Black Sheep interviews Max Minghella

The cast of George Clooney’s THE IDES OF MARCH is practically mammoth. Aside from Clooney himself, you have Ryan Gosling, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Paul Giamatti, Marisa Tomei, Jeffrey Wright and Evan Rachel Wood. If you go one more name down the list though, you’ll come by one Max Minghella, and once you see the film, you’ll know why his name deserves to be included amongst all these others.

Minghella with Hoffman, Tomei and Gosling

“It’s an amazing privilege to work with people like that,” the 26-year-old, London native tells me in his charming accent. “It was such a useful experience in terms of education.” Personal benefits aside though, Minghella, who was part of another impressive cast last year in THE SOCIAL NETWORK, hopes the film’s pedigree does not hurt its chances of being seen. “There are so many prestigious actors, I hope it doesn’t turn people or get them to not root for the movie because I think it has a really strong heart.” So why the elaborate casting then? “I don’t think its cast for the sake of casting. It happens to have an extraordinary cast but they’re all the right people for the parts.”

In The Social Network

Minghella, the son of the late filmmaker, Anthony Minghella, was “obsessed” with Beau Willimon’s “Farrugut North”, the play this film is based on (“I saw it a lot”). He is happy that Clooney has done such a fine job directing. “All of the things I loved in the play are retained but George has managed to stretch it out on a much bigger canvas,” he states with some relief. And what of Clooney as a director? “He’s very clear. He’s a very pragmatic filmmaker, which makes you feel very safe as an actor. You feel like you have a real boss who knows where he needs to be and knows where he needs to take us.” Incidentally, Minghella and Clooney have worked together before; he played Clooney’s son in Syriana.

Minghella and Gosling

“I never thought I was going to be an actor but I always knew I would be in film,” Minghella tells me when I ask if this is always where he saw his life headed. You might suspect that Minghella’s interest in filmmaking came from his Oscar-winning father, but in fact it was his mother who peaked his interest at a very young age. Carolyn Choa is a choreographer now but when Minghella was still a baby, she worked for the British Board of Film Classification, the British equivalent of the MPAA. “When I was a baby, she’d have to watch like five or six movies a day, and she’d tell me the plot summaries for each of these movies as my bedtime stories. So my imagination as a person is totally intwined with film as a medium. I wouldn’t know how to do anything else.”

So while Minghella’s name may not be above the title, he is honoured to have been a part of THE IDES OF MARCH. “I’ve never had this kind of fairy tale experience before of really wanting something, feeling like you’re the right person for it, and then it working out so simply. That’s never been my story before.”

And with that, a new story begins.

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NINE

Written by Michael Tolkin and Anthony Minghella
Directed by Rob Marshall
Starring Daniel Day-Lewis, Marion Cotillard, Penelope Cruz, Judi Dench, Nicole Kidman, Kate Hudson, Fergie and Sophia Loren


Journalist: What I am asking, Maestro, is have you run out of things to say?

I don’t think NINE could look better on paper if it tried. You’ve got Michael Tolkin, the author of “The Player”, and the late, great Anthony Minghella translating a Broadway classic to the screen, that has even deeper roots as the show itself was based of Federico Fellini’s 8 1/2. You’ve got Rob Marshall in the director’s chair. This is the man who reinvigorated the movie musical right when it was on the very brink of extinction with the Oscar-winning, CHICAGO, after all. You’ve got a cast of women unlike anything I’ve seen on film before – Marion Cotillard! Penelope Cruz! Nicole Kidman! Judi Dench! Kate Hudson! Fergie! Sophie Loren, for Pete’s sake! And who do you have at the center of all these ladies? Why none other than the genius of the day, Daniel Day-Lewis. How then could all of the excitement that this incredible pedigree inspires be completely missing from the final cut?


The problem might be the show itself. Day-Lewis is Guido Contini, Italy’s most exciting internationally recognized director. Well, he used to be. As of late, his films haven’t been connecting with audiences like they used to. We meet him amidst a flurry of press for his latest project and we quickly realize that he’s got no movie to make. Before long, we are introduced to his wife (Cotillard), his mistress (Cruz), his mother (Loren), his muse (Kidman) and his creative rock (Dench). It isn’t long after that that you realize juggling all these women in his life and ultimately trying t control them like he does his films is making it impossible for him to breathe. The women aren’t smothering him though. He is doing that all to himself by failing to see them all as actual people instead of supporting players in his own life. An unsympathetic egomaniac does not rally an audience.


It is even more troubling to me though that Marshall’s direction never allows for these lovely ladies to elevate past supporting players either. It’s ironic really to watch a movie about a blocked director directed without the inspiration to make it as great as it so clearly could be. Each woman in the cast gets to sing their song one by one and each one sings of how their lives have been changed by Contini, be that good or bad. As we never get to see these characters for who they are but rather just through the eyes of Contini himself, the hurt they sing about it isn’t connected to anything real. That said, neither are the musical numbers themselves. They all look and sound fantastic and, not to mislead, are pretty enjoyable too. They just keep coming in such an expected fashion that they lack the spontaneity necessary to make them truly pop.


Like CHICAGO, Marshall wants the musical numbers to feel like a surreal layer to the characters’ live. They seem to be happening in their minds but you never feel like you’ve actually been in anyone’s head. Anyone, that is, except for Contini. Every song and every scene is about him and while Day-Lewis does a perfectly fine job losing his way, he never quite finds it either. Although history is given to suggest where his troubles may have started, his woes never amount past the point of self-indulgence and subsequently NINE never becomes the masterpiece it should have. Instead, this fascinating dissection of one man’s mind never gets deep enough to entertain past the surface.

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