He found himself subjected to the disapproving glances of better-off neighbours, again foreshadowing Ada.”I’d forgotten all about that,” he says, shaking his head. “If you open up, if you surrender yourself,” he tells me, “everything will come to you.” He is not averse, for instance, to drawing from his dreams; the image in The Talented Mr Ripley of the Madonna rising to the water’s surface, followed by a corpse, came from a dream. I remind him, too, of a dream he once wrote about in an article on The Others. In it, Minghella was haunted by the idea that he had allowed his house to fall into disrepair Its gardens, like Ada’s, were being strangled by weeds. He surrounded himself with everything he needed – books, paints, research materials, music, a piano.

It’s beginning to sound like the feed-line for a joke, isn’t it? The gag is that he was cocooned in that room, writing about life on a farm (“Bird’s got a purpose, seed’s got a purpose, shit’s got a purpose,” runs one line in the film), while outside it was happening for real. “I realised I didn’t have the faintest idea what the farmers were up to,” he shrugs. “I wanted to force myself out of this corseted, intellectual life And, in a very rudimentary way, I did. I started to pay more attention to the animals.” Well, it’s a start.Minghella is a great believer in what he calls “opening up” during the creative process. For that reason, the character with whom he identifies most closely in Cold Mountain is Ada: she flounders around on her late father’s farm, scrapping absurdly with roosters, allowing the garden to become overgrown, and generally finding that a privileged education counts for little when you need to grow your own meals, and quickly. As if to underline what he perceives as his own distance, Minghella wrote the screenplay in a room he had designed in a cottage in Hampshire, situated on a working farm. There may not be, but that’s what gets me up in the morning.”He is, however, trying to correct what he calls his “overdeveloped internal life and undernourished external life”.

I think it would bother him greatly if he didn’t feel that sense of validity. “I want my films to have some kind of moral gymnasium in them,” he says with undisguised urgency. But it’s odd coming from a man who has worked so extensively with words as a playwright and in his early capacity as, among other things, script editor on Grange Hill.”The film sentence is not based on speaking,” says Minghella, lighting a second cigarette, “but on the juxtapositioning of shots To my surprise I found I have great interest in that. I find myself not wanting to pursue a solution through language any more. Now I’m more intrigued about how to make the shot have purpose.” That’s a good word – it sums him up.