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CATE PROJECTSThere was a bit of fine tuning regarding Cate's various projects recently. To begin with, Steven Spielberg's representatives backed off the report that he will forego "Minority Report" to do the "Harry Potter" film, so it seems impossible to get any straight info regarding the status of "MR"!
As reported in the Sydney Daily Telegraph, Cate turned down a potential $12.5 million payday to star in Hannibal. Cate stated she had to decline because of numerous prior committments even though she liked the script.
On The Gift front, Best Actress Golden Globe winner Hilary Swank (Boys Don't Cry) has joined the Sam Raimi helmed thriller. The critical darling joins the red-hot cast of Cate (last year's GG Best Actress winner!), who plays a woman with psychic powers, and Keanu Reeves, who'll play against type as Swank's abusive husband. A recent change is Greg Kinnear, who replaces Ron Eldard (ER, Bastard Out of Carolina) as a school principal who consults Blanchett after his young fiancée (Katie Holmes) disappears.
Rounding out the cast are Giovanni Ribisi, Michael Jeter (The Green Mile), Gary Cole (Office Space), J.K. Simmons (Oz, Law & Order), and Chelcie Ross (A Simple Plan). Billy Bob Thornton and Tom Epperson wrote the script.
It's exciting news that Hilary has joined the cast. It's amazing to think that a year ago she was playing a single mother on "Beverly Hills, 90210", and while obviously talented, could barely get arrested, careerwise.
The local rag in Savannah where the film is being shot recently ran a story on the production which, while short and sweet, may be found at Savannah Now.
THE TALENTED MR. MINGHELLA REVISITED
We ran an excerpt in our last edition of Cate News from the exclusive interview our good friend Paula Nechak of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer recently conducted with Anthony Minghella. An edited version of her interview appeared in the paper. Paula was kind enough to provide us with the unabridged version.
Anthony Minghella Interview--The Talented Mr. Ripley
BY PAULA NECHAK
SPECIAL TO THE P-IThree years ago Anthony Minghella had a career high. The now 45-year-old playwright, screenwriter and director had just seen his epic screen version of Michael Ondaatje's elliptical, best-selling book about love, war and regret, "The English Patient," reap nine Oscars - including Best Picture, Director and Supporting Actress for co-star Juliette Binoche.
It's an experience he'd love to replicate. Though Minghella's acclaimed first film, "Truly, Madly, Deeply," was drawn from his own play, he's admittedly had extraordinary luck adapting other people's novels. This Christmas, "The Talented Mr. Ripley," which is based on one volume in a series of '50s noir-crime thrillers by Patricia Highsmith that feature her elusive chameleon-creation, Tom Ripley, will put Minghella back in the limelight. And his next project is the post-Civil War romance "Cold Mountain," culled from Charles Frazier's successful seller and which seems like perfect terrain for Minghella to explore.
"I'm very excited by the idea of going on an adventure with somebody else's map," he says laughing. The
bearish, genial director made a brief stop in Seattle just a day after he finished "The Talented Mr. Ripley" and he is understandably nervous about its reception. He eases slightly after I remark that he is one of the best cinema writers (besides fellow Brits David Hare and Stephen Poliakoff) going, though he subsequently - even modestly - goes to great lengths to tell me that he "didn't have a plan to be somebody who adapted novels to film."
That said, he reverts to his original enthusiasm for doing what he does so well. "I think on a very banal level I get incredibly excited by something I've read and I don't want to let go of it. Then it takes me three years to get it out of my system. All that time I'm thinking I'll go off and make some movie of my own; something smaller. Then I read something else and convince myself I'll do it quickly first and of course, there is no 'quickly.'"
"I suppose I've seen that film can be a great medium to advertise your passion about something else as well as one's own preoccupations and in fact using material that already exists doesn't stop you from making personal movies."
"I feel in some ways 'The English Patient' and 'The Talented Mr. Ripley' are as intensely personal as 'Truly, Madly, Deeply' was. It's also a way of refreshing oneself and avoiding the same noise repeatedly. It's still full of mysteries and secrets and because there is so much to do in translating the reading experience into a story that you tell to other people, I feel perfectly expressed in the process. I don't think very much about the difference between a book and a film."
Minghella admits that a lot of what he's doing when he makes a movie is "passing on the things that have excited me." He says he wants to share "what Matt Damon can do or how extraordinary some Spanish steps are when you crane up on them at six in the morning."
He says he first read Highsmith's novel "as a reader" many years ago. "I came across it in a very strange way. I'd written a play and someone wrote that it reminded them of a Patricia Highsmith work. Of course I went out and bought the book and found this character, Tom Ripley."
Though this particular work by Highsmith has been done with more chilly perversity and come-uppance in Rene Clement's 1960 classic "Purple Noon," which starred French film idol Alain Delon as Tom Ripley, Minghella swears he had no reluctance to re-approach the subject. He says it was "the heart of the book, which is so original" that made him want to do it his way. "Look, a man goes on an errand and becomes obsessed with the person he's sent to bring home. He wants to be with him and love him. That's too distinctive to throw away."
Minghella's version plumbs that dormant homoerotic subtext more fully than Clement's. A struggling nobody named Tom Ripley is sent to Italy to bring home the beautiful and wealthy American golden boy, shipping heir Dickie Greenleaf, who is living a life of ease and frivolity with his fiancee, Marge Sherwood, who first synononymously embraces Tom and then suspects him of murder after Dickie mysteriously disappears.
"The Talented Mr. Ripley" is a seductive guilty pleasure, visually gorgeous and brimming with beautiful talent: Jude Law as Dickie, Gwyneth Paltrow as Marge, Matt Damon as Tom Ripley and Cate Blanchett in a role that Minghella specifically added as a "moral harbinger" to Ripley's transgressions and of whom he says simply, "I love her character. Everytime I went back to the screenplay I wrote a bit more for her. She's so funny and I know it's absurd but I kept thinking of Lucille Ball. Giddy is the perfect word; she's like an armada, all elbows and knees and very gauche and I think the character writes a journal entry every time something happens to her. I told that to Cate who said, 'I know, I know,' and it was the only clue she needed. After that she was free and she flew."
The director says the thing he most remembers about the book is the "yearning" Tom Ripley has. "He's desperate to be loved by everybody." And Minghella has bravely refused to shy away from what might be construed by some to be a gay serial killer film. In fact, it's anything but. Tom Ripley is an organism that defies sexual identity, so great is his need to be anything but himself.
"To dilute the complexity of that would be a shame," says Minghella in response to the concern that Tom might be misjudged. "I wasn't trying to be iconoclastic, it's what is original about the story. To make it conventional and safe would have taken away the reason to make the film. It's the skinlessness of Ripley, the tenderness of him and I feel it's a big mistake to undervalue what an audience is capable of."
Minghella says when he cast the film "nothing had yet happened for any of them," meaning it's now-nodded fellow Oscar winners and nominees. "Matt's films had not yet come out and sure, I want to take as much credit as I can for everything but it would be a lie."
"I cast very much like we're having this conversation," he says. "I don't read actors, I don't meet them with other people. I try to get an intimate connection with them so I can try to work out whether they're fellow travelers with me or not. Since everything about me is in the screenplay how they react is instructive. There's a great deal spoken of the alchemy between actors on film but what's critical is whether I can help them and they can help me."
"With each of these actors I was excited by the work they had done, particularly Matt, who was such a fellow spirit when I met him that when he spoke about the film it was exactly how I'd experienced it as a writer. He seemed in concert with what fascinated me about the character; he was fearless about what it required him to do and I trusted that. I try not to invest in who is currently glamorous when I cast."
He says he didn't "find" Ralph Fiennes, Juliette Binoche or Kristin Scott Thomas for "The English Patient." "I'd been mesmerized by work they'd done already." In "The Talented Mr. Ripley" Gwyneth Paltrow, last year's Best Actress Oscar winner, plays a role "which is not a vehicle. Already there was so much expectation for her and to play what is essentially a character part and to be modest in the way she approached it - and to show that she's an actor first and a movie star second - was all I was interested in."
"I'm excited by actors and what they do," Minghella adheres. "There is a humanity to actors, a vulnerability, and if you can make an actor feel safe they'll give you so much back. No matter how much you plan and write a moment it's ultimately better to be surprised by what an actor can bring."
And that, he contends, is essential in a film that is all about ambiguity and accountability. "This is a film about a person whose actions are reprehensible yet the film is about morality. It asks a great deal of an audience. Will they recognize the difference between public retribution and judgement and that a man is in a prison he can't escape from? It's a tragedy but it has a much more mischievious rhythm. At face value this film says you can kill people and get away with it."
"I have to put all my hope and trust into the fact that audiences will see the film arguing with its own subject matter." Minghella defends. "You can't get away with anything really. Though this character is blessed with the ability to improvise his way out of problems, he's cursed by that ability. Mr. Ripley's talent is the thing which sentences him to solitary confinement."
Alright Blanchetteers, that's a somewhat abbrieviated version of the News this go around. As always, we invite you to check out the Lord of the Rings News Update for the latest and greatest regarding that production.
Plus, we would draw your attention to our Image Gallery where we are proudly displaying the latest group of astonishing Oscar and Lucinda captures, as so generously provided by our own dear Lillie. So, until next time, remember, when all else fails, "PLAY A VOLTA!!"