'COLD' HARD FACTS DIRECTOR ANTHONY MINGHELLA ADMITS NOT EVERYONE WANTS TO SEE HIS CIVIL WAR EPIC, BUT A FLURRY OF AWARDS COULD WARM THE SKEPTICS.

Byline: Glenn Whipp Film Writer

For a director who alternately refers to himself as an ``endangered species'' and a ``used-car salesman,'' Anthony Minghella has very little use for self-pity. An unfailing pragmatist, Minghella didn't panic when MGM decided to bail on his latest epic tragedy, ``Cold Mountain,'' some three weeks before filming, and he didn't lose his head when freak storms threatened to shut down his production (a la Terry Gilliam's ``The Man of La Mancha'') once he managed to begin filming.

Now comes the hard part. Minghella, the maker of such erudite entertainments as ``The English Patient'' and ``The Talented Mr. Ripley,'' must sit on the sidelines, wait and see if anyone will let him make another movie again. Chain-smoking, but never losing his inherently English sense of calm, the soon-to-be-50-year-old director says he would have gladly spent another year in the editing room (his favorite place) and openly wonders if there's an audience for an $80 million story of doomed love, the only kind of love Minghella seems to know.

``If I ran a studio, I'd never make one of my films,'' Minghella admits, lighting another cigarette. ``When I was going around with my drawings and script and photographs for 'The English Patient,' every time I started talking about it, I thought, 'I wouldn't agree to make this. It doesn't make any sense at all.' And the same is true of 'Cold Mountain.' These are movies studios respect, but I don't think there is an appetite to make them.''

``Cold Mountain'' is Minghella's - and, by extension, Miramax's - biggest gamble. Based on Charles Frazier's popular novel about a Confederate soldier, Inman, who leaves the battlefield to return home to the woman he loves (but barely knows), Minghella's movie contains scenes of horrific violence and brutal cruelty. In a season of bleak movies (``21 Grams,'' ``Monster,'' ``Mystic River''), ``Cold Mountain'' might just be the harshest of the lot.

``You do kind of have to go over the pages a couple of times,'' says Renee Zellweger, who plays a spunky backwoods woman. ``It's about change. It's about developing as a person in challenging times. It's about redefining what's important in life.''

Studio reinforcement

Not exactly high-concept stuff. But Miramax, the film's sole financial backer after MGM pulled out over budget concerns, has a track record selling difficult material using the cachet of awards and Oscar nominations.

And though ``Cold Mountain'' - grossing $19.1 million in its first week of release - has been greeted with mostly respectable but not rapturous reviews (Time Magazine film critic Richard Schickel called it the worst movie of the year), the film did grab the most Golden Globe nominations of any movie last week (eight) and seems a good bet to win favor with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences when Oscar nominations are announced Jan. 27.

`` 'Cold Mountain' is one of those movies that has all the earmarks - prestigious source material, respected actors, an Oscar-winning director,'' says Paul Dergarabedian, president of Encino-based box-office tracking firm Exhibitor Relations. ``You know it will get nominations. If Miramax can get a best picture nod for 'Chocolat,' they're not going to lose with this.''

Minghella's directorial style itself seems designed to appeal to the academy's refined (at least, in their own minds) tastes. ``Cold Mountain,'' to a fault, looks great; its battle scenes may be shocking and horrifying, but they are also undeniably gorgeous. The bodies fly with choreographed precision.

Nicole Kidman, playing the Southern belle of the film's love story, never appears less than radiant. Even after her character, Ada, loses her upbringing and gets her hands dirty as a farmer, her hair retains that $6,000-a-day-stylist look.

Perhaps most telling, Minghella decided against filming in the book's actual setting, concluding that North Carolina simply wasn't photogenic enough. Instead, he took his production halfway around the world to Romania, where legendary production designer Dante Ferretti built the movie's luminous little town from scratch.

``Anthony is extremely meticulous,'' says Kathy Baker, cast as a farm woman coping with cruelty. ``He treats each little piece of the movie with the same exacting care.''

Such painstaking craftsmanship comes with a price tag. Minghella has doubled his budgets on his past three films - ``English Patient'' cost $20 million, ``Ripley'' $40 million and ``Cold Mountain'' $80 million-plus - and he nearly quit this movie in preproduction when Miramax resisted paying for the talents of his favored collaborators, most notably editor Walter Murch and cinematographer John Seale.

Those kinds of budget demands, along with the movie's downbeat material, caused MGM to have second thoughts. Simply put, they didn't think the movie would break even.

Tragic preconceptions

``It is an extraordinary amount of money, but when you compare it to some of these other epics, it's the cheapest movie out there,'' Minghella says. ``Still, you're talking about a lot of money for a film which speaks to an ideal audience, an audience of peers, an audience who is demanding. So I can see the problem.''

But while he might be a little sheepish about the costs, Minghella makes no apologies about his choice of material.

``I think about the history of theater and music and film and think, 'When did tragedy become a dirty word?' '' Minghella says. ``I remember when I was first talking about 'The English Patient' and I said in an interview, 'It's a tragedy,' and someone came up to me and said, 'DON'T say that tragedy word. It's not a good word.'

``When did tragedy become a problem?'' he continues. ``I think that catharsis and the possibilities of catharsis and tragedy are so important. There was a time in Greek theater where going to see a tragedy was compulsive for society. If you corral an emotion in a way that's not simply glib or smug, then it's a very useful thing for fiction.''

One of Minghella's favorite scenes in ``Cold Mountain'' involves a death that is not tragic, but necessary. It comes later in the movie when a mountain woman kills a beloved goat to make a stew for the ravaged Inman. For Minghella, the scene taps into an almost reverent appreciation for the natural, uncorrupted order of things and also lays bare our modern disassociation with that framework.

``It was interesting when we were previewing the film - 4,000 men died in a hole at the beginning and no one batted an eye, but you take the goat and cut its throat and the whole audience is devastated,'' Minghella says. ``Our sense of violence has been reduced to video games. We don't understand that it's flesh and blood involved. And we also don't accept the degree to which we've created a world in which the life cycle is distant from us.''

``We're terrified of aging, we're terrified of dying, and we don't want to think of our lives in simple terms,'' Minghella says. ``Our humanness is being extracted from us, but our Chinese chicken salad tastes really good.''

Glenn Whipp, [phone]

glenn.whipp(at)dailynews.com

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(1 -- 3 -- cover -- color) The long way home

`Cold Mountain,' with Nicole Kidman and Jude Law, was a battle for director Anthony Minghella - but he may yet win the war

(4) Jude Law plays Inman, a Confederate soldier making his way back to the woman he loves, in ``Cold Mountain.'' The film carries a high profile: Its source material was a National Book Award winner, and its stars and director are Oscar nominees or winners.

(5) - Anthony Minghella, director, right, on the set with Jude Law

(6) Renee Zellweger, left, plays a tomboyish farm hand sent to help Nicole Kidman's character, who has lost her father, in ``Cold Mountain.'' ``It's about change,'' Zellweger says of the story. ``It's about developing as a person in challenging times.''