Cold Mountain: The Journey from Book to Film

Frazier's mythic novel about a wounded Confederate soldier's return to his sweetheart in the mountains of western North Carolina achieved critical and popular acclaim, and the film version of it promises to be one of this winter's biggest movies. This book explains how the film's directors, producers, actors, designers and other collaborators made the transition from page to screen, using period illustrations, movie stills, passages from the screenplay and interviews with the cast and crew. In his introduction, director Anthony Minghella describes how he and his crew struggled to replicate the novel's focus on nature while they were filming in Romania; he also deprecates the process of adaptation:""Beautiful stories are plundered, seemingly in the most perverse ways."" Yet the filmmakers' painstaking attention to detail suggests that Frazier's novel has not been ravaged in its transposition to the silver screen. And fans of backstage stories will appreciate this book's insights into how the filmmakers depicted the intricate relationship between Ada (played by Nicole Kidman) and Ruby (played by Renee Zellweger) and how they shot the battle scene in which Inman (Jude Law) is severely injured. 185 illustrations.