Breaking & Entering - Anthony Minghella interview
Interview by Rob Carnevale
ANTHONY Minghella talks about the challenges of directing Breaking & Entering and why he enjoys working with Jude Law…
Q. It’s been some time since you wrote and directed a film set in Britain. Why now?
A. After I made Truly, Madly Deeply I imagined I was going to make another British-based film and I started writing a story based on the idea of a break in, called Breaking & Entering. I write in notebooks and I’ve got two which say very proudly on the front, Breaking & Entering. The idea was I would write a story about a couple who come home from a party to discover that their house has been burgled. They try to do an inventory of what’s been taken and they discover that things have been added.
What had been added were somehow indications of problems in their relationship. I could never really progress that story very much. But when I was shooting Cold Mountain with Tim Bricknell we were on top of some hill somewhere, and I thought I had to go home and make a film about home, about London, and we got a call from our new offices to say we’d been burgled.
That call became a weekly call for about a year, where we had 16 incidents I think – our offices were in the process of renovation and they were being burgled like a sport. The people who we left behind while we were away were increasingly exasperated and worried about these burglaries.
So, something tripped in my head and I realised that perhaps in that story of burglaries there might be a way of looking at London. Particularly when I came home and started to meet some of the agencies around crime in London – the police, social workers, community workers and, particularly in Camden, a group of people who were advocating conciliation meetings.
I was struck by, first of all, how generous, committed and decent a lot of these people were. But also it made me think in a way I’d never thought before about the idea of a victim of a crime and the perpetrator of a crime being in the same room, what that meant and what that might do. That’s such a theatrical idea apart from anything else.
And so the story emerged by this collision of this imaginative idea I’d had a decade ago and this real thing that started happening to us while I was shooting Cold Mountain.
Q. Was it ever hard shooting on some of the London locations?
A. Well, we shot a sequence on Primrose Hill, a very traumatic sequence between Juliette Binoche and Jude Law, and Harvey Weinstein [producer] came to visit us that day. He looked at this hill, which was full of people, and said nervously: “Are these all extras?”
I said that we didn’t have any extras, we just had Jude and Juliette. So he asked how we were going to shoot the scene and I said we can’t just own the hill – to shoot in London we have to take what we can get. It’s true to say that we shot the scene for the better part of a day with absolutely no interference from anybody, with a great deal of interest and support and quietness.
It was extraordinary and I was very proud of London on that. We both [Anthony and Jude] talked a lot about how it was our neighbourhood, how we both lived close to that hill and it seemed that what could be described as indifference is sometimes people being good hearted.
I think we found a lot of that when we were shooting, that it’s a wonderful city. The thing about London is that you can tell any story you want to tell, you can find anything you want to find. You can find ugliness, you can find beauty, you can find curmudgeonly people and obviously generous people. It depends what angle you are trying to spin, and I think the truth of the film is that we were welcomed in London and we were thrilled to be shooting a city that we live in and loved.
Q. Did you set out to change the perception of the Bosnian refugee experience in Britain?
A. Sometimes I come away from press conferences about other films thinking I wish we’d talked more about what the film is about. With this one, all we’re talking about – which is wonderful – is what the film is about. At some level I was trying to write a story about a marriage, and a marriage in modern London – and a modern marriage where there’s no ring or contract involved.
It spilled out, necessarily, into conversation that I think there’s an invisible class in London that sustains us. If you took the migrant class away from London it would implode, it couldn’t be sustained if this invisible class disappeared. As my family is an migrant family and my wife’s family is a migrant family, I have a particular predilection towards celebrating the fact that it’s a fantastic community of all sorts and all colours and all kinds and all creeds.
It’s not always compatible – we share the same geographic space, but we don’t always share the same values or the same expectations, or the same privileges. That leads to conflict, it leads to burglaries, it leads to petty crime. So, inevitably the film takes a view which argues for compassion and for a second chance. Everybody in the movie gets a second chance.
Q. Can you talk about your relationship with Jude Law?
A. There’s nobody better to go to work with on any day than Jude. Not only because of how he is with me, but how he is with the crew, how he is with everybody else. I did a day’s acting a few weeks ago and for the first time I experienced what it was like to be a guest on somebody else’s set. I realised that how the other actors treat you determines how you’re able to do yourself.
The one thing that Jude does is this welcome which enables other actors to do well. So that’s part of the reason why I wanted to work with him, because it’s such a great collaboration.
Q. Can you talk a little more about the conciliation scene. Was it, in itself, a kind of conciliation process for the actors?
A. It was the most difficult scene that we shot in the film because all of the individual actors were conflicted about what was happening. I then realised that we were touching on something very interesting, which is how do you forgive? Is it appropriate to forgive? Is it right that in this story the forgiveness comes through a lie? The ‘it’ of the film suddenly was much more urgent than I’d ever experienced before.
Q. Do you have any plans to work with Jude Law on something for the stage?
A. We’d like to do a play I think. I’m a very dull person in terms of actors. I find an actor I like working with and I want them to be in every project. I’ve tried to get Robin Wright Penn in every movie, anything I’m doing. If I’m writing a postcard I want her to do it with me and I finally persuaded her to, and I hope she’s come back.
And Martin, although he insulted me every hour of every day of the work, it was still an honour. Notwithstanding that I have a new nickname given to me by Martin Freeman. It was fantastic, and so you want to go back and work with them. It was great to have Juliet Stephenson in this film, to have Ray Winstone working with me again in the film.
I love that process but in the last year I’ve done some work in the theatre again and it was a fantastic experience for me and I would love to go back and perhaps direct a play or write a play. And if Jude or anybody else was interested in doing that, then great. Jude and I have had a conversation about this and it would be good to find something we could do together.
Q. Was the use of the Bosnian footage intended to put into context the troubles of these characters?
A. I suppose that one of the things I would say is that it can’t always be that the only place you reserve judgement is for the underprivileged. If you’re saying this is a film which says, “give everybody a second chance”, you can’t be punished because you have a profession any more than you can be punished because you don’t have one.
There’s got to be some sense of fairness in the way that you view all the characters. And I’m not judging anybody in the film at all. Obviously, what I’m trying to say is that sometimes when you’re quick to judge someone from another country, you don’t know their history or the trauma of their history.
We looked at that footage from Bosnia and actually didn’t use the strongest parts that we found because it felt like it would have been exploitive of that material to put it in as profound a way as it was in its undiluted form.
Just as when we were shooting in King’s Cross, Juliette, Jude and I drove past the floral tributes for 7/7. We didn’t use that footage because it seemed to be trying to inflate the value of fiction with some of the pain of life. But obviously I was trying to say “think again” about somebody you might judge on one level.
In the same way as when I first came to London, I remember that I was a young playwright trying to make my way and I was lodging on somebody’s couch. They had a cleaner on Fridays who was Argentinean. One day, she was vacuuming around my papers and I spoke to her and asked where she was from and she said Buenos Aires. It transpired she was a union analyst who had escaped from Argentina and come to work in London and found work as a cleaner.
I realised straight away, as somebody who’d had quite an innocent background, that people were not what they seemed to be in London and the more time that fiction allowed you to think all the way around something before you judged them.
Read our interview with Jude Law