The things that scare us today
What if they happen someday
What if the sword kills the pen
What if the god kills the man
And if he does it with love
Well then it’s death from above
And death from above is still a death
So what if nothing is safe
So what if no one is saved
No matter how sweet
No matter how brave
What if each to his own lonely grave
Tom Ripley (Matt Damon) & Peter Smith Kingsley (Jack Davenport) in The Talented Mr. Ripley (dir. Anthony Minghella)
I do know that one of the clues for me, and in fact it resulted in my completely enlarging a character who’s mentioned only in passing in the novel, is that when Ripley fetches up in Venice late on in the story […] it appears as if he’s experienced absolutely no remorse whatsoever for what he’s done. And as this character, Peter Smith Kingsley, is pulling the drapes off this dusty old Venetian palazzo, he turns round to find Ripley collapsed in sobs on a couch.
And it seemed to me to be a great index of what the film might be, which is to hint at the fact that there is some consequence, an internal consequence, that there’s a prison that you can’t escape from, which is a prison of your own head. And no amount of talent to improvise your way out of trouble will ever get you out of the trouble that you have inside your own mind.
And so in some way, I thought it could be a story about the sentence of escape, rather than the sentence of being caught. — Anthony Minghella