Reply #166: A tribute from actress Juliet Stevenson.

[CBHagman]

An affectionate and admiring look at working with Anthony Minghella:

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_ent...

The obituaries so far have focused on his directing; no one is talking about his writing and in my view he was one of our greatest writers. In Truly, Madly, Deeply he understood that the rhythms of human speech connect to complicated internal loss. The dialogue is extraordinarily rhythmic, coming from the heart, head and the mouth. With beautiful music, it’s the same thing: so many emotions can be elicited in one movement. Ant understood that people write in sentences but rarely speak or think in sentences and so wrote films that are complex maps of how we experience ourselves, relationships and language. It was a great gift.

(SNIP)

On a film set, the machinery and hardware are usually central, but on Truly, Madly, Deeply he made the actors and characters the emotional centre of the set. So if you were supposed to be grief-stricken, the whole crew was tuned to that. If you and Alan Rickman were dancing around, the whole crew would be dancing to bebop. He created this atmosphere and made everyone feel extraordinary. He had an intense curiosity for people and was attuned to, and interested in, their foibles, frailties and idiosyncrasies. Whatever your status on the set he brought you in and invested in you. People would do anything for him. He was very unjudgmental.