ALEX CHADWICK, host:
Finally today, news that the Oscar-winning filmmaker, the director of "The English Patient" and "The Talented Mr. Ripley," Anthony Minghella, has died at the age of 54, the cause of death a hemorrhage following neck surgery that he had last week. His most recent project was a BBC television adaptation of the bestselling book "The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency." That's scheduled to air this Sunday, and in fact literary adaptations were what he was best known for, including "The English Patient.")
(Soundbite of film, "The English Patient")
Ms. KRISTIN SCOTT THOMAS (Actor): (As Katharine Clifton) Promise me you'll come back for me.
Mr. RALPH FIENNES (Actor): (As Count Laszlo de Almasy): I promise. I'll come back for you. I promise. I'll never leave you.
CHADWICK: That movie won nine Academy Awards, including Best Director, and though it was a highbrow, kind of classy period piece, intense emotions, sweeping desert panoramas, the quintessential Oscar movie, there were some critics. On an episode of "Seinfeld," Elaine called the movie boring, but in this interview eight years ago on NPR's FRESH AIR, Anthony Minghella showed he could take a joke.
Mr. ANTHONY MINGHELLA (Director): I was enormously flattered that they took the trouble even...
(Soundbite of laughter)
Mr. MINGHELLA: It was an index to me of how much "The English Patient" had pervaded the public consciousness that anybody would be remotely amused by this. And in fact in Britain there was a much more sort of devastating and just devastatingly funny attack on "The English Patient." It was called "The Toy Patient," in which they dressed up some bears and, you know, woolen rabbits and played out the story with puppets. And it was much funnier and much better than my film.
(Soundbite of "The Toy Patient")
Unidentified Woman #1 (Actor): (As character) What is your name?
Unidentified Man #2 (Actor): (As character) I don't know. I can't remember anything at all. Wait, I think I'm going to have a multi-award-winning, three-hour flashback.
Mr. MINGHELLA: So I mean I just took it as a great compliment, really, that anybody cared enough.
CHADWICK: He was born in England to Italian immigrants who owned an ice cream company, Minghella's Ice Cream. He said it was those summers working for his parents that drove his artistic aspirations.
Mr. MINGHELLA: I certainly remember the feeling of not being inside the world I wanted to be in but rather imprisoned in the cage of this ice cream van. I remember vowing then that I would escape from the prison of the ice cream van and try and reinvent myself.
CHADWICK: He reinvented himself first as a music composer, then a playwright, a filmmaker, of course, and two years ago he even directed Puccini's "Madame Butterfly" at the Metropolitan Opera.
(Soundbite of opera, "Madame Butterfly")
CHADWICK: Here he is interviewed on WEEKEND ALL THINGS CONSIDERED.
Mr. MINGHELLA: We approached this production with as much humility as we ought to have had in the sense the singers are working all the time, and to be standing on the Met stage means that they are the top of an extremely competitive field, they're the best singers in the world. We are first-time opera-makers. It's not for us to, you know, revolutionize opera.
CHADWICK: Anthony Minghella would be the first person to say he didn't revolutionize filmmaking either. He wasn't a megalomaniac on the set, demanding absolute allegiance to his vision, and he was genuinely surprised when people absolutely loved, or sometimes hated, his work.
Mr. MINGHELLA: I feel so uniconoclastic as a filmmaker, and it's always very strange to me that such a - I don't know, such an equivocal and such an equivocal filmmaker should excite, you know, such extreme reactions in people.
CHADWICK: Anthony Minghella, dead at the age of 54. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.