Whatever you do to her she still looks beautiful 
Director Anthony Minghella has come a long way since the days when he used to write episodes of school drama Grange Hill. Following The English Patient and The Talented Mr Ripley, his latest film is Cold Mountain, starring Nicole Kidman and Jude Law as a pair of lovers separated during the American Civil War. CONTAINS MINOR SPOILERS.
How did you first encounter the novel?
I went on record as saying that I would never do another literary adaptation. A week later I was flying to Toronto to spend some time with Michael Ondaatje, who wrote The English Patient. He handed me a novel called Cold Mountain, so I put it in my bag and I went home and when I got there, there were two FedEx parcels waiting for me and they were both Cold Mountain. Then I got a call within a few days with somebody asking if I wanted the galley proofs of Cold Mountain sent to me. So I assumed that this was some kind of augury.
The film is set in North Carolina but shot in Romania. Was that because Romania has the feel and look of another age?
I was heartbroken when we had to leave North Carolina because it's a book whose soul is about a particular place. But the reality is that if I could have gone back to North Carolina I wouldn't have done. What we found in Romania was something so consonant with the film and so beautiful and untrammelled. You drive past fields full of people scything the harvest. It really was like time travelling.
The romantic tension between Nicole Kidman and Jude Law is sustained through very few scenes...
When I was researching The English Patient I kept reading about wartime romances and war brides. There's this strange thing that happens when death is close at hand - life becomes very urgent. It accelerates relationships. People cling to each other, they cling to life in the face of so much cruelty and death. It feels to me that in these periods, all of the volume controls are turned right up.
Nicole Kidman manages to look great even when she's at her lowest. How did that happen?
The thing that's so infuriating as a filmmaker is whatever you do to her she still looks beautiful. The costume designer Ann Roth came up with this idea that when Donald Sutherland's character dies, she simply gave the rack of Donald Sutherland's clothes to Nicole and said this is what you have, make them work. So for the rest of the film Nicole's using the remnants of her own clothes plus all of Donald's. As soon as she put them on, though, she looked as though she'd just stepped out of Prada! It was absurd!
