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Tavis: Anthony Minghella took Hollywood by storm back in 1996. His film The English Patient won 9, count 'em, 9 Academy Awards, including one for best director. He's back, and he's done it again--another highly acclaimed epic, this one already earning 8 Golden Globe nominations. Here's a scene from Cold Mountain.

Ada: There's a rooster. He's a devil. I'm sure of it. I go near him and he is at me with his spurs. He's Lucifer himself.

Ruby: I despise a floggin' rooster.

Ada: Oh, no, I wouldn't...

Ruby: My name's Ruby Thewes. I know your name. Let's put him in a pot.

Tavis: Ha ha ha! Anthony Minghella, a pleasure to meet you.

Anthony Minghella: Thank you very much, indeed. Nice to meet you.

Tavis: That scene is so funny, and let me just start by telling you that not only is the writing here amazing, which we'll talk about in a second because you didn't just write this. I mean, you directed it and you wrote it, but that scene is so funny and the casting here was brilliant.

Minghella: Well, you know, it's funny because when I met Renee Zellweger, I met her because she'd wanted to option the novel, she'd loved the book so much. It's very unusual for an actor to go out and try and buy the rights to a book. And so I met her long before I'd written a word of the screenplay. And I think that when I met her that she had in her mind to play Ada, and I sat with her and she's so interesting and she's such a chameleon, and I almost didn't know what she looked like as a person, I'd seen her in so many different roles. And I thought she would be fantastic playing Ruby. And she brings such energy and such an incredible spirit. She's sort of the funniest serious actress I know, the most serious comedian I know. So it's a wonderful entry into the movie anyway, and she does it brilliantly, I think.

Tavis: Indeed, she does. She plays this role so well, as do the other characters. Let me ask a question that I suspect some will chide me for or chastise me for asking such a silly question, but how much of casting--how important a role is it to the success of a film, particularly given that you know how to do these epics and do them extremely well?

Minghella: You know, somebody once said, asked a director what was important in a movie, and they said, "It's simple. It's 50% the screenplay, 50% the casting, 50% the cinematography, 50% the locations, 50% the production design, 50--" You know, everything has to be right.

Tavis: Right.

Minghella: But certainly it's the case that if your casting is not correct, there's almost nothing that you can do. If your casting is good--I mean, you know, people talk about how directors help actors, but actors help writers and they help directors. They dignify the work that we do.

And in this cast, I felt like every day, oh, my gosh, I've got this incredible group of actors. I mean, you go--wherever you look in this film, there's one of my favorite actors showing up and helping me. And certainly the 3 principles, Renee and Nicole and Jude, are just absolutely marvelous, but they were helped all the way through this film by fantastic--I mean, Phil Hoffman, Giovanni Ribisi, Ray Winstone--everywhere, you know, there's some great actor. And I'm, you know, like all directors, I'm a film fan a long time before I'm a filmmaker, and one of the great gifts that we have as filmmakers is we can see somebody's work on the screen and say, "Oh, I'd love to have some of that in my movie," and I've got a lot of it in my film in this particular case.

Tavis: Mr. Hoffman--funny as the preacher. And we're talking to him later this week on this program, as a matter of fact.

Minghella: He's a Renaissance man, Phil, because he's an enormously gifted actor, he's a producer, he's a director. He's fantastic. You know, he's one of the great secret weapons of American cinema, because every filmmaker loves him. He always--whatever film he's in, he always does something extraordinary. He was in my last movie The Talented Mr. Ripley, and I became friends and such a fan of his.

Tavis: I wouldn't call it a secret weapon because the secret is out, but I am just fascinated how it is that one writes these screenplays as well as you do and then gets behind the camera and directs these things as well as you do, to the point, obviously, of having won the Academy Award for best director for The English Patient. How do you balance these 2 things?

Minghella: Well, to be honest with you, there's no distinction in my mind between writing and directing. I don't think one day I'm a writer, the next I'm a director. When I start writing, I'm--the first thing I wrote of Cold Mountain, the screenplay, was I drew 3 or 4 images that had come to me when I read Charles Frazier's wonderful book. I had some notions of a visual for the film. And I'm writing even when I'm shooting, and I'm writing in the cutting room.

Tavis: But you're being much too modest. You have to admit, though, that you are uniquely gifted and skilled and talented. There are a lot of folk in this business who can write and can't direct, and there are other folk who can direct and couldn't write their way out of a wet paper bag. I mean, you do both of these things extremely well. You're being much too modest, aren't you?

Minghella: Listen, I try very, very hard. I'm a slow filmmaker. I think one of the gifts that I have been given is being allowed to make my films slowly. And I also have an incredible team of people who work with me. I work with probably the greatest editor in film history--Walter Murch. I have a great production designer, cinematographer, costume designers. They make me better, and they've helped me, and they've taught me a great deal. And I've had to learn to be a director, you know. I was a playwright. I came to movies through writing. But my first job was as a musician, and I trained as a painter. And so--

Tavis: You know, I hate people like you. That's just too much talent...

Minghella: No.

Tavis: ...residing in one body. It's not fair that Anthony Minghella should have 8 uniquely different talents.

Minghella: No. The truth is I was never very good at any of those things. I mean, I was a mediocre composer. I really was a mediocre composer, and it was of great sadness to me. I just started off writing incidental music for the theater and television, and I wasn't particularly great at it. And I think that one of the things I've learned is that directing is like conducting. You know, it's good to know how a piano works, it's good to know how a fiddle works, but you don't have to be a great violinist, you don't have to be a great pianist. But it's good to know and understand them, because then you respect the people who do that work. I love to take photographs, but I'm a terrible photographer. But I know something about...

Tavis: ...the process.

Minghella: ...the lens and the process, and it's helped me to collaborate and respect the people who work with me. And I really--you know, it always makes me laugh when directors show up and they take credit for their movies by themselves and then you go to the movie theater and in this movie, 8 minutes of the film is taken up with credits. And that's all of the people who contribute to making a movie, and in my case, they're really important, those contributors. And so I think it's fair enough that I get criticized if the movie is not correct, but I think when the movie is liked by people who go and see it, they should always-- the director should always remember that they are just one visible part of a big family making a movie.

Tavis: Well, when people go and see this movie Cold Mountain, one of the things they are going to see is how you wrote and shot a movie that is based, obviously, in the era of the Civil War, and yet, you went like this all around the subject of slavery. Some would argue that you did it rather brilliantly, that the movie really is about love and other issues and wasn't really about slavery or the Civil War. And yet, there are others, friends of mine who happen to be of African descent, who ask me, "Tavis, I haven't seen the movie yet, but how can you be raving about a movie that is based in the Civil War era and this guy didn't talk about the Civil War or at least not the issue of slavery?" Why did you do that? And talk to me about the choices that you made, the process you went through to not talk specifically about slavery, as it were.

Minghella: It was interesting you said that they haven't seen the movie yet, because I think when you see the film, it's pretty clear why it is the way it is, but for me, I was trying to make a very important point. Because the protagonists in this film are dirt-poor farmers in the mountains of North Carolina. And frankly, I don't believe they would've gone to war if they'd understood the terms of the war. They were sold a bill of goods about what the war was about. They were told that they were going to fight for their land, that the North--it was called the War of Northern Aggression--that the North was gonna come and invade them and take their land away. If they were told that they were going off to fight for the abolition of slaves, then why would they have gone? They didn't have slaves. They didn't know slaves. And so, part of what I tried to do is to stay within the reality and truth of the characters that I was writing. Frankly, I did try to sort of lever in some issues about race into the story.

Tavis: I must tell you, in the instances where you did do that, as an African American, I appreciated that because the characters, for the most part, all said the right things, as far as I'm concerned, about the institution of slavery, except for that one scene in the church--I don't want to give the movie away--but the scene in the church where they are at once praising and uplifting God and then the word comes in the middle of the church service that the war is on and that they are being called to fight, and the church empties out with all these white men who are now in this celebratory state about the chance to go to war to fight, and then to fight, obviously, to protect and preserve an institution like slavery. I thought that was a fascinating scene.

Minghella: But I think it's true. You know, I think again that if you listen to the words of those songs, they're incredibly belligerent. They're supposed to be religious, but they're actually very sure. And I wrote a line in the film where the character Jude Law plays, Inman, says, you know, "I imagine God is weary of being called down on both sides of an argument." And I'm trying to--to be honest with you, the film is political, but its politics are the politics of people being sent to war on a lie. You know, they're hoodwinked. You know, this is a war in which poor people fought a rich man's war, and that's what I was trying to get at. I mean, partly of course my job was to adapt a novel and not to editorialize the novel and not to shovel in 21st century perspective into the novel. But nevertheless, to try and say, 'Look what happens when people are hoodwinked into going to war.' And not only that, one of the things that most interest me about the question and the issues which have arisen about it is the extent to which people lost their lives over this conflict and yet it's still so vexatious 150 years later. It didn't solve it particularly well. And it seems to me that, you know, the movie starts on a battlefield and ends at a table. And I wish that the table was a more-used platform for discussion and for debate and for solution than what appears to be a very effective solution of the battlefield.

Tavis: I've only got about a minute to go with you, and I could go on because I find this conversation fascinating, as I did the movie, but since you admitted to me that you are political, you've got your own viewpoints, what is it that you hope the abiding lesson of this movie will be for those who will go and see it? Or lessons, I should say.

Minghella: Well, first of all, it's not the job of filmmakers to tell people off, but I think that what I care about is peaceful solutions. It may not be an anti-war film, but it's certainly a film for peace and a kind of plea for the United Nations, for the sort of fuzzy solutions of listening to each other. It's certainly a film which says that tribe or color or creed--hiding behind those issues has not helped us in the world. And you know, I'm a filmmaker allowed to make movies without my passport being examined, and I wish that were the case for the rest of the world.

Tavis: Hmm. We've got 30 seconds to go. So, you've been through this process, as I've said before, of the nominations and all the Hollywood hype and having won the best director Academy Award, so how do you navigate this process for the next few weeks while this hype is building and going about this film?

Minghella: Oh, I just try and have some dignity, you know, and realize that the movie doesn't get better when it gets Academy Awards. It doesn't get worse if it doesn't get them. I don't get cleverer. And I just hope that everybody who deserves blessing is blessed.

Tavis: Mr. Minghella, pleasure to meet you.

Minghella: Thank you very much.

Tavis: Anthony Minghella. That's our show for tonight. You can catch me tomorrow on my radio show on NPR--National Public Radio. And I'll see you back here tomorrow night on PBS.

Good night from Los Angeles. And, as always, keep the faith.