An Interview with Anthony Minghella, director of “Breaking and Entering”
BY KEVIN CARR
Anthony Minghella is the Oscar-winning director of “Breaking and Entering.” Minghella’s latest film stars Jude Law, Juliette Binoche and Robin Wright Penn. It is a departure from his more recent films in that is the first original screenplay from Minghella since his debut, “Truly Madly Deeply.” It also is a relatively small, independent film rather than a sweeping period piece, making it a more intimate project for the award-winning director.
Excepts from the interview follow. To hear the entire interview, click here.
7M: WHAT IS THE THEME OF “BREAKING AND ENTERING”?
Let me tell you about how it came about, and maybe that will be a way of describing a theme. After the last original film I made, “Truly Madly Deeply,” I tried to write this movie called “Breaking and Entering.” The idea of it was to examine how a marriage was unraveled and repaired by a break-in. I had an idea about a couple coming home from a dinner party who found that their house had been burgled. And when they did an inventory, they discovered that things had been added. What had been added had been indicative of the problems in their marriage.
I could never quite write that film, and I put it to one side. And when I was making “Cold Mountain,” I was renovating an office in London at the same time, and that office was hostage to several burglaries, and it reminded me of this idea.
If it has any theme, it is that sometimes things need to be broken before they can be fixed. That some kind of damage is the antecedent of something healing, so that was where I began.
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