Hello, I'm Kirstie Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 1997, and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My cast away this week is a playwright and film director.

Brought up on the Isle of White in a close family of Italian descent,

he claims never to have felt wholly English.

He went to Hull University first as a student, then as a teacher, and started writing

successfully for radio and television. He wrote the first Inspector Morse and won an award

from the London theatre critics for his first West End play Made in Bangkok.

The huge success of his first major hit, the film Truly Madly Deeply, which he wrote and directed,

took him to Hollywood and the familiar difficulties of the artist battling against commercial hype.

The next project he vowed he would make his own, and he did triumphantly.

It was called The English Patient, a film which has won nine Oscars.

He is Anthony Mingello.

It was a great triumph, Anthony, and a beautiful film,

but in that sense, of course, it was do or die for you,

because it was

absolutely what you wanted to make wasn't it? Well that's right I'd had an

experience in Hollywood in between Trillie Madidekle in that film where I felt that

I'd learned that it's easy to make mistakes making films

it's better to make your own mistakes and I felt that I'd surrendered the compass

somehow and once you've given up your own taste in filmmaking it's very hard to

know what's good and what's not good.

...