I looked around and we were about a mile-and-a-half from land, and I thought, 'OK, I'm going to drown now.' And then I started to flail out and panic. I gradually calmed down and I got home. But the reality was that in that moment I was panicking and I feel like that to me was the clue about Ripley, that Ripley constantly finds himself out of his depth in the film and then reacts very, very badly.

Anthony Minghella

Categorized in : Reality Home Land

I have always believed that there is a need for life-affirming films.

Anthony Minghella

life-affirming film needs

I'm interested in stories which insist on a dog fails-to-eat-dog kind of world. I hate misanthropy, want to believe that there's a possibility that we might all be redeemed, that hope deferred makes the soul sick, that our humanity is fragile, funny, common, crazy, full of the longing for love, the failure of love.

Anthony Minghella

crazy hate dog

I am a teller of stories. A weaver of dreams. I can dance, sing, and in the right weather I can stand on my head. I know 7 words of Latin, I have a little magic... and a trick or two. I know the proper way to meet a dragon, I can fight dirty but not fair. I once swallowed thirty oysters in a minute. I am not domestic, I am a luxury and, in that sense, necessary.

Anthony Minghella

latin dream dirty

There's this sense of being strange, which is at the heart of every creative person. Every writer, every actor, every director knows who Ripley is. We've made careers and lives out of pretending, making things up, inhabiting other people's stories and lives. That's what I do every day. . . . The story is so audacious and subversive: a central character who behaves badly and isn't apparently caught. That intrigued me no end.

Anthony Minghella

careers heart character

The feeling of not belonging, of not being entirely worthy, of being sometimes hostage to your own sensibilities. Those things speak to me very personally.

Anthony Minghella

speak feelings sometimes

Once you start to realize that a film is the sum of its editing, then editing is the thing you're always looking at.

Anthony Minghella

realizing film editing

I was one of five very clever kids, the other kids were cleverer than I was and still are and are very achieving. The girls were always first at everything and I was always 101st!

Anthony Minghella

girl clever kids

The imaginative leap for me of writing for women is no more difficult than the one of writing for men. I've always wanted to have women well represented in the work that I've done because I've always been around them and around the way they look at the world.

Anthony Minghella

done writing men

No studio in Hollywood wanted 'Cold Mountain.' None. No one wanted 'Ripley,' no one wanted 'The English Patient.' That tells you there isn't really an appetite for ambitious movie-making out there.

Anthony Minghella

ambitious mountain hollywood

You know, you lose a lot of social skills if you’re a writer. You spend too long alone. And it’s forced me to address that.

Anthony Minghella

addresses skills long

I want to tell stories which require something of an audience, by way of thought, argument, emotion, because I'm more often in an audience than I am a maker of films, and that's the kind of movie I want to see.

Anthony Minghella

stories want way

I am a writer who was able to direct the films that I write.

Anthony Minghella

film able writing

The problem with growing up in a cafe was the cafe never closed, my parents worked every day of the year from morning to night. So it was a big menagerie of kids, business and cooking!

Anthony Minghella

growing-up morning kids

Waiting is part of writing. When I write the word 'waiting' by hand it even looks like 'writing.'

Anthony Minghella

waiting writing hands

The BFI exists to celebrate all poets of world cinema, of the past and present.

Anthony Minghella

cinema past world

The only lesson to extract from any civil war is that it's pointless and futile and ugly, and that there is nothing glamorous or heroic about it. There are heroes, but the causes are never heroic.

Anthony Minghella

ugly hero war

There's a great tradition at the BFI of giving fellowships and I thought one of the great jobs that I'd have at the BFI would be to give them out on a regular basis.

Anthony Minghella

would-be jobs giving

Betrayals during war are childlike compared with our betrayals during peace.

Anthony Minghella

childlike betrayal war

Of course, like all film-makers I've been mesmerised by cinema since I was a child.

Anthony Minghella

cinema film children

My grandmother was a huge influence on me and the fact that there was this very strong, rather formidable presence of women in my life has been an enormous value.

Anthony Minghella

grandmother strong facts