Anthony Minghella Quotes

When I became the chair of the British Film Institute, I didn’t understand how much of my time would be taken up with trying to make a case for the British Film Institute: what it’s for, why it exists, why it needs its money.

The problem with growing up in a cafe was the cafe never closed, my parents worked every day of the year from morning to night. So it was a big menagerie of kids, business and cooking!

The only lesson to extract from any civil war is that it’s pointless and futile and ugly, and that there is nothing glamorous or heroic about it. There are heroes, but the causes are never heroic.

The imaginative leap for me of writing for women is no more difficult than the one of writing for men. I’ve always wanted to have women well represented in the work that I’ve done because I’ve always been around them and around the way they look at the world.

The feeling of not belonging, of not being entirely worthy, of being sometimes hostage to your own sensibilities. Those things speak to me very personally.

Of course, like all film-makers I’ve been mesmerised by cinema since I was a child.