First
of all, congratulations on winning the DGA Award for feature
directing.
After ten years of writing plays for Britain's stage and radio, and then television scripts for such English programmes as Inspector Morse and The Storyteller, Anthony Minghella was given the opportunity to direct his first film, Truly, Madly, Deeply, from his own screenplay in 1991. Thanks to the acclaim of that small BBC-financed feature ("the thinking person's Ghost," it was proclaimed by enthusiastic critics), the British-born Italian suddenly found himself known Ñ and in demand Ñ in the US as a director. He next was hired to helm the script for Mr. Wonderful, shot in New York, two years later. That romantic comedy proved to be a learning experience for him Ñ in more ways than one.
After that, Minghella labored for two years adapting Michael Ondaajte's allegedly unfilmable novel, The English Patient, into a screenplay. With the help of noted producer Saul Zaentz, and then Miramax (which stepped in when original distributor Twentieth Century Fox bowed out), he was able to complete his vision of the film Ñ but not without a grueling four-months-plus of production on two continents. The result, as we all know, was critical and popular acclaim for The English Patient, as well as several guilds' and Academy Award honors, not the least of which was a Directors Guild of America Award and an Oscar for Minghella's direction.
A few days after his DGA Award win, the DGA Magazine caught up with Anthony Minghella over breakfast at the Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills for a long chat about The English Patient, his career, the role of a writer-director, his philosophy of filmmaking and the importance of remaining true to one's personal voice.
First
of all, congratulations on winning the DGA Award for feature
directing.
Thank you. It was great for me. I felt so honored, so blessed by that award. It's exasperating the way it gets parlayed into Academy Award significance, whereas for me, the significance was to win that award. I was just thrilled. And I can't tell you what it meant for me as a validation of The English Patient and the work in the film. I'm a firm believer in guilds, and this recognition from the Directors Guild means a huge amount to me.
Did you ever think that you'd receive such recognition on only your third feature?
When [producer] Saul [Zaentz] and I began talking about this film four-and-a-half years ago or longer, we dreamt, as all filmmakers dream, about making a film that would excite us and move us and be the kind of film we would enjoy seeing ourselves. In terms of what my expectations were, my expectations were of surviving. I felt like I was clinging to the edge of a precipice nearly every day on this film -- as a writer and as the director and then in the post production phase. It was such a monumental task that all I thought about was what was in front of me the next day, which was always, for me as an inexperienced director, a new and testing obstacle.
I know you started out as an academic and as a playwright and then moved into television and radio writing and then, suddenly, you were a director on a feature that you wrote. How did that come about?
Let me work backwards, rather than forwards. One thing is very clear to me -- that the writing process in film is a continuous one, and I mean that in a literal and a metaphorical sense, insofar as that not only does the writer need to work throughout the film process and into the cutting room, but also that the director is a writer in film. Essentially, the director is the author. I know that's a contentious remark. I'm a writer first and foremost, but it's quite evident to me that the camera is the second pen at work in the film. So, if you're interested in being a filmmaker, it seems imperative that you continue that writing process with a camera.
It's an absolutely organic process to go from being a writer to somebody who writes and directs film. There doesn't seem to be any dislocation to me in that role.
Were you a fan of the cinema?
I've always been entranced by the cinema and I've always wanted to work in it. And I suppose what happened was that I discovered, as a writer, that I had an affinity for working with actors. It seemed a necessary process to become involved directly with them in filmmaking. Also, before I became an academic, I studied in music, art, literature and history, and those elements seemed to me to make up a great deal of what is required for filmmaking. So, I've been able to find an activity in my life which harnesses all the things I'm interested in; a place where I think more of my passions can be corralled than in any other activity.
I don't mean to dilute the role of screenplay writing, I just know that as a director, I'm able to direct from the first day I start writing. And as a writer, I'm able to write on the last day I'm directing. That, to me, is a wonderful opportunity and I've grasped it with as much skill as I have and as much commitment to it as I can muster.
Why did you begin working in theatre?
I suppose there's a very simple answer to that, which is that there was nothing else available to me when I started writing in the early '80's. There was no film industry to speak of in England. And what little there was was so remote that I think nearly all writers, directors and actors in England begin their careers in the theatre because that's the dramatic arena available to them.
It's not accidental that Danny Boyle [Trainspotting] directed one of my early stage plays, and that my first experience of Mike Leigh [Secrets and Lies] was to walk onto his set as a young writer when he had a play on at Hampstead, and I was just about to have a play done myself. The theatre was our training ground.
Obviously, for film, that's a mixed blessing because theatre and film are very different forms of dramatic expression. What they both share, however, is a freedom of style that television hasn't embraced, in the sense that there's a fluidity of scene and transition and expression. Television favors naturalism. And film, in its structure, is not naturalistic. Nor, on the whole, is contemporary theatre. A great deal of what I've learned in the theatre is very valuable to me as a filmmaker. Not least is a real celebration of what actors can bring to both media, and how significant performances are.
Athough I'm delighted to make cinematic films, and I desperately want to make films on a large canvas, I think that ultimately, I'd rather watch an actor against a wall opening up to the inner life, than to look at any ravishing vista.
Tell me about Truly, Madly, Deeply, your feature debut.
Well, I'd worked with the same group of actors again and again -- particularly Juliette Stevenson, but also Alan Rickman, Michael Maloney, Colin Firth and a whole group of actors who've become part of a loose repertory company, and I'd started to write specifically for them. Juliette is somebody I think of as being, without question, one of the most talented actresses working. I felt she had been ajudicated as a formidable, classical Shakespearean actress and, although it's true to say that she's a remarkable actress on the stage, the sense of her being quite severe and cerebral as an actress seemed to me to be so far from the person that I've worked with and from the joy that she has as a human being, that I wanted to write something for her which showed the whole range of her skills.
The reason that I directed Truly, Madly, Deeply had a quite prosaic and revealing history. I had started a television series as a writer in England called Inspector Morse, which had become very successful and, as much as I had enjoyed doing it, it wasn't personal and I was struggling to make personal statements as a writer. With each successive year, the producers would come to me and ask me to do some more scripts, and I would always try to find some way of not doing it. The fifth season, they came again and I said, "You know, I can't do any more of this." And they said, "Well, what about if we ask you to direct one?" They knew that I was interested in directing and, incidentally, had begun as a director in the theatre before I became a writer.
So I was very, very tempted, but Inspector Morse was so popular in England, and so many people watched it, that I felt very nervous of being exposed in such a way.
Then the BBC had called me and said they were starting a film division. They wanted to know if I would I like to write -- and direct -- the first screenplay. And the truth is, I felt that if I directed a small BBC film, it would be a much safer place to begin than in the glare of Inspector Morse, so I made the decision to make Truly, Madly, Deeply -- not out of some act of bravery, but out of modesty in wanting to make my first film quietly.
And the irony is, of course, that that film then became the passport for me to become a filmmaker. It was seen by many, many more people than ever saw an episode of Inspector Morse and introduced me to America -- not as a writer, which is what I'd been all the time, but as a director.
So, I became one by default, really. It's an
interesting story of how fear can be as much of a compass as
courage in these things. And it's also a testimony to the power
of a working relationship, because I've always understood that in
dramatic work, you ride on the shoulders of your collaborators
and you're only raised as high as they can carry you. And I think
that I've been incredibly lucky to work with people who've
dignified my writing and my directing.
I find it interesting that of your three features, your first was an original screenplay, your second was from a script by other writers and your third was adapted from a novel. Which of those situations do you prefer, and how do they affect your directing the material?
Well, Truly, Madly, Deeply, which is a film that means an enormous amount to me as a personal statement, was a summary of the kind of work I had been doing as a writer -- which isn't to say that I don't perceive it as a film, but I think that it's celebrating an actress [Stevenson] and the nature of our working history together. I would be quite forlorn if that were to be the last personal film I'd made.
When I made Mr. Wonderful, I was delighted to have the option to make a film in America, to work in filmmaking on a slightly larger -- although still modest -- scale, in which I was able to learn some more of my craft. The studio [Samuel Goldwyn Company] had a perception of what the film should be, which wasn't entirely the same as my own. In a confrontational way, there was a certain amount of give-and-take in terms of trying to connect my vision with theirs, and I think there was some loss involved because ultimately, the dilution of the filmmaker's voice -- good or bad -- is unfortunate. In the compromise and the negotiation, there's an inevitable move towards the general and away from the particular, and I think that it's in the particular that films live or die.
I don't want to apologize for a film I'm happy to have made. But I know it's not a personal film, certainly not as personal as I would have chosen it to have been, despite the fact that I had a wonderful producer, Maryann Maloney, and a very good working experience. I worked hard on [developing] the script and, obviously, found ways of insinuating a great number of my own interests into the project. I'm of Italian origin [like the Annabella Sciorra character in Mr. Wonderful], and I wanted to try and bring some of that immigrant experience to bear on the material that Vicky [Polon] and Amy [Schor] had written. I also wanted to introduce an element that was very personal to me, which is the struggle to escape one's roots and the irresistable tug of one's roots. So, Annabella's character, who moves away from a blue collar environment to try and live in an academic one, absolutely parallels my own struggle with my father -- who's a great man; he's an ice cream seller who didn't have any education at all and came [to England] from Italy without anything -- and my own experience growing up living in an extremely blue collar world, which I tried to get as far away from as I possibly could as an adult, only to find that that's my home and my world and my family in every sense. The ironies of wanting to escape, only to arrive back precisely where you came from, but perhaps changed, is my own experience and I tried to color in the character of Anabella in that film with my own reconciling of a life of the mind and of one's roots.
So the whole story in the film -- her university life, her collision with the academic world, then her return and her attempt to marry the past and the present -- is something that I see as a personal journey as much as a fictional one in that film. But at the same time, the story structure and the impulse of the film doesn't belong to me at all, and I wouldn't want it to. When I look at the film, it seems to me to belong much more to the studio than it belongs to me.
What do you think you learned from that experience?
Perhaps that I'm not as good at making studio films as I am at making my own films, and that there's something to be said for nursing my own passions, wrongheaded or otherwise, and reconciling myself to my own voice. One of the things that we all struggle with is, first of all, identifying what our voice is, and then reconciling ourselves to it because often we want to be other filmmakers, other directors, other writers. This instinct to try to be somebody else, to try and trade in your voice for one that you admire more, is one that you ultimately have to resist.
What about adapting The English Patient?
One of the things that characterizes The English Patient is how idiosyncratic it is to my own taste and judgment. I think you have to live or die by that, and I made a very conscious decision to be more steely about pursuing a vision. And I was lucky to work with a producer like Saul [Zaentz], who not only supported the vision I had of the film, but he insisted on it, which is a very different thing. He didn't just defend it, he attacked me to insure that I had a vision, and for that I'm so much in his debt.
Although The English Patient is an adaptation, it feels by far the most personal film I've made because it doesn't have the reticence of Truly, Madly, Deeply in terms of its directing ambitions. And at the same time, despite that fact that I was adapting somebody else's book, there was so much space in that project for me to work, there was so much opportunity for me to write as a writer, and not as an editor, that I see as many of my preoccupations and follies at play in The English Patient as I do in Truly, Madly, Deeply. I think that, despite the differences in scale, surface quality and production value in the two films, they seem to be intrinsically related. They have the same preoccupation with healing and damage and the capacity that people have to hurt and heal each other in the name of love. The same focus on small details of behavior, the same investment in what an actor can tell you in a film. They both give over a great deal of the weight of the event to performance and they're also, I think, ultimately more concerned with the humanity of cinema, than with anything else.
They're human films, and I think that's true with Mr. Wonderful as well. I've tried not to judge the behavior in the work that I do; if a writer or director judges behavior, it gives nothing for the audience to do. It closes the moral circle of the film, and presents and demonstrates feeling and emotions, rather than asking you to participate in the struggle that people have.
Do you think you ever would direct another screenplay that wasn't yours?
It's very unlikely that I'll direct anyone else's screenplay in the future, because I think it's inappropriate, ultimately, for the director to trample on the vision of the writer, or to try and appropriate that vision. It's forcing material into places where it naturally doesn't want to go, forcing a genre perhaps to accommodate more than it's able to. It seems to me to be a much more sensible and sane route to develop material that either comes directly from me, or from a source other than a screenplay.
You prefer being a writer-director.
The advantage I have when I walk on a set with my own writing is that I know every beat and impulse and nuance of it because it's come directly through me, and so there's nothing I don't know about the screenplay. It means I'm free to let go of it completely.
I was talking to [actor] James Woods, and he said that he's always found that writer-directors are the least preoccupied with the writing because they know that the writing is transitional, that it's part of a longer journey.
But I also think there are lots of incredible directors out there who can direct screenplays, who know what it is to animate other people's writing. I don't have that experience and I don't know if I have that skill. I think it's a very different skill from directing your own work. I'm enormously respectful of those directors who know how to respect the writer and still leave their signature on their movies. And I think of directors like Sydney Pollack and Mike Nichols -- directors I admire very much working now who have a very particular style as directors, and yet know how to bring the best out of the writers they work with. That's what they're good at. I think that my small piece of ground to plow involves generating the material myself.
You spoke of the similarities between Truly, Madly, Deeply and The English Patient concerning love, healing, cruelty and betrayal. In watching your films again, I realize that Mr. Wonderful fits in with that theme as well. In the first film, you have Alan Rickman coming back from the dead and Juliette Stevenson is truly, madly, deeply in love with him, but it turns out he came back to push her into continuing on with life, and with Michael Maloney, at the end. In Mr. Wonderful, you've got the premise that Matt Dillon is trying to marry off ex-wife Annabella Sciorra to avoid the alimony payments, only to come around and fall back in love with her. In The English Patient, too, Kristin Scott Thomas' husband kept allowing these situations to occur where she would be alone with Ralph Fiennes. All three deal with the idea of pushing the women characters into a kind of healing betrayal...
You've done your homework. It's very disconcerting to realize how narrow a vein one is investigating as a writer and as a filmmaker. I probably shouldn't know too much about those things.
But I think fiction has some obligations. It's very hard to explain why it is that human beings sit in dark rooms and watch other people pretending to feel things and do things and say things. And it's a very rare moment when anyone ever questions why there are films, why there are plays, why there are pieces of literature. The only answer that made any sense to me is that we have fiction in order to enlarge experience. We only have a very small series of relationships ourselves, so we look to fiction to give us some way of measuring our experience against the way that other people may respond in similar circumstances, or in circumstances we can't hope to experience ourselves, so that we become larger in some ways as individuals.
Stories exist in order to do two things: to enlarge experience and also to force us into perspectives that we're not otherwise afforded. We can't be the jilted husband, the wronged wife, the dying woman, the detective and the murderer in our own experience, but we can be through the prisms of fiction. So if films or plays or novels are working, we're forced to inhabit perspectives we could never experience in our own lives.
What you would want from a piece of fiction is for it to make all of us less misanthropic and more generous toward the experience of being human, which isn't the same thing as endorsing adultery, or murder or cruelty. But it's a reminder that there is no secure moral framework that is available to us, that we are the sum of our choices and that our choices, on the whole, are made for the best possible reasons. The cruelty of being alive is that in the pursuit of our own morality, we seem so easily to trample over other people's. We seem so efficient in damaging others. And that's the world I feel I live in and I want to rehearse it for others.
I feel strongly that the one obligation that makers of fiction have is to try to tell the truth as best as they understand it about the experience of being alive.
What was it that drew you to make The English Patient into a film?
First of all, it's the richest piece of literature I can remember reading in recent times; rich in its ideas, its images, its meditations and its journey, which is so transporting. I love the book, and that's a very useful emotion to have when your setting off on a complex project.
There's such a striving in the novel to make connections between the sum of individual action and history. It says that history is not something going on outside a room, it's the sum of the personal action and choice. In times of impending war, the membrane between personal behavior and the public world in history is much finer and so it's much easier to detect the relationship. Obviously, in this story, the personal betrayals and the historical betrayals are the same thing, so that really intrigued me because it's a preoccupation I've had for a long time before I encountered Michael Ondaajte's writing.
That seems to me to be the perfect material for filmmaking because the sentence of filmmaking is not made up of nouns and adjectives and verbs and adverbs, it's made up of shots and sizing and positions. So you're able and obliged to make connections between the small and the large, between the contraction and expansion of the iris, which is what the sentence of filmmaking is.
Also, I thought [The English Patient] was such an opportunity to work on this [larger] scale because the danger is that you get compartmentalized so quickly that people think they know who you are from the first piece of your work that they come across. Every piece of work I was offered or encouraged to pursue after Truly, Madly, Deeply was miniature because that was that film is. It's a miniature film, but my instincts have much more do to with the cinema of film.
I think it's evident in The English Patient that storytelling with images is as exciting to me as language, but because I'm an academic, because I'm a writer, the quite natural estimation of me would be that I would be interested in literary films or films in which language is most potent. In fact, as a writer I always thought that dialogue is the least interesting part of the job. It's often in the lapses between language, in the distance between what people want to say and what they do say, between the emotion and the stated position [that I find most interesting]. Those things preoccupy me a great deal more than epigrams or fine writing. Not only that, but I think that the architecture of writing -- what scene happens next, where a scene begins, who's in the scene -- excites me more to talk about and to investigate than any one line in a film.
What I loved in this project is that I knew that I would have to go away and bring back visual material that would tell the story at least as powerfully as anything that anybody said. That opportunity to make a film on a canvas which was a painter's canvas and not a writer's one was a real thrill and a real challenge to me.
The visuals and the entire look of the film were outstanding, but what stood out the most for me was the editing, the production design and the cinematography. Did you work very closely with Walter Murch, Stuart Craig and John Seale, respectively?
Yes. The most exciting part of this film was in the cutting room because, first of all, I was working with a master: Walter Murch. It's very hard not to bow down in the presence of someone like Walter because his challenges and his arguments were so exciting and so rigorous that it was a constant education and joy to me. The struggle to make sense of a film is the best reason to be doing it. We focused on transitions almost every day -- what the film required and how to best braid the different narratives so that they felt seamless. The work he did on the sound with his collaborators -- Pat Jackson and the other people there -- to make up the sounds was fabulous also.
I think Stuart's work in the film is unsung for the best possible reason -- because it's invisible. This is a man who is absolutely involved with every set-up; there's no accidental detail in the frame. You're not conscious when you watch The English Patient of how designed the film is, but it's completely designed in the strictest sense. Often what appeared to be location shots were actually constructed. There is no world, so you're constructing. There is no Cairo, 1935-36 to go and find. There is no desert with a cave of swimmers that we could get to. And so we had to make everything. We made a church. We made a monastery. We found a garden we liked, we found a set of stairs we liked and we found some trees we liked and then around that we designed a building on the stage and on location. I felt often in this film as if he were teaching me that the responsibility to directing is to create a world. His work was vital.
With John, you have the luxury of having a cinematographer who literally becomes your eye. We met many, many times and scouted the film together with Stuart. We were able to come up with some quite solid ground rules for the filmmaking and those were largely connected with color and palette, whereby a certain set of colors were reserved for the desert and all scenes connected with Cairo and Africa, and another set of colors and light was reserved for Italy. The rule of thumb we came up with was to imagine that the desert was made by a graphic designer, where the images were simple and bold and reflected in some way the purity of the desert where there are very few colors and very few lines. There are very strong horizontals, very few verticals and a starkness of look. John had to produce those images.
One of the things that kept occurring to me while I was making the film was that in a novel, you have this great facility at your disposal, where you can write a single line and the audience fills in [the rest]. That's the joy of reading -- one sentence can evoke pre-war Cairo. It has to mention a scent or describe a piece of architecture, or the way a woman walks, and the mind develops that into a full-fledged image.
Film is the most prosaic medium around because you turn the camera on and if there's nothing in front of it, it doesn't record it. There's nothing suggestive about the camera. It's literal. It records the information available with the lighting. And so we had to create from scratch a world that was as transporting to the viewer as Michael's book was to the reader.
John was responsible for that. It was 124 days of principle photography; it was relentless. We were moving the whole time. We had very few facilities. We were trying to make a huge film on a modest budget. He was the operator as well as the DP, and it was an enormous test of his determination to pull the film off. He's absolutely indefatigable as a co-worker.
The film certainly has an amazing look to it...
What's great, of course, is that all these people are being recognized. The various guilds have been very quick to celebrate the work and I think it's marvelous that John and Stuart and Walter have won their respective guild awards. There's one person's name in the front of the film, who is the filmmaker, and then there's a whole lot of credits at the end -- and they are the filmmakers as well. The orchestral analogy is the perfect one. Every member of the orchestra is a vital element in the music, and the job of the conductor is simply to bring the best out of all of them. My job is to give them a score, but I'm not playing anything.
A lot has been written about the struggle to get The
English Patient done with Fox, and then Miramax stepping into the
breach and saving the day. What is your take on that?
I have a very strong take on all of this. It's untrue to say that Fox pulled out of the film. I think what happened was that there was too much distance between our view of the film as filmmakers and what they saw as their responsibilities as film sellers, which was ultimately that their evaluation of the film was lower than ours. They wanted to give less money than we [needed] to make the film with. It was a divorce on irreconcilable differences; and I think it was a mutual divorcing rather than an abandonment, which is how it's been characterized in the press. And I feel badly in a way that Fox has taken unnecessary and injudicious flack for that. It's just this fight between this scale of budget and what the studio thinks it's getting for that investment.
As far as I'm concerned, the mistake was that they underestimated two things. One was the appropriateness of my casting choices. Our mantra was, "Don't use a star to introduce this film to an audience. Make the film the star." And that's exactly what happened. It didn't need a film star for the film to work. In fact, in many ways, Saul and I both felt a film star would puncture the skin of the film, that it would become personality-oriented and people would be viewing our film with the obstacle of a film star rather than the blessing of a film star.
And the second thing is that there's no button on their calculator for emotion. When they're doing their numbers, it's very hard to imagine the emotional impact of the film at the point where it exists only on 120 pieces of paper. I was convinced that the film would not only be ravishing to look at, but emotionally ravishing as well, and that the audience is hungry for that and desperate to be treated as grown-ups. I think the idea that you make films that appeal to you as a filmgoer got lost somewhere in the Hollywood equation because, understandably, they've had such marvelous results when they've let go of that equation. Ultimately, the awards and accolades are secondary in their minds to the accounts at the end of the year -- and their accounts are very healthy.
Thank God, they were wrong.
What About Miramax?
Thank God for Miramax, because what's absolutely extraordinary about Bob and Harvey [Weinstein] is that they have no fear. They're not looking over their shoulders to account to anybody, not even Disney, for what they want to do. They don't work from fear, they work from excitement and conviction and they were excited and convinced by the screenplay and by our plans for the film. They focused their energies on how to introduce the film to an audience, which they've done magnificently. They've been marvelous colleagues. And they're being amply rewarded for that faith.
I think that's a lesson -- if you invest in filmmakers, there's potentially a great reward. The Barton Fink scenario doesn't have to apply, which is that you take your Barton Fink and try to make him into somebody else. On the whole, it seems better if you take your Cameron Crowes or your Scott Hickses or Mike Leighs and say, "Oh, good, I'm working with Cameron Crowe or Scott Hicks or Mike Leigh, and that's why they're here." And not to be surprised when you get a Cameron Crowe or a Scott Hicks or a Mike Leigh film back, which is what so often happens. There no point in investing in an Anthony Minghella and saying, "My God, I've got an Anthony Minghella film. What do I do?" Miramax's great triumph is that they invest in filmmakers because they want their films.
Speaking of an Anthony Minghella film, what is your next project?
I'm looking to make a film of a radio play called Cigarettes and Chocolate, which I wrote about eight years ago. It's about a woman who stops talking. It's the one piece of writing that I'm most proud of, and it's also the most personal piece of writing of mine. The idea of the film is that one day this woman stops talking, apparently for no reason. And all the people around her come to the conclusion that it's something they've done, only to find out that the reason she's stopped talking has nothing to do with any of them.
I'm also working with Sydney Pollack's company, Mirage, on The Times of Mr. Ripley, which I've adapted from Patricia Highsmith's book. That's a film I want to make very much. Sydney's been a great mentor and guide to me. He was very supportive through Truly, Madly, Deeply and I became friends with him. I invited him up to the cutting room with The English Patient, and he read every draft of the script and I felt delighted in his wisdom.
And there are all kinds of other things on the horizon -- the utmost of which, to be honest with you, is to go home because I have this obsession with the fact that home is the only place where you can make proper choices. And I haven't been home for over two years, so I don't know what is a good step for me. I think the one thing I must not do is become paralyzed by The English Patient, because I think somebody's written quite cogently about the phenomenon of directors becoming marooned by success. And given that I'm so early on in my filmmaking career, the best thing I can do is to make some films and not worry too much about the other end of the process; just keep learning about the business of filmmaking.
Who would you cite as your influences as filmmakers?
Billy Wilder recently told me how much he admired [The English Patient], while I was able to tell him at some length how much I admired him and how much he had led the way for so many directors of my generation. I think he's a wonderful filmmaker and I'm a great fan of his. And Fred Zinnemann's From Here to Eternity is a film which has a great deal to say about the way I made The English Patient.
But chiefly, I would say that the films which have influenced me have come out of Italy, the ones that I was brought up and raised on -- the films of Fellini,Visconti, DeSica, Rosellini and the Taviani Brothers I think are wonderful filmmakers. The Tree of the Wooden Clogs is a film that I've gone back to again and again in my life. I Vitelloni, Fellini's biographical film, is probably my favorite film. I've discovered that I've aways gone to Italy as an inspiration, and also it's where my sensibility resides.
And finally, the cinema I find to be the most exciting at the moment is Chinese. And I think the greatest living filmmaker is Zhang Yimou, the director who made Raise the Red Lantern, Ju Dou and Red Sorghum. He is a masterful director of image and actor.
From your brief but celebrated experience, do you have any advice to give to young filmmakers today ?
Well, one is to make peace with your own voice. That's one thing I've learned. The other one is that perseverance furthers, as the Chinese say. Your will is your best ally. If you try to second guess what will work, you're lost. The minute you surrender your taste to the taste of others, it's over. It's the deaf ear and the hearing ear; you have to have one ear that is so wide open to advice and to other people's wisdom, and one ear that is so deaf to invasion. It's just learning whom to let in the deaf ear and whom to let in the hearing ear, and that's a trick I don't think any of us ever learn.
Tomm Carroll is the editor of the DGA Magazine.
