Jude and Nicole? Never...

Clearly he has hidden depths and a tenacity that has carried him through the hostile terrain of large-scale filmmaking. By all accounts, his latest film, Cold Mountain, was not exactly a cakewalk. Terrible weather, a battle scene involving hundreds of extras, an inhospitable landscape. Not to mention the press intrusion over the alleged off-screen antics of his two stars, Nicole Kidman and Jude Law.

"There isn't a single day I have ever shot when I haven't thought I was going to throw up," admits Minghella.

"You feel defeated, alone and inadequate. After a week of shooting Cold Mountain I doubted I'd make it through the next week, knowing I had five-and-a-half months more to go."

So much for the glamour and excitement of film-making. As for the shenanigans surrounding Law and Kidman, he is happy to set the record straight. "It had no impact on the film whatsoever," he says, categorically.

"Jude and Nicole are hardly ever together in the film at the same time. Often when Jude arrived Nicole was leaving. It was an extrapolation made by people who know nothing about the making of a film."

Minghella himself caught some flak when it was claimed that he was angry about Jude Law leaving the set to be with his then wife Sadie Frost when she gave birth to their son, Rudy.

"Jude told me before we started filming that Sadie was expecting and asked if he could go home when it happened. Of course I said there would be no problem. It was a week earlier than expected but I had a plane for him 45 minutes after the call came. I was horrified to read that we had refused to let him go home. It was nonsense."

How this son of Italian ice-cream makers ascended to the dizzy heights of an international film career, complete with an Oscar and a CBE, is the stuff of dreams, luck, ambition and very hard work. After a fairly uneventful schooling, in which he was often berated for playing truant, came a drama course at Hull University where he met his future wife, Caroline Choa, who is now a dance choreographer. They split their time between their Hampstead and Los Angeles homes.

Before making waves with his debut movie, Truly, Madly, Deeply, Minghella had been a successful writer for television and theatre (Made in Bangkok, Inspector Morse) and before that, had spent some time writing songs and playing keyboards in rock/folk bands in his birthplace, the Isle of Wight.

Given that he is not far from inheriting the mantle of David Lean as a kind of British elder statesman of romantic epics, it is surprising how vividly Minghella recalls his adolescent years.

"I used to sit in my Dad's ice-cream van with the chimes - which played The Happy Wanderer - dinging away and thinking, 'When I get out of here I'm never going to sell anything again.' Twenty-five years later and I'm selling my movie as hard as I can. There is no escape."

Whether it is icecream or movies, Minghella's name is invariably attached to quality product. He tapped into a forgotten (middle-aged) audience with his second film, The English Patient, and can now command the likes of Kidman - probably the biggest female movie star in the world - and Law in Cold Mountain, his own adaptation of Charles Frazier's romantic quest novel set against the backdrop of the American Civil War.

Today Minghella is the epitome of cool. It is just over a week since he put the finishing touches to the movie, but there is little in his manner or appearance to suggest the stress of a six-month shoot.

Yet still there is the undeniable suspicion that Minghella chooses the harder path. His big films have all been adaptations of well-known novels whose followers would scrutinise his work more keenly than most. And if The Talented Mr Ripley and The English Patient needed a bit of tweaking to get to the screen, Cold Mountain must have required an enormous effort of rethinking and readdressing as a movie. Certainly there is a lot riding on it. For one thing, it is the most expensive movie producer Harvey Weinstein has every bankrolled.

"Harvey has always been there, waiting with faith. This is the most expensive film he has ever invested in and that says something about his nerve. His heart is a film-maker's heart, his passion is a film-maker's passion, irrespective of his methods or his personality.

"Harvey's idea of a good time at home is to watch seven movies - and probably none of them in the English language.

"We have had many merry battles along the way and I would not hesitate in working with him again. He has a somewhat dangerous desire to leave his signature in film-making history and sometimes that is destructive. He can trample all over you. But he is also highly supportive." As well he might be. Minghella virtually defined the Miramax style singlehandedly with The English Patient - a film that was targeted, and reached, an audience that had remained untapped for decades.

A full-blown epic romance set against exotic desert landscapes and a wartime backdrop, it was the kind of film that reached deep into the heart of middleaged, respectable and a largely uncatered-for generation of filmgoers and hauled them back into the cinema. It was the perfect combination of erudite research coupled with shamelessly romantic entertainment.

This approach to filmmaking - the thorough research, the endless watching of old movies - is the mark of the zealot and Minghella describes himself to me as an "evangelist of cinema". It seems an apt expression, given his religious convictions and how they have impacted on him as a

film-maker. "I've always wanted to do a Crusades film," he replies elliptically.

"The conviction on both sides that they were supported by a similar kind of deity is perennially fascinating. And the blood that has been shed in the name of God seems worth addressing.

"My family was totally religious. But to answer your question: do I go to church? No. Do I go to retreats? Yes. Do I think the Church is pernicious? Yes. Do I believe in an afterlife? No.

"The way of viewing the world is so clearly Catholic to me, whether I like it or not; it has taken me a long time to come to an accommodation with that. I cannot escape from the imprimatur of Catholicism, I'm marinated in it."

Indeed, he even uses Catholic imagery to describe why he decided to devote three or four years of his life to adapting and then making Cold Mountain.

"Ripley was a film about purgatory; this is a film about redemption. Ripley delved into the worst of myself. I wanted a few years of delving into the best of myself."