Minghella a composed filmmaker

Despite a record of critically acclaimed and commercially successful films (“The English Patient,” “The Talented Mr. Ripley” and “Cold Mountain”), director Anthony Minghella wrestled with self-doubt as he approached his latest film, “Breaking and Entering.”

“I was very nervous because I hadn’t written an original film since ‘Truly Madly Deeply,’ ” the filmmaker said last fall at the Toronto International Film Festival, referring to his 1991 debut.

“I wonder if I can write a film,” he remembers thinking. “I’d been so dependent on the crutch of a good book that I worried I would have nothing to say. I was surprised by maybe wanting to say too many things.”

“Breaking and Entering” stars Jude Law as a London architect and Robin Wright Penn as his live-in Swedish girlfriend. The architect embarks on an affair with a Bosnian refugee (Juliette Binoche), the mother of the teenager who’s been breaking into his office.

“It’s an action film with no action,” Mr. Minghella jokes.

An intimate, scaled-down film, “Breaking” may surprise those expecting the sweeping historical and geographic backgrounds of Mr. Minghella’s tear-jerking romantic epic “The English Patient,” which won nine Oscars, including best picture and best director.

There’s a tension “between what I want to write about and what I want to look at,” says Mr. Minghella, who comes off as exceedingly intelligent but never pretentious.

“I love scale in movies,” he explains. “I just want to be transported, I want the camera to go exploring. I loved in ‘Cold Mountain’ having a thousand people running around. But I have very tiny handwriting, and I think my interests are very small.”

The themes of “Breaking” should come as no surprise to anyone who’s followed Mr. Minghella’s work or his life. The 53-year-old director was born to Italian immigrants and raised on the Isle of Wight, off the southern coast of England. He studied English and drama at the University of Hull.

He’s married to Carolyn Choa, a Hong Kong-born choreographer, with whom he recently worked on his operatic debut. His stark, revelatory production of Puccini’s “Madama Butterfly” premiered at the English National Opera in 2005 and opened the Metropolitan Opera season in New York this past fall.

Mr. Mingella would have liked to become a composer; he began his career writing incidental music for the theater. He says he likes working with Gabriel Yared — who won an Oscar for his “English Patient” score — because he “lets me into the compositional process a lot.”

His love of music is evident in his films. He even plays the celesta in the score of his current film, which, like many of his others, features the music of J.S. Bach.

Noting that he listens to Bach “every day,” he confesses, “Films always end up being a kind of advertisement for things you’re interested in.”

In “Breaking,” he manages to relate his love of Bach to his continuing wonder at the irreducible individuality of people. “The last thing you’d imagine when you see a kid breaking into the building is that you’d go and find a mother from Bosnia who plays the piano, who’s playing Bach,” he says.

“It’s a film about understanding how much we don’t know about the world and how our prejudices assert themselves,” he says.

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