I was busy trying to learn it. I I've always wanted to be able to play the Goldberg variations. I can pick my way terribly through the aria and I'd like to have a long good go at learning the other thirty-two variations.

Presenter34:51

And a luxury.

Anthony Minghella34:53

A piano to play them on.

Presenter34:55

Anthony Minghela, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your Desert Island disc.

Anthony Minghella34:58

Thank you very much.

Speaker 135:07

You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Islandists archive. For more podcasts, please visit bbc.co. uk slash radio four.