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Breaking and Entering
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 Breaking and Entering Production NotesTagline: Love is no ordinary crime.
When a London architect (Law) meets a young Muslim thief, it causes him to take a new look at his life.
A story about theft, both criminal and emotional, "Breaking and Entering" follows a disparate group of long-term Londoners and new arrivals whose lives intersect in the inner-city area of King's Cross. When a landscape architect's (Jude Law) state of the art offices in a seedy part of town are repeatedly burgled, his investigations launch him out of the safety of his familiar world.
A story about theft, both criminal and emotional, "Breaking and Entering" follows a disparate group of long-term Londoners and new arrivals whose lives intersect in the inner-city area of King's Cross. When a landscape architect's (Jude Law) state of the art offices in a seedy part of town are repeatedly burgled, his investigations launch him out of the safety of his familiar world.
"Breaking and Entering" is Academy Award-winning director Anthony Minghella's first original screenplay since his 1991 feature debut, "Truly Madly Deeply." Minghella, Sydney Pollack and Timothy Bricknell are producing for Minghella and Pollack's Mirage Enterprises.
Breaking and Entering tells the story of a series of criminal and emotional thefts, set against the backdrop of London's changing culture and geography. Will (Jude Law) and his friend Sandy (Martin Freeman) run a flourishing landscape architecture firm that recently relocated to King's Cross, the centre of Europe's most ambitious urban regeneration site. Their state-of-the-art studio office repeatedly attracts the attention of a local gang of thieves and Will, fed up after another break-in, chases one of the young gang members, Miro (Rafi Gavron), back to the apartment he shares with his mother Amira (Juliette Binoche), a Bosnian refugee. At home, Will lives with his beautiful girlfriend Liv (Robin Wright Penn) who spends most of her time worrying about her troubled 13-year-old daughter Bea (Poppy Roger).
Will befriends Amira to further investigate the burglary, but their friendship takes an unexpected turn. Amira soon discovers that Miro robbed Will's office and becomes suspicious of his true intentions in their relationship. In a state of fear, she sets out to blackmail Will in order to protect her son. With his life already in crisis, Will embarks on a passionate journey into the wilder side of both himself and the city.
Introduction
Filmed on location in London and at Elstree Studios during the summer of 2005, Breaking and entering is Academy Award winning director Anthony Minghella's first original screenplay to be produced since his 1991 feature debut, 'Truly Madly Deeply.' Produced by Minghella, Sydney Pollack and Timothy Bricknell for Mirage Enterprises (Minghella and Pollack's production company) the film is a co-production between Miramax Films and The Weinstein Company.
Breaking and entering stars Jude Law who previously worked with Anthony Minghella on 'Cold Mountain' and 'The Talented Mr Ripley' and received Academy Award nominations for both performances; Juliette Binoche who won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for her role in Minghella's 'The English Patient,' and American actress Robin Wright Penn who became a household name with her starring role in 'Forrest Gump' and was recently seen in 'A Home at the End of the World.' The cast includes Vera Farmiga, Ray Winstone, Martin Freeman, Rafi Gavron, Poppy Rogers and Juliet Stevenson.
The behind the scenes team includes production designer Alex McDowell ('Fight Club,' 'Minority Report') and cinematographer Benoit Delhomme ('The Scent of Green Papaya, 'Merchant of Venice,' 'Cyclo'). The original score is composed by Gabriel Yared ('The English Patient,' 'The Talented Mr Ripley,' 'Cold Mountain') and Rick Smith and Karl Hyde of the group Underworld.
About the production
Who is cleaning my house? Who is cooking my food? Who is washing my car?
For his first original script to be produced since 'Truly, Madly, Deeply' in 1991, Anthony Minghella chose a drama, both intimate and wide-ranging, involving the disparate lives of contemporary Londoners. His characters represent a cross-section of residents, from established young professionals to the city's more recent arrivals: immigrants carrying burdens of war and economic hardship. As the rundown neighbourhoods are redeveloped and the 'haves' encroach on the terrain of the 'have-nots,' boundaries of class, culture and privilege are blurred and breeched. The players are brought together by a series of actual and metaphorical thefts, which force them to connect, fall apart and come together again in other, better ways.
"A long time ago, I tried to write a play called Breaking and entering," says Minghella. "The idea was that a couple comes home from a party to discover that their house has been burgled. When they do an inventory of what has been taken, they discover that things have been added and these things indicate problems in their marriage. I liked this idea but I could never write it, although I kept trying.
Then, a couple of years ago, we bought an old chapel in North London to use as our studio. I remember my son Max saying ominously at the time and it's in the film, 'Bad place for an office.' He was at school nearby and knew the area. But I loved the place, loved the location. During the very extensive renovation, I was in Romania scouting for 'Cold Mountain' and I'd get these calls from the office saying, 'Hello, we've had a break-in. Hello, we've had another break-in.' I suppose the office had become a sort of focal point for the surrounding estates and it was a fun thing to come in and cause problems. We were broken into 13 times over a period of eight weeks.
This sort of 'baptism of burglary' reminded me of the idea I'd had 15 years earlier and I started to think there was a different way to say the same thing: that a crime can cause a repair, a break can fix something. In my mind, there's something in the idea that when damage is done, the repairing of that damage makes everybody stronger. There's also this idea of the different ways there are to 'steal' things from other people; there are all kinds of theft. That's partly what the film is about."
Jude Law who plays the pivotal character, Will Francis, says, "It's a story about the worlds we live in, here in London, that collide and pass by each other, and intertwine. Worlds that we sometimes don't pay attention to that we take for granted, that we judge or - even worse - which we're respectful to in a very patronizing way. You think, 'I donate money to a charity, I give my old clothes to Humana, I'm doing my thing,' whereas in fact, you're doing nothing to help anybody who you see as anything beyond a belly. We almost never ask, 'Who is cleaning my house? Who is cooking my food? Who is washing my car? Are they better educated than me?'"
"It's not a sellable subject somehow, immigrants," says Juliette Binoche who plays Amira, the Bosnian refugee mother of Miro, the boy whose breaking and entering sets off a series of unlikely encounters. "We kind of put them in the corner and we don't want to think or talk too much about them. But I loved that Anthony wanted to address what it is to be an immigrant, how your life can change completely because of a war, because of other people's decisions. How do you survive as an immigrant if, in your own country, you were a pianist, or a scientist, or a teacher, and then suddenly in another country you become a tailor, a cleaning lady?"
"It's so easy to judge, isn't it, when you don't know people and you don't know situations?" says Martin Freeman who plays Will's business partner, Sandy Hoffman. "We all do it. I do it all the time. Sometimes you forget that everyone's got a story, everyone's got a life. It's harder to be black and white once you know the more complicated things at stake in other people's lives."
"I wanted to make a film at home in London, and about London," says Anthony Minghella. "And one of the things I love about London, which all of us who live here celebrate, or most of us do, is the fact that it's full of people from many nations. It's culturally so diverse; it really is a melting pot. But I would say that's the charming analysis. The less charming analysis is that, as the striations of class have altered and blurred, everybody has sort of flocked to the middle-class in an interesting migration that has more or less removed English blue-collar workers. An invisible class has emerged: an underclass, most of who are not English at all but have come from other countries. Although we are extremely brittle and arch about immigration, and often use the issues as a political gesture in elections, we rely on immigrants."
"My grandmother was a Polish immigrant; she had a Polish accent when she was speaking in French and she was a tailor. So for me, when I read the script, I was taken aback because I didn't expect it to be so close somehow," says Binoche. "So far, but so close at the same time. One of the reasons I wanted to do the film is as a dedication to her, my roots. I felt it was a great opportunity to say thank you because it's still true that there are generations that have to go through a difficult time in order for their descendants to have a better life, better choices. It was wonderful to be able to talk about those people."
"In London today, we rely on an invisible group of Kosovans, Slovenians, Bosnians, Brazilians, Mexicans, Nigerians, Ghanaians: people who come here and do the jobs that we are loathe to do," says Minghella. "They're largely invisible to the welfare state, they're invisible culturally, but they make up the high percentage of this great city. And I thought, if you make a movie about London, you'd better make a movie which at least looks at that issue, looks at the degree of privilege and the degree of under-privilege that obtain right now in London. I wanted to make a film that somehow glanced at this without making anybody feel that they were just being told off."
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Jude Law and Juliette Binoche in Breaking and Entering.
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