At One With the Stranger

Was that a slip of the tongue? If so, it’s a tiny thing, certainly understandable. Sitting on a rooftop terrace overlooking the verdant hills in Berkeley where he currently, temporarily, resides, Anthony Minghella is discussing anomie.

It’s not your typical Hollywood celebrity chitchat, but then Minghella isn’t typical. He used to be an academic; references to Bach, Valery, existentialism--and, yes, anomie--come naturally to him.

And so, just now, while speaking of his new movie, “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” Minghella mentioned a novel by Albert Camus. The book is about an alienated character who commits a murder. Minghella said the title was “The Outsider.”

“The Outsider.” The mind races. Did Camus write such a book? Could he mean Richard Wright’s “The Outsider”? Expatriate American author. Lived in France. Existential sensibility. It’s unlikely. But, no. He said Camus.

And then he said the title again: “The character in ‘The Outsider,’ Mersault, seems to have an enormous amount in common with Ripley.”

Frantic mental note: Find nearest bookstore. Track down this lost Camus novel. Today.

But there is no need: It turns out that in England, where Minghella is from, “The Outsider” is the title of the 1946 classic of alienation that in the U.S. we know as “The Stranger.” But how perfect is that for the purpose of this conversation? The affable Minghella, in these last tense days of polishing his movie, seems never to have met a stranger. The theme of the outsider, though, is much on his mind.

With “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” which will be released Christmas Day, the director has made four films, including the lavishly praised and multiple-Oscar-winning “The English Patient” in 1996. And each of his movies, in one way or another, has dealt with outsiders. All of them, as well as the plays he has written, have characters who are immigrants or expatriates.

“I’m very fascinated with that, as somebody who grew up with a kind of immigrant’s perspective, with an outsider perspective,” Minghella says in his cultured British accent.

His father, a Sicilian ice cream maker, immigrated to Britain from Italy. They lived on the Isle of Wight. “I could stand on the shore of that island and look over at the place that they called the mainland and feel a membrane between me and that place,” he says. He feels it even today. In England, he’s always felt Italian, he says; in Italy he feels like a Brit.

And in America? In America he feels comfortable, he says, because “everybody’s an immigrant in America, so there’s much more of a sense of people celebrating both their origins and their current nationality. It’s something to be proud of in this country. It’s something to be anxious about in England, traditionally.”

That sense of alienation, of dying to belong to a club that doesn’t want you as a member, is very much at the heart of “Ripley.”

The film, which stars Matt Damon, Gwyneth Paltrow, Jude Law and Philip Seymour Hoffman, is based on a 1955 novel by the late expatriate American author Patricia Highsmith. (It was made into a film once before, in 1960 in France, with the title “Purple Noon” starring Alain Delon.) Highsmith wrote five Ripley books but is perhaps best known to movie fans as the author of “Strangers on a Train,” which Alfred Hitchcock adapted.

Because she wrote in the mystery genre, her admirers say the quality of her writing and the philosophical implications of her work have been underestimated. Graham Greene was a fan. And Minghella is among those who see her work in the same existential vein of Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre. To him, Ripley, who changes identities with the ease of a chameleon, is an alienated figure out of touch even with himself.

“One of the things that I have Ripley talk about [in the movie] is his confining of his true self to a place that he can’t visit and doesn’t want anybody else to visit,” Minghella says. “He’s got an essential shame about who he is.”

In the book and in the movie, this leads him to obsessively attach himself to a rich, handsome American living in Italy--with fatal results. The $40-million movie (which is being distributed by Paramount Pictures and Miramax) is riding on Minghella’s faith that audiences will be able to relate to such a twisted character.

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The typical Hollywood way of adapting a story like this might be to cast John Travolta as the dogged Italian policeman on Ripley’s tail and turn it into a role equal to, if not bigger than, Ripley’s. But aside from identifying and expanding upon the thematic threads that interest him, Minghella remained fairly faithful to the book.

With “The English Patient,” he simplified a supposedly unfilmable, nonlinear, poetically written novel by Michael Ondaatje, and turned it into a romantic hit. Despite a complex narrative, the absence of big American stars and an emotionally distant protagonist, the movie won nine Oscars, including best picture and best director, and became something of a cultural touchstone, not to mention turning Ralph Fiennes into a sex symbol.

Now Minghella has taken a deceptively simple story about a globe-trotting murderer and con man and cast some of the hottest young stars of the moment. At the same time he’s taking pains to underscore the moral complexities that make this a fitting companion piece to the earlier film. Both movies are aimed squarely at a mainstream audience, yet Minghella doesn’t shy away from making demands on viewers.

Having as wholesome a presence as Damon play Ripley should help make the character accessible. But however you slice it, Minghella and Damon are asking audiences to identify with a killer.

Damon says the role was a stretch for him, but he thinks it is just as big a stretch for Hollywood in general. “There are very few movies with protagonists who do some of the things that Ripley does.”

Damon essentially plays two different characters--the awkward, sunken-chested Ripley, a gay man who is uncomfortable in his own skin, and then Ripley transformed into Dickie, the self-assured rich boy whose identity he assumes not merely to elude the authorities, but because Dickie’s is the charmed life Ripley feels he always should have had.

Actually, Damon could be said to play three characters if you count the suave and confident personality that Ripley evolves into later in the movie.

Fluidity of identity seems to be a prevailing theme in movies this year, appearing in some form in films ranging from “Being John Malkovich” and “Boys Don’t Cry” to “Tumbleweeds” and “Anywhere but Here,” in which female wanderers head west pursuing a new life. Minghella sees it as a particularly American theme that also has universal appeal.

“The truth was that Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself,” wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald in his most famous book, “The Great Gatsby.” When he wrote in one of American literature’s most beautiful passages of Gatsby’s faith in and longing for “the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us,” he could also have been writing about Ripley or about half a dozen main characters in other movies this year.

Minghella is particularly interested in the way the expatriate experience links to this--”the idea of travel as an opportunity to make yourself up, to reinvent yourself in a foreign country.” This idea also apparently interested the many American writers who followed Henry James, Edith Wharton, T.S. Eliot and others to Europe.

Highsmith, a Fort Worth native, was one of them. And she had lots of company in the 1950s and ‘60s. “Gore Vidal was there,” says Minghella. “Tennessee Williams was there. James Baldwin. There were a lot of people hanging out in Europe, often people feeling anomie from the host of the American culture.”

He thinks audiences will relate to what drove them, and to what in Ripley took a frighteningly extreme form.

“Most people have an experience of what it’s like to feel a sense of worthlessness, to feel that if people actually had access to who they were they would reject them,” Minghella says. “In those moments there’s a sense that being anybody else would be better and preferable to being who you are. You’ve got your nose pressed up against the window somehow of the world you’d like to live in.”

The anxiety Minghella feels today, here at “Ripley” producer Saul Zaentz’s Berkeley production center, has to do with finishing his movie. Three weeks before the scheduled opening of the film, he still is fiddling with the sound mix.

Post-production is already over schedule, and he still has several days of work ahead. Having finished lunch, the goateed director leans back in his chair on the terrace and lights a cigarette. It is a habit he resorts to in the final stages of each of his movies.

He’d sat all morning in a darkened mixing room beside Walter Murch, who is doing double duty as both sound and film editor, and several others, jotting down notes as they watched reel after reel. They’ve watched each reel thousands of times, he says.

Sound mixer Mark Berger sat at the controls. A jovial man with a high forehead and a halo of wiry, graying hair, he seems as relaxed and carefree during the lunch break as Minghella, whose easygoing charm conceals the fact that he is nervous.

The challenge of making any movie, Berger says, is that there is no one right way to do it. If film, as Jean-Luc Godard once observed, is “truth 24 times a second [based on the number of frames that pass before the lens in that time], then you have to make 24 choices each of those seconds,” Berger says.

Just before the start of lunch, Minghella learned that the set of fixes they’d made yesterday has been lost. But while others try to find out whether they can be recovered or if they’ll have to be redone, the only sign that he isn’t taking it in stride is his ever-present pack of American Spirit cigarettes.

Minghella is an unusually collaborative director. Trusted members of his crew read and comment on drafts of his screenplays as he writes them. He depends on their expertise so much that, during filming of “The English Patient” in Italy, one of the extras stopped Minghella to request an autograph, then asked: “You are one of the main directors, aren’t you?”

Minghella says he works this way because, as both the director and writer, there’s a danger of getting too close to be able to view it objectively. “It doesn’t mean that I will agree [with other opinions] or change what I’m doing, but I think the dialectic is vital,” he says.

With the exception of production designer Roy Walker (who replaces Craig Stuart), this is the same core team Minghella used for “The English Patient.” They are the reasons why he relocated in May from England to Berkeley, where they’re based, to do post-production.

And Damon says the crew is just as loyal and committed to Minghella as he is to them. He attributes that to the way the director works. “He’s very aware of everybody’s job and what it takes,” he says of Minghella, “but he doesn’t try and do everybody’s job for them. Instead, he augments it by understanding and supporting it and giving ideas, and then giving you the space to do what you do.”

As far as his character is concerned, Damon says, “I feel very much like we made [Ripley] together.” Because the robust Damon is so physically different from the character, getting the look and body movements right was the biggest challenge, he says.

Minghella remembers Damon as being so committed to the role that he seemed to spend every minute working on being Ripley. “He was always running,” Minghella says of Damon, who had to lose weight for the part. “He seemed to feel that he wasn’t doing his job unless he was hurting himself for the role.”

Unlike “The English Patient” and “Cold Mountain,” the movie based on the best-selling Charles Frazier Civil War novel that Minghella will write and direct next, he did not seek out “Ripley.” It fell into his lap while he was struggling to get “English Patient” made.

“There were all kinds of problems getting that film made, and it looked at one point like it wasn’t going to happen,” Minghella says, recalling the struggle with financing. “Just at the point where we were capsizing, Sydney Pollack called me and said, ‘I’ve bought the rights to “The Talented Mr. Ripley.” Would that be something you’d be interested in writing while you’re waiting?’ ”

Minghella wrote two drafts of “Ripley” before he began shooting “The English Patient.” Then after he finished that movie, he spent another year refining the screenplay. He knew he wanted to direct it almost immediately after he began work on it.

“I felt such a profound connection with the material that I couldn’t bear the thought of somebody else doing it,” he says.

The irony is that, even though the movie fell into his lap, he’s felt an odd connection to Highsmith’s work since the start of his writing career. The program notes for his first commissioned play described it as being in the spirit of Highsmith, though at that point he had never read her books.

“I had no idea who Patricia Highsmith was,” he says, “so I went down and I bought some books, including ‘The Talented Mr. Ripley.’ ”

When he wrote that first play, Minghella was a young university instructor who’d written one previous work. He thought of himself as a musician then, and he’d strung together scenes to act as a framework for some songs that he had written. But then he was asked to write a play for a local theater company. Within three years, he’d won a London Theatre Critics Award (in 1984) for most promising playwright and another one in 1986 for best play for his “Made in Bangkok.”

Minghella had hoped to adapt one of his plays to the screen after “Ripley,” but he found himself unable to resist “Cold Mountain.” Minghella pays lavish attention to the music in his movies (“Ripley” is full of music; Minghella even changed Dickie from a painter to a saxophonist), and one of the attractions of “Cold Mountain” is that he’ll get to immerse himself in the American musical idiom. Another is that he was attracted to the epic sweep and emotions of the novel, which is patterned after “The Odyssey.”

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Even he chuckles at the fact that he, an award-winning playwright with a distinctive style and with highly personal literary concerns, is known now in Hollywood primarily as an adapter of other people’s work. The only film that he conceived on his own and wrote was his very first, the quirky and sweet British-made “Truly, Madly, Deeply.” His first American movie, “Mr. Wonderful,” was ruined by too much studio interference, he says.

Now, because of the creative freedom he insists upon, and the fact he has chosen to adapt books with themes that were meaningful to him, he feels that the two adaptations he’s made are the most “personal” of all his film work.

“The fact that they’re based on novels clearly means that the story is not my story, but I think the manner of telling the story inevitably betrays me,” he says. “I feel as naked in front of those movies as I do in front of ‘Truly, Madly, Deeply.’ ”