Anthony Minghella, Writer and Director, In His Own Words

A poetic collision of events.
A fluid image.
Intricacies of the body.
To hear and see –
deceptive of appearance,
like a sleight-of-hand.
A combination of values.
Visual muscle drifting from
magical place to mystery.
The dimensions of intensity
and integrity – charismatic.
A location design created to convince
Nature to cooperate.
From time to location, and back.
Synchronization within walls
of space-time looped backwards.
That intimate connection of spirit
by emotional tentacles;
the reaching touch of passionate certainty.

From laughter to tears, and back.
Happiness and agony.
A transition of fears.
The damage of pleasure and pain.
The close-up connection of images
periodic and tense in present and past.
Neither better nor worse.
The connection of remote geography,
boundary, territory, nationality.
A stupid allegiance to the tribe.
The fact of small connections
on a tribal basis.
A boundary-free state of mind,
but still hostage to tribalism.
A growing desire of personal cruelty
and aggression.

What a life might have been like
to a failed immigrant.
A double glazed dislocation of paranoia.
An expedition by an eager explorer.
A collation of scale,
and an understanding of it.
Resist repetition.
A jagged clipped attraction
of difficult communication.
The complexity and rhetoric of language.
Surrender – cut off from reality.
Mechanical constituents of the same –
pulled together.

An organic process of proliferation.
An author’s spoken painting
of multitudes of brushstrokes
in a teamwork of personal expression
with a connective filament.
No logic, no sanity.

(Love) an obsessive need.
Longing and the yearning
with an intensity of will.
Do you grow each moment,
or move in steady preoccupation?
Is it immediate reaction,
a stimulus response,
or a rush of rashness?
A mystery of disappointed intentions
which correspond and receive
and pay no attention to rules.
A brief location in time.
Retell the story to capture
the original beauty.
Refresh and infuse the new tale.

Love can be:
violent lethal and poisonous.
It can even involve murder.
The florid turmoil of rejection,
hating the ownership, which fuels
anger, jealousy and possession;
destroying all previous tenderness
with a sexual struggle.
A different love scene
has gifts and gestures and joy;
dreamy and romantic
with an inflection of moods.

Use a flex of tone
from lust to intimacy
unobserved in life.
The surround of sex – unadorned.
Nakedness is emotional and physical.
The rosary of likes and loves
in stolen relationships.
There is an assassination of feelings.
The tightness or easiness of emotion.
A private need in a public setting.
The walls and bars of circumstance.
A swooning sound – of being overcome by desire.
Choreograph your erotic actions
without a dissonant circumstance.
A volcanic release of a broken heart.
No time to tell variegated stories.
A quiet scene between two people
is more difficult than the noisy crowd.
Is friendship as resonant as love?
Stolen moments in public places.
Deflected echoes of a previous period.
Casting permutations on lists
of possibles and plausibles.

From simple to complicated
on a reduced financial basis.
Money centered mania
doesn’t always work.
Put two people together
in the metabolic situation
stirred by intimacy,
and see the dialectic
of that scene between them,
colonised by authority.
The strange magic of movies
is found in importance
at the beginning or the end.
Subterranean and subcutaneous rhythms.
A shift of focus in dramatic perspective.
A strange objective viewpoint
in a subjective setting.
Playing with antecedents and source,
destructively tearing and hitting
to bruise the physicality of love
in a body’s landscape.
Context is all –
and the provenance of exhibits,
which are the evidence.
Create the world you want to see
and an audience will travel with you.
Don’t be monolithic –
staying with the one –
reflect the many.
Capture life –
and all its credible dimensions.
We are all leading characters.
There are many journeys.

The inexorability of the actor’s creation.
(Some actors) have a hotline to the heart;
a glimpse of the soul;
tiny flashes of joy or pain,
incapable of a lie,
letting you into secrets.
A dangerous soul
within a refined person
and a lurking animal.
The ability or disability
of keeping the lid closed
when the lava force
pushes against it.

(Some actors) are blessed with a face
you could look at for the rest of your life;
which has one focus
that replaces several pages of dialogue,
and angles of endless expression;
ellipses within scenes,
once seen, forever remembered;
the connection of two images –
and the connection of many.
A strange architecture.