I had Roald Dahl’s Matilda yesterday but we haven’t finished yet – we read a chapter a night Matilda is my favourite book

I had Roald Dahl’s Matilda yesterday but we haven’t finished yet – we read a chapter a night Matilda is my favourite book. I like James and the Giant Peach a little bit but Matilda’s my favourite I haven’t seen the film yet but I really really want to It’s about this girl who likes reading. She really likes to read books but her mummy and daddy don’t let her read and she’s got a very rude teacher I’ve got a nice teacher Matilda does get to read in Miss Honey’s class Her best friend is called Lavender She’s nice My best friend’s called Jamie. “I ‘ve still got a lot of work to do.” So said Anthony Minghella when we bumped into one another at a dance premiere last April It was something of an understatement.

He had just completed the first cut of The English Patient and it ran to four hours and 17 minutes. Six months later, standing nervously before a packed cinema in Chelsea, he told the cast and crew that the film – now a rapid two hours 45 minutes – had taken over three years to make, it was theirs, and he hoped they liked it They did So did America. This $30m movie arrives here next week, having taken over $55m in the US so far, in a storm of expectation, not least because of 12 Oscar and 13 Bafta nominations. All this from a supposedly “difficult” Booker Prize winner everyone told him was unfilmable.
Privately, he admits to feeling “a little picked over” – his multi-continent pre-publicity schedule would give Jeffrey Archer pause – but this shortish, roundish, effusive man is painstakingly generous at the end of yet another round of interviews. Considering the missing hour-and-a-half lopped from the film, the length of a standard feature, I ask him what went? He parries. “Somebody asked me the other day if there will ever be a director’s cut No This is the director’s cut. There’s a danger of characterising the process as one of bloodshed but actually it was one of distillation.”He rubs his cheek thoughtfully as he focuses down.

“I tried to keep reminding myself that the film should be as short as I could manage it You write film until the very last day. It’s a sentence you begin working on with a pen, then with a camera and then on an editing machine. Editing was part of the writing, refining and taking away everything I didn’t feel was essential. There’s only so much you can offer to an audience in an evening without constipating them.

However wonderful the next course is, if you’re full, you don’t want any more.”The New Yorker marvelled at the film, “awfully close to a masterpiece”, particularly at Minghella’s reimagining of Michael Ondaatje’s multi-layered novel. Minghella had been introduced to Ondaatje’s work by the poet Maura Dooley. He devoured The English Patient “in a single gulp” the morning after finishing his previous film, a modest Italian-American Nora Ephron- esque romantic comedy, Mr Wonderful, starring Matt Dillon. He immediately called Saul Zaentz, Oscar-winning producer of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Amadeus, and a champion of Minghella’s calling card, Truly Madly Deeply. Eighteen months and many drafts later, he produced a final screenplay and the finance game began.

Twentieth Century Fox pulled out at the last minute having demanded a star of the magnitude of Demi Moore to play the coolly intelligent Englishwoman Katherine Clifton. Minghella and Zaentz refused to forfeit Kristin Scott Thomas and Miramax stepped in.The film is unimaginable without Scott Thomas’s luminous, thoughtful presence but you can see why a market research-obsessed studio would be nervous. Four damaged people end up sharing their lives in a ruined Tuscan villa in 1944: the mysterious “English patient”, his face and body burnt beyond recognition; a nurse (Juliette Binoche) fearful that anyone who loves her will be destroyed; wounded thief or spy (Willem Dafoe); and Naveen Andrews as a Sikh who is a bomb disposal expert A love story across continents and time, yes. Conventional Hollywood fare? No.Not that anyone reads in Hollywood, but the non-linear novel wouldn’t have helped matters For Minghella, it was a challenge “I was obsessed with the transparency of the storytelling. The book’s defining characteristic is its fracturing, its dismantling of narrative. That was the one profound alteration I made: to construct some architecture to holds its beauty.”After the 123-day shoot in Rome, Tuscany, the Sahara and beyond, most of the editing time was spent on the transitions of time and place.