Minghella a composed filmmaker

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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.