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title: “Fast Forward” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-29” author: “Luther Tidwell”
One afternoon in London, Minghella sits on a couch in a darkened editing room, the siege of Petersburg, Va., blooming above him with a horrifying beauty on a giant, flat computer monitor. “Cold Mountain,” the movie, opens with a Confederate soldier chasing a rabbit through a trench, trying to bag breakfast even as Union troops are rolling kegs of powder in a tunnel beneath them. Another Confederate, Inman (Jude Law), sits staring at a tintype of his love, Ada (Kidman). Then a hand lights a fuse. The blast hurls bodies into the air, and a fiery mushroom cloud towers over the field.
After a flashback to Ada and Inman’s sweetly awkward first meeting on Cold Mountain, N.C., the movie returns to a Petersburg so ravaged it looks like the surface of the moon. There’s a stunning, high-angle shot of the Federals as they charge into the new crater, only to find themselves trapped with more troops crushing in behind them. Inman watches in shock as his comrades pick off the Union soldiers and throw bayoneted rifles into the pit like spears. Asked if he got nervous about historical accuracy, Minghella says quietly, “Even the dimensions of the pit are the same.”
After that harrowing battle, Inman deserts. He walks hundreds of miles to Ada, whom he’s kissed just once. He fears she will not recognize him any more than he recognizes himself. Like Minghella’s masterful “The English Patient,” the “Cold Mountain” screenplay can be intensely emotional. He insists he’s not a romantic, however. Would his wife agree? “Probably.” How did he propose to her? “Well, I asked her about 1,000 times.” Why did he have to propose 1,000 times? Minghella smiles. " ‘Cause she’s got good taste."
Minghella is warm and analytical, a former academic who tells taxi drivers, “Thank you very much, indeed.” In the editing room, he’s downcast because he’d like to show all of his movie but his studio, Miramax, has sent an executive to sit in the room and make absolutely certain that he doesn’t. (The exec seems nice. And he does not appear to be armed.) To be fair, any studio would be cautious so long before release, and Miramax has committed nearly $90 million to “Cold Mountain.” That’s a company record, but then Minghella may well be the studio’s date for the Oscars. After the opening sequence, an assistant fast-forwards. The executive, Colin Vaines, ducks out of the room to answer a call. “This is really interesting stuff,” Minghella says of a scene flitting by–blip blop blip –on the monitor. “Should I skip it?” the assistant asks. “Yeah, just keep going,” Minghella says, morosely. “I think Colin is getting grilled at this very moment.”
Minghella was first handed “Cold Mountain” by Michael Ondaatje, author of “The English Patient.” This was after the “English Patient” movie was a hit, and Minghella and Ondaatje were hanging out in the latter’s cabin in Canada, reading poetry and plays, often aloud. (This, adorably, is what Minghella refers to as “a boys’ weekend.”) The director had no interest in doing another adaptation and didn’t read the book. Then he found three more copies, sent by two film companies and an editor, waiting at home. After finishing the novel, Minghella made author Frazier what sounds like the least-promising offer in history: “I said, ‘I know nothing about this period, and I know nothing about North Carolina. And more than that, I am not an intrepid person. I really do not like cold weather’.” But Minghella had loved “the collisions of cruelty and generosity” in the novel, and felt a kinship with Ada, who must survive alone on a farm, though, to borrow a scene from the film, she’s so terrified of even a rooster that a scrappy young stranger named Ruby (Renee Zellweger) must stomp up onto her porch and pull its head off.
At lunch, in the Soho district of London, Minghella finishes a cigarette outside an Indian restaurant and then ducks inside. “Every time I make a movie, I think, ‘This is the movie I’m going to get through without smoking’,” he says. “But then something… happens.” During the making of “Cold Mountain,” everything did. A few years back, Tom Cruise wanted to play Inman. (It seems that the woman he was married to at the time thought it’d be perfect for him.) Miramax and its then partner, MGM, were elated about Cruise. “It would be a lie to say it was an idea that, at first glance, made any sense to me,” Minghella admits. But he met with Cruise and was “completely beguiled.” The deal ultimately fell through. Minghella turned to Jude Law, whom he’d directed in “The Talented Mr. Ripley.” MGM pulled out of the movie shortly before filming, concerned about costs. To his credit, Miramax’s Harvey Weinstein assumed responsibility for the entire budget without even a worried call to Minghella.
The cast went to Romania, and were met with punishing heat and 20-odd consecutive days of rain. Minghella began smoking again: “As any director who’s ever shot a film that’s lasted more than 100 days will tell you, there’s a point you reach where you don’t believe you can make the film. For me it was the third day. Because we began with a battle. I thought, ‘I’ll never survive this.’ It was the noise. The smoke. People running. Trying to get the shot you want when it’s 100 degrees and there’s no shade.”
Right now, Minghella is in the midst of test screenings, which are clearly going well, though the director likens the process to “having your skin torn off in small sections for a couple of hours.” No worries. There appears to be enough lightness and whimsy in the movie. Kidman and the broadly comic Zellweger seem to have a terrific chemistry. And there’s a heart-stopping sequence between Law and Natalie Portman, who plays a widow trying to save herself and her baby from malicious Union soldiers starved for food–among other things. Frazier, who’s seen a rough edit, says, “Jude understands the internal parts of the character, the quietness. There’s a lot of stillness there. He’s not an action hero shooting his way home.”
Hearing all this should comfort Kidman. But when she’s told that Minghella has, for now at least, cut a lovely bit of dialogue in which Ada says that men consider her a “thistle,” her heart palpitates again. “Oh, god, I hope that’s not lost. That’s so important!” She pauses. “I’ve got to see the movie,” she says. Seems like we all do.
