Minghella's Legacy -- And Unfinished Work

By Steven Zeitchik

The Anthony Minghella passing is sad for all the reasons it's usually sad when a talent is taken too early. It's especially poignant given that the writer-director was in the middle of seemingly a half dozen projects --his own, as well as a number he was producing with longtime Mirage partner Sydney Pollack.

At 54, the British filmmaker known for his adaptations of literary material was, in many respects, in the prime of his career.

Minghella and the Weinstein Co. recently concluded a deal with HBO and the BBC to air the adaptation of the "The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency" franchise as a movie and TV series. The filmmaker also was attached to write and direct the adaptation of Liz Jensen's psychological thriller "The Ninth Life of Louis Drax" for TWC, and also at TWC had served as a producer on Scott Rudin's German-novel adaptation "The Reader." due out in the fall.

Minghella was also developing a project called "The Resurrectionist" at Miramax, based on a well-reviewed novel with elements of the thriller and the fantasy.

The BBC will air the two-hour pilot of "Detective" next week, but HBO said it still plans to air the movie as a kickoff to the series next year. The status of the series remains up in the air; it's not clear how many scripts have already been completed and if the project could or would go on without Minghella. (Features scribe Richard Curtis was co-writing.)

Minghella had, though, written but not yet cast or shot his segment of "New York, I Love You," the follow-up to the set of romantic vignettes "Paris, je t'aime" that was set to shoot in NY in April, as Gregg Goldstein reports. A rep for producers said they were waiting for Minghella's family to weigh in but hoped to forge on with a new director. Miramax, meanwhile, said it was too early to determine whether it would set up "The Resurrectionist" with someone else.

All day, stories poured in from people who had worked with Minghella on set and on tour, in the editing room and at press conferences. Nearly every story pointed to a gentle soul who didn't see immense skill and vision as antithetical to being a mensch. As Daniel Battsek told us, Minghella was "as kind and generous as he was talented."

Of course the talent was a pretty big part of it too. Minghella's current projects were
just the latest in a career marked by bringing literary works to the screen in a way that balanced his own vision with fidelity to the source material. Janet Maslin wrote on "The English Patient" that the helmer "manages to be astonishingly faithful to the spirit of this exotic material while giving it more shape and explicitness, virtually reinventing it from the ground up," and that seems to sum it up nicely.

Among Minghella's last public appearances was a BAFTA event last week in London where he noted his experience in Hollywood. "The thing that is most notably different about working in the U.S. is that if you are embraced then you are completely accepted," he said. "It was quite giddy (after "English Patient") because you'd be there and Meryl Streep would come on the phone and you'd think it was your mother pretending to be Meryl Streep or maybe your sister, but it was really Meryl Streep."

He also said, with rather acute self-awareness, "I had never thought of myself as a director and found out that I was not. I am a writer who was able to direct the films that I write." Today we think of him as someone who shared all that with us, albeit for not nearly long enough.