I didn't see it at the cinema. I saw it on the television when my parents had gone out, which was a very rare occasion because they worked.
Island boy: in 1968 the arrival of the Isle of Wight festival was like an invasion, Anthony Minghella said, by people in Afghan coats
They had a cafn the Isle of Wight which was open 365 days a year, from morning to night. They apparently came home one evening and found me completely devastated. It transpired that I had been watching The Blue Angel. I can't date it but I certainly wasn't 10. I must have been seven, eight or nine.
My memory is of this appalling humiliation of a teacher in love with a cabaret performer Marlene Dietrich. It begins with an extremely curmudgeonly, rather rigid and puritanical schoolteacher who finds out some of his pupils have been visiting the cabaret. He then pursues them and gets sucked into the life of this cabaret. When he marries Marlene Dietrich, he is then forced to perform in this cabaret. There is a sequence in which he is humiliated by Dietrich and has to go on stage in his clown's make-up.
Relative values: Minghella with his incredibly religious Italian father in 1979
It is 40 years ago or more that I saw this film. I can only remember glimpses. Shards of it remain in my mind. It was the first time a piece of fiction had had such a devastating emotional effect on me. It was the first time I realised there was an adult world that adults could damage each other or destroy each other emotionally.
Fiction with claws: Minghella watched The Blue Angel, starring Marlene Dietrich, above, on the television at the age of about nine on his own I remember my parents coming home and finding me in a place where I was so overwhelmed. I was in floods of tears
When I was a teenager, I was very much aware of the impact of film fiction. I had seen a lot of it and I had had access to the cinema. Where I grew up, our cafeteria was adjacent to a cinema. The projectionist rented a room in our building. There was always complete, free and unfettered access to the projection room.
Avid reader: Minghella, aged five
When I first decorated a space that was mine, it was decorated from floor to ceiling with film posters. They were probably absolutely unique items but I didn't realise. They were like wallpaper. There were lots of strange B-movie titles. I think I had a couple of David Lean posters. I seem to remember a picture of Robert Mitchum. And an Egyptian scene, King's Solomon's Mines, perhaps. But they weren't selected with any kind of discerning aesthetics. They were simply ways of wallpapering my walls that made my room look very quirky.
Most of my day was taken up with working for my parents. When we weren't at school we worked in the cafOne of my earliest movie experiences was selling ice cream in the cinema, carrying a crate of tubs around in the intermission. I have never resented my childhood. It was blessed in the sense that I had a wonderful family. I don't resent the lack of cultural information I had as a child. It made me very enquiring and curious.
I've always imagined that you find your culture rather than receiving it on a plate. With my own children they've tried to discover their own maps because the map in front of them is so defined.
Sometimes the weight of a cultural hegemony you experience if you live in a home with books and music and arts can be as tyrannising as having no pointers and no references. I had my own mini Cinema Paradiso experience of watching movies through the projection hall.
It was this experience with Blue Angel that made me realise that fiction had teeth and claws and tears. I can remember where I was sitting on the floor of my parents' living room. There are these rites of passage, these disturbances that lace together to push you into adulthood. I suppose The Blue Angel was one of those early disturbances. There are these fissures in the steady progress from childhood to adulthood.
Those fissures determine what kind of adult you will be. In particular, what I remember is watching it by myself. That made it much harder to bear. I think if I had watched it with somebody else, maybe with adults, I would have had some mediation between it and me. But because it was an entirely unmediated experience, because it was undiluted, I remember my parents coming home and finding me in a place where I was so overwhelmed. I was in floods of tears.
I tried to explain what had upset me. It was a subtitled movie. I have a strange theory the engagement with subtitles is not a distraction but has an oddly intensifying characteristic. You're using the reading brain as well as the seeing brain. When they're both engaged, the effect can be more powerful because you're dealing with something where you're having to actively decode events. It's a very curious thing. Some of my favourite movies, some of the most piercing movies, have been when I have had to read what is being said as well as listen and watch.
Marlene Dietrich's character was exotic and unknowable. The existence of an erotic life was another secret to me. It was clearly on display in that film. When I talk about these fissures, that probably is the beginning of a sense that there is an erotic life. I was an extremely avid reader as a child in a way that as a teenager I wasn't at all. From the ages of five to 10 I was addicted to reading. I would read under the covers with a torch. I read widely and wildly, with no control or compass. My parents didn't have any books at all. They weren't able to monitor us because they were working all the time. So we found books from the library. We had no sense of what was an adult's book. I remember reading The Nun's Story aged seven or eight years old, being absolutely fascinated. That has its own indications of an erotic life that runs counter to a religious life.
One of the imprimaturs of my childhood was religion because my parents were incredibly religious. My grandmother was religious. We went to church a lot. We were Roman Catholics. I was taught by nuns until I was 18 so there was a very strong sense of the catechism, and then this cultural offering [The Blue Angel] was in diametrical relationship to that. It was about all the flip side to those assertions. I was going to school in the Sixties, when there were convulsions in the world of education. [The film] If had an enormous impact when I was 13 or 14. We all went to see that film and thought it was the holy grail.
The system the post-war assertion of the status quo and an unending vision of England and Britannia was all fragmenting. It was a fascinating time to be growing up.
The festivals came. I saw a documentary about the Isle of Wight Festival recently. When you look at it, it looks as if modern England came to England on a ferry. It was like time travel; one culture which is so hermetic and so certain and so smug is invaded literally by boats of the modern people in Afghan coats. It was a modern with a sell-by date but it had such a seismic impact on a small island which, as somebody said, was two hours and 20 years from London. To be caught in the middle of that collision was a fascinating experience, a very important and indelible one in terms of having an opinion about the relationship between stable institutions and what the inner life is: the way that the inner life is struggling and convulsing and fighting to make sense of the world.
I was very much into painting and drawing. I had a piano at home and a bass guitar. My friends played with us. We drew and painted and we all hung out with the art department and smoked cigarettes and listened to jazz. That community of people felt dislocated from the mainland. There was a different place called England. We didn't live there but imagined what it would be like. It's four miles away. And yet it has another set of values. It is the unknown. We all imagined that we would get on the ferry and go off to find ourselves. The island was so small, so eccentric and so idiosyncratic. You would imagine a world where you would have an opportunity for personal liberty.
I had various jobs playing the piano in bars and in restaurants. The Isle of Wight had a big summer entertainment scene. There was a big folk club circuit there. There were the Isle of Wight festivals which meant that, as a young teenager, music was very viable. People were doing it who I knew. But I had never seen anyone with a camera. Although I lived next to a cinema, it took me a long time to [understand how films were made]. A cultural matrix which said that books are written as well as read is a very specific world. I didn't know where that world was. I assumed that books arrived titled and made and that there was no one anywhere struggling to write a book or make a film or think about what kind of film could be made. We were just receivers of culture.
I don't mean this was some kind of privation. It was simply a way that you experienced culture merely as product. There was no process that you were admitted to.
It was only when I became a student [at the University of Hull] that I realised there was process. Philip Larkin was our librarian. I realised that the guy who made these books also walked around and did his shopping. He must have therefore sat down at some point and written these poems. It started to occur to me to make a deconstruction of the finished article. Then, from that to the idea that a movie was made and that somebody had an idea of a script and drew pictures. By the time I graduated, I had started trying to make films myself. It was quite a long journey of penetrating culture a sense of simply coming to terms with the fact that culture didn't just exist, it was created and processed.
The entitlement that you require to think you can tell somebody a story was something that didn't even occur to me. I didn't think I would ever have the authority to tell a story. I was in a culture and a social territory that wasn't empowered in any shape or form. My parents were Italian immigrants. We were people who worked in cafand sold ice cream, not people who had the right to talk about their lives in public or to dramatise them or to fictionalise them or to give pleasure from our rehearsal of them. It never occurred to me that I might be in a place where I could be a film-maker. It never occurred to me until I went to university that ordinary people could have access to the complex club that is the world of cinema.
When I was in my third year of university, I was writing music. I wanted to do something with theatre. I started to write a musical. I wanted to submit some music but the department wouldn't allow it. So I thought I would write some text to lace these songs together. I adapted a short story. There was a sequence I wanted to be an exterior sequence. I didn't know how to do it but I thought I would film it. The department had a camera, a Bolex. So I went out and shot a little sequence in the park and had a lot of fun with it. I've often thought that for all of us, opportunity is everything and it is not an accident we turn out the way we turn out.
Having done that short scene, I thought I would make a full-length movie and so I borrowed some money. What's interesting to me is the odd galvanising of immigrant parents. My parents resent being called immigrants because my mother was born in England and my father came to England so young. But there is this drive and determination of people who settle in other countries.
When I wanted to make this musical piece for my degree, there was no piano available in the department and we couldn't afford to rent one. I played the piano for 48 hours and got sponsored and we got a Bechstein so I had a piano that I could play. When it came to making this film, there was no money in the department to help me make a film and so I went out and borrowed money. It took me nine years, with some other friends who helped me, to pay off the loan. I just wanted to make a movie.
It was a catastrophic first attempt. It's in a drawer somewhere. But it was me learning the cruel parade of film-making how much it takes of your resourcefulness and willpower to make a film but also how addictive and extraordinary it is.
The presence of a Bolex was very important, but this was still not real film-making. I had never met a real film-maker. My children met film-makers before they could speak, they met novelists, they met poets. I remember that when I was working on The English Patient with Michael Ondaatje, my son was working on some opus half-novel, half-film script when he was six or seven. I remember him reading it out to Michael. I had never met a novelist until I was in my twenties.
When I started directing, I felt like a man who had discovered that his hobby could be his job. All the things I like to do are allowed I like to play music, to draw, to write; I was an academic for eight years and I love the world of the library; I like the interaction with other people and the requirement to be alone; I like working slowly, which film requires, and I like to plan; I love sound studios and music studios and darkrooms. There is no part of the film-making journey that doesn't interest me.
When I stumbled into it I found how well cast I was in terms of temperament. The thing I have discovered is that there is quite a sharp distinction between my instincts as a writer and my instincts as a film-maker. I have very small handwriting, really small handwriting. Oddly enough, that mirrors my interest as a writer. I love detail, minutiae, oblique inflections of character and personality. As a film-maker, nothing would make me happier than doing work with 1,500 extras and a big paintbrush. To feel like you have an enormous palette is a great pleasure and enormously rewarding. What is great about the movie world is that you are allowed and you are encouraged to flex between the epic and intimate.
A woman's face and the battlefield are the two essential images of the movie business. There is something about the movie close-up. The Blue Angel was probably the first time I saw a woman lit with erotic intent.
I am very hungry to continue to collide with arresting art and arresting culture. I think we all are, whether we make it or simply consume it. We're on the prowl, open-mouthed, for the food of culture. You're always an audience. All the people I know who make art are first and foremost audiences, because you can only make two or three pieces of art a year. You're much more frequently in the position of consuming culture than you are of creating it. I think we're innocent at the moment of consumption but perhaps never as innocent as the boy sitting in front of the television watching The Blue Angel.
Screen Epiphanies by Geoffrey McNab is published by BFI/Palgrave MacMillan, 20. The BFI's season of films featured in the book continues on the South Bank with Jules et Jim, introduced by John Hurt, on 23 January. As part of the BFI's Josef von Sternberg season, which runs until 30 December, The Blue Angel will be shown on 16 December. Information: 020 7928 3232; www.bfi.org.uk
