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cold mountain
Inman (Jude Law) and Ada (Nicole Kidman). Below: director Minghella.
Doing so changed Minghella’s mind completely. “I realised it was a great novel, unique and extraordinary, and it spoke to me about preoccupations that were prominent in my mind at the time,” he says.
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“THE JOURNEY OF INMAN IS A SERIES OF TESTS - HE’S TESTED BY HUBRIS,
BY COURAGE, BY VANITY, BY ROMANTIC LOVE, BY HIS COARSE DESIRES
AND BY HIS LOYALTY” |
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What is more, it was so far removed from his own direct experience - from the kind of film he could imagine making - that the challenge started to become irresistible.
“I always gravitate towards projects where I feel the material is beyond me at first glance,” Minghella laughs. “And here I am offered the enormous opportunity as a film-maker living in England to make a movie about the most critical and defining moment of American history, which is the Civil War, in which I can also explore my own relationship to nature.”
Because, while Inman’s Odyssey - a 19th-century equivalent of the journey of the medieval Everyman, or of Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress - appealed to the storyteller in Minghella, the challenge that Ada faced touched another nerve.
“I would like to say that, as much as I identify with Inman - or that I project onto Inman what it would be like to be a warrior returning home,” he says, “I also identify with Ada, because I feel as if I have an extremely nourished inner life and an undernourished outer life, with a level of ignorance about working the land and working with animals that is overpowering to me.”
Having written the screenplay - using his usual technique of reading the book, then setting it aside and telling the story in his own terms - Minghella concentrated his efforts on the two cornerstones of preparation for a film: casting and location. In the former case, it wasn’t just a question of finding the right actors for the three central roles of Ada, Ruby and Inman: it was a matter of finding three actors who would provide the interaction needed by the heart of the film, he explains.
“It was impossible to decide who would play each of those characters without having a sense of all three, of what the triangulation would be in the film. I circled round and round a putative group until I could find a triangle that made the most sense to me. In fact, the offers to Jude, Nicole and Renee were made on the same day, because I felt I couldn’t offer a role to any one of them until I knew who the other two would be.”
Finding the locations that would capture the world of Cold Mountain as created by Frazier in his novel proved almost as much of a challenge as casting. Minghella toured North Carolina with Oscar-winning production designer Dante Ferretti and found a number of potentially perfect sites, particularly in and around the town of Asheville, where Frazier was born.
But there were two problems: the trees and the climate. Trees in the modern Blue Ridge Mountains are cut down every four years, so never attain the height or have the bulk they would have had in the 19th century. And global warming meant that the snow that was so crucial to the final scenes of the film could not only not be guaranteed: it wasn’t even especially likely.
“There is an extremely significant weather story in the film,” says Minghella. “It begins in the blazing heat of summer and ends in a monochromatic world covered with snow. In the past few winters, snowfall in the Asheville region was too unreliable for a film production to gamble on.”
The answer came from an unlikely source, if not an altogether unlikely person: executive producer Iain Smith had been on a hiking tour of the Carpathian Mountains in the Transylvanian region of Romania, and sent Ferretti and Minghella photos of his trip which were intriguing enough for them to go and take a look. The fact that North Carolina has a Transylvania County, not far from the real-life town of Cold Mountain, seemed to be a good omen.
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