‘Mountain,’ heart and soul

Jude LAW and Anthony Minghella have had a secret love affair going -- one of deep, almost spiritual friendship. After “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” the Englishmen pledged to work together more often. But it took years for Minghella to bring “Cold Mountain” to the point of casting it.

The award-winning novel by Charles Frazier, set in the unforgiving mountains of North Carolina during the Civil War, came to Minghella as a course of fate. He was searching for a story about pilgrimage. His friend Michael Ondaatje (author of “The English Patient”) recommended “Cold Mountain” in 1998 and, separately, a few months later, he received a package with the book from friend and “English Patient” co-producer Paul Zaentz. After adapting the novel, Minghella began the delicate dance, or as Law likes to call it, “the courtship,” of casting.

Understanding that on a $90-million movie he had to strike a balance between commerce and art, he cast Nicole Kidman, Renee Zellweger and Law in one fell swoop. Minghella did not view the story as a particularly Southern tale but rather as a universal story about a man’s inner journey. The international cast filmed mainly in Romania, which stood in for a barren, war-torn South. With the film behind them, they agreed to talk about their relationship, the notion of time, war and, this being Hollywood, stardom.

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It was your idea to cast Jude as Inman after working together on “Ripley”?

Minghella: No. There was nobody left. (They laugh.) If you allow me what sounds like hubris but is actually not hubris, I hope, I was very intrigued by Fellini and Marcelo Mastroianni’s relationship. That Fellini found as a writer and filmmaker somebody that he felt was obviously was some idealized version of himself....

Law: It’s a courting process and a very odd one.

Minghella: If I didn’t know Jude and I wanted to interview him for a movie ... it’s business. If this is somebody that you love and is your friend and you have worked with, it is almost impossible. We couldn’t have met and discussed Inman and “Cold Mountain” and then said, “Well, that was very interesting. I will go off and cast somebody else.” And Jude could not have met me and said, “Well, that was very interesting, but I don’t want to do it.”

Law: Nor put you in a position where I said, “Come on, you are making this film, I’ve read it and I want to be in it.”

Minghella: Casting for me is a painful process ... it is very painstaking and lengthy. I always feel that terrible weight of not wanting another actor to be in some kind of arena of judgment .... On an extremely banal level, for a film of this scale, there should have been a movie star in this part.

He is not a movie star?

Minghella: There should have been an American movie star.

At one point, Tom Cruise was supposed to star?

Minghella: There are ghosts of many actors around the edges of this project ... I had more calls about this part than I’ve ever had on any project I’ve been involved with. Jude didn’t fly to this movie and didn’t fall into that category by election ....There was not a history of playing a leading man’s role. Not only was there a delicacy of the fact that we are friends but the delicacy that this was a sell to the studio -- and a big sell.... The fact that I offered three parts on the same day was very significant. It meant that I could demonstrate to the studio that they were getting a very strong package

Jude, why did the role appeal to you?

Law: Initially it was really just the opportunity to work with Anthony again. We have this joke that we sort of avoid each other and that is often more to do with our shyness -- although I think we have gotten a lot better at admitting to each other how much we love working with each other now and enjoy each other’s company.... From the point of view of an actor, I felt this was something I had never done. I had to discover new muscles in myself and the craft, but it was something I could do.

It is an epic story and yet Inman is not an epic hero. He is an everyman.

Law: The challenge, and it proved to be so, was for Anthony and I to maintain this spiritual journey, [to capture] the soul of Inman. Finding a soul that would permeate a film is actually quite daunting.

Inman’s journey back to Cold Mountain really is an inner journey, to find his soul. It’s not to find Ada [Nicole Kidman’s character].

Law: But are they not one and the same in a way? It had been so long and the memories become so fragmented and mythical ... that in a way she symbolizes simply life and the heart which is the thing he has to find out of the mire of the war and what he has done.

Minghella: She is home, home is her .... It is all one and the same thing. He is hanging on to a name of a place that isn’t even a real name. He is heading to a woman who may not even recognize him and he doesn’t even know her. It’s all about having a reason and a destination.

While this is a universal story, as you said, it is a very Southern story. How did you capture that spirit?

Law: I would love to say that I studied the South and the lifestyle of the South of that period, but I didn’t. I always felt that my responsibility was really to find the heart of this man

Minghella: I think the other real clue both for Jude and for me was Charles Frazier himself. I remember Jude listening very carefully to the tapes of Charles reading the novel. Charles is a man with enormous reserve....There is a great deal of Inman in him. He is a man who is very, very circumspect with language. Extremely shy but a man of the mountains whose father was a teacher. Oddly enough, I found his voice as important in adapting the screenplay as I did the novel.

Law: He is talking at times in the novel about incredible brutality and violence, and when you hear him speaking it comes from this beautiful, soft, lilting voice.

The film really illustrates out how one really just has one moment in life that you better appreciate when it comes.

Minghella: That’s so true. I wrote The line where Monroe says to Ada, “I lost your mother after 22 months of marriage, and that was enough to fill a life.” In a sense, that was a flag for the film.

Law: It’s funny, last night -- I’ve seen the film a couple of times now -- one thread that came out more than ever was time. The relevance of time, and how long is time and how do you measure time?

On to the more mundane questions. So now you are a leading man.

Law: I am still waiting for my membership card.

How will you be looking at your roles and making those decisions?

Law: I hope to think I am going to deal with it exactly the same way I have always dealt with it. Which is that you look at the group you are going to step into, the director and part and the only obligation I’ve made to myself is to keep myself excited and interested....

Minghella: The challenge in the performance was to, in a sense, strip an actor of the things he might normally use to convey a performance which is language. Jude was joking the other day, saying he had spent a lot of time working on the accent and he had nothing to say. That is the hardest kind of movie performance, where you are having to admit people into your thoughts and feelings without the vehicle of language.