06/02/2004 - As Cold Mountain opens the festival, the film's director, Minghella and his producer, answered U.S. criticisms over their choice to shoot the movie about the American civil war in Romania, with a European cast

Fortified by his 7 Oscar nominations, Anthony Minghella presented his blockbuster on the American Civil War, Cold Mountain [+see also:
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film profile], at the opening of the Berlin Film Festival last night. "I like the comparison with Gone with the Wind, they’ve got a lot of things in common. Nevertheless Cold Mountain is a film full of hope, a story that starts with the cruelty of war and ends with a family happily sitting around a table".
But in America, there’s been a row about the decision to shoot the whole film in Romania, with a mainly European cast. The film’s producer, Harvey Weinstein responded to the criticisms: "It’s not that I didn’t have faith in the studios, it’s that I believe in Europe, American cinema owes a lot to Europe and it should give something back. Whereas the last European film shown on a big network was Zeta, about 25 years ago. My point of view is that there aren’t such things as European films or American films: cinema is universal". Minghella added: "Where would I have found the North Carolina of 1860 in America? And the faces ravaged by the poverty of that time? Romania offered us these faces, a marvellous countryside and made fantastic spaces available to Dante Ferretti who did a magnificent work of reconstruction".

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