Berlin International Film Festival 2000

Nick Roddick, Moving Pictures veteran interviewer, will be interviewing the well-known and the budding new talent, as well as the other key players at this 50th Berlinale edition.

We're from Finland, Belgium, Sweden, Italy and Spain. We're sitting in another hotel room, around another circular table covered with tape-recorders, all Sonys, with another empty chair on the other side. As we wait, we talk about how Anthony Minghella must be at the very end of the press tour for The Talented Mr Ripley how he's heard every question, given every answer a hundred times.

"If he says, 'That's an interesting question'," says someone, "that means he's heard it before."

"You can't blame him," says someone else and we all agree: we are an unusually compassionate tribunal this morning.

Minghella comes in, beaming happily and shaking hands. He looks at the wing armchair we've left for him.

"So I sit in the fat chair, do I?" he says. Funny. But it sounds like something he may have said before.

"What," asks a Belgian colleague, "would you say was the most challenging aspect of taking on this project?"

This must surely be Ripley 101: the question Minghella can be guaranteed to have been asked before. But his answer is, as always, fluent and thoughtful.

"I think the difficult thing with adapting a book that you love is how to honour the book and make a film which stands alone from it, which works on its own terms," he says. "I think it's probably why, in the past, Hollywood has always elected to adapt books that you wouldn't like very much: you get so sensitive to the sins of omission and commission that you commit in the process of adaptation."

With Ripley, he says, this was especially difficult.

"It's interesting, because at first sight, the novel is very uninflected," he adds. "It's a straightforward suspense story. But the more you excavate the material, the more profound Ripley as a character becomes. I think he stands in for or identifies a lot of 20th-century angst, a lot of the anomie and dislocation of 20th-century human beings. It's about the feeling of being shut out, the feeling that you are essentially worthless.

"I think that the issue of taking somebody's life and taking over their identity is a metaphorical issue," he goes on. "That identity transformation, that Clark Kent-into-Superman thing, is what I think the story is about, not the simple narrative business of killing somebody and becoming them. It's about killing yourself and becoming somebody else. I thought that was a much richer vein to explore."

He takes a sip from a glass containing a mysterious green liquid, which he lowers with almost infinite slowness onto the table, so the sound doesn't upset the Sonys. It's a small gesture, but there is something so considerate, so courteous, about it. Plus Minghella obviously loves to talk, and does so with all the articulateness of the academic and writer he was and is. He has, if anything, too much to say, especially since this is a project with which he has been involved for a long, long time.

"The very first play I wrote," he says, "the first notice I had said, 'This play reminds me of the works of Patricia Highsmith'. I had no idea who Patricia Highsmith was, so I thought I'd better read her and I thought, 'This is really good writing, but it has nothing to do with my sensibility at all. How would someone make that connection?'.

"Then, some 16 or 17 years later, we were marooned in Italy trying to make The English Patient and Sydney Pollack called me and said, 'We've got the rights to "The Talented Mr Ripley": would you think about writing the screenplay?'.

"I started to go back into the material, and I realised it spoke to me much more loudly as a grown-up than it had as a young man. So I called Sydney and said, 'You know what? I don't want to give you this back! Can I do it?'.

"Every time I skimmed another layer off the material, it got more interesting to me. I think what you can accuse me of in some ways is appropriating the subject of the film for my own preoccupations. I don't intentionally do that, but I know it's as personal a film as I'm capable of making."

A film about an American murdering another American in Italy in the fifties made by a British film-maker (albeit of Italian descent) at the end of the nineties: what could be personal about this, I ask?

"It's had the blessing or the curse of a Catholic film-maker," he explains. "It's burdened by the sensibility of somebody who was taught to examine his conscience every night, who is plagued by the thought that there may be a purgatory, some place for working out a particular problem in life.

"I believe that. I love the mischief of Ripley getting away with it, but I couldn't resist saying, 'Getting away with what?'. Not getting caught is not the same thing as escaping from the dungeon of the psyche, from which there is no escape.

"I believe in the humanity of Ripley," he concludes, "and I believe that part of the cost of being human is to have a soul and to have to reconcile yourself to that soul. There's a great CK Chesterton quote. 'When we are children, we're innocent and therefore want justice. And when we're adults, we're guilty and hope for mercy'.

"I think there's something of that in Tom Ripley."

In Anthony Minghella, too.