The English Patient (Movie)

"This is quite different from how the desert works in the film. Anthony was of Italian descent. He was the perfect Englishman (he played cricket, for example) but was also incredibly cosmopolitan. Because of his family background, he’d had the experience of some of the xenophobia of the English, which can be quite considerable. He saw this novel, The English Patient, as a coming together of people from different countries, different backgrounds, so that they would represent humanity. I was the one filming in the desert with a small second unit, miles and miles away from the main unit. In the prep, as Anthony talked to me about how he wanted me to shoot it, the first thing he said was, ‘Peter, I want you to think of David Lean when you shoot this movie.’ That was hard enough, but then he said, ‘The desert should be a metaphor for the human body.’ So that’s the opening shot: as the plane flies over the desert. I had to go out with a crew and a helicopter to remote areas of the Sahara, where there was no vegetation, and shoot that desert in such a way that it wasn’t clear what it was, that one might think it’s human skin. This worked actually, because when the rushes were shown I heard the crew mumbling that it didn’t look like desert. That’s when I knew we’d got it right. So it’s the desert as a metaphor for the human body and more than that, a symbol for humanity. That’s really completely the opposite to what we have in the novel. Michael Ondaatje was actually often there, in Tuscany, for the shoot. He seemed to absolutely love it. He was completely supportive of Anthony and not at all possessive about his material, about his book. He was just interested to learn about film. That intrigues me as well. One tends to think there’s a tension between the novel and a movie. But when Colm Tóibín talked about Brooklyn he was very pleased that the filmmaker went away and did what they wanted to do with it. I think that’s incredibly generous and Ondaatje was very much like that as well. In terms of other differences between the book and the film, I mentioned that Anthony wrote a very tough play called Made in Bangkok . In general, though, he’s generous in his view of humanity. Michael Ondaatje is much harsher in his view. In the novel, the passage of time is different and László von Almásy visits the cave of the woman he’s been in love with some time after she has died and seems to commit some sort of sexual act. There’s a hint of necrophilia there. It’s really disturbing. The movie is much warmer. The passage of time is much more fragmented in the novel than it is in the film. It’s often the case in movies that the passage of time is smoother, it’s more compressed. But there are exceptions. Oppenheimer , for example, covers many decades. Michael Ondaatje took this historical character, László von Almásy, and fabricated a fiction out of him. Then Anthony took Michael’s fictional character and fabricated another fiction out of him. So it’s meta upon meta, in a sense, which is something I’m going to touch on later. One final point: the novel ends with the most beautiful cinematic moment, which is not in the film. Hana in Canada knocks over a glass and Kip in India catches a falling fork. The cut between the two is breathtaking. I get shivers of excitement from it. The way Michael Ondaatje ends the novel is just so beautiful. Anthony couldn’t do that. He would have been not just stealing, but robbing from him. I was there just before it opened! I saw a public rehearsal. Anthony was there with his father, Edward. It was lovely to see them. I was actually living with the Minghellas when Anthony came home at the end of one day and said, ‘Saul Zaentz wants me to do a movie but I’m not going to do the movie he wants me to.’ I said ‘Anthony, are you mad? This is Saul Zaentz.’ He said, ‘I want to do The English Patient so I’ve told Saul that’s what I want to do.’ That was the first I heard of it and look what happened."