We Have to Learn to Make Peace with Each Other
Anthony Minghella
(Jan. 6, 1954 - Mar. 18, 2008)
"It's essentially a love story which is affected by burglary. I tried to write this first of all after my first movie, Truly, Madly, Deeply. And I had this notion of a couple who had found that their house had been ransacked, and in the course of trying to work out what had been taken, they discover that things had been added. And what had been added were in some way illustrations of the problems of their marriage. I always had this interest that a break-in -- that a damaging event -- would fix something.
"...Scar tissue is much stronger than your regular tissue. And for some reason, this idea that a scar is stronger than the original flesh is in this movie. The idea that the damage done, when it's repaired, if it can be repaired, will make these people stronger with each other than they were before.
"I have this maybe inaccurate sense that audiences believe and commentators on fiction believe that authenticity means a kind of misanthropy or negativity, that if something is miserable, it's true, if something is pessimistic, it's true, and if something is optimistic or healing, then it's a gloss. That life isn't like that. But I don't believe that. I think that people are incredibly indomitable. They do put things back together again. They do fix themselves. They do fix each other. And that we have to believe that it's possible to fix things. We're in a world where not necessarily marriage is in trouble, but certainly harmony is in trouble in the sense that the marriages of culture that exist in cities, the observing of each other's right to believe and the right to think and right to feel is in a troubled and turbulent moment in history. We have to learn to make peace with each other and forgive each other.
"So this idea of conciliation goes way beyond simply forgiving a burglar or simply forgiving an aberrant husband. To me it's the required emotion and movement and dynamic for our future."
-- Anthony Minghella, discussing his last film, Breaking and Entering, with Elvis Mitchell on KCRW's The Treatment (2.7.07).
