ou usually think of Toronto, Montreal or Vancouver when you think of "Hollywood North." But Canada's cottage country can exert influences too.

  For example, it was in a cabin in the Ottawa Valley, as a guest of Canadian novelist Michael Ondaatje, that director Anthony Minghella was pointed towards the biggest-budgeted movie of his career — the Nicole Kidman/Renée Zellweger/Jude Law Civil War romance Cold Mountain.

  "I felt like I'd got into this cycle of adapting novels," Minghella told Moviemaker magazine. "I'd said that I wouldn't do another one." Quite a vow, considering the Oscar trips he earned with Ondaatje's The English Patient and Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr. Ripley.

  "We just kind of hung out for a weekend together in his cabin, and he (Ondaatje) gave me a novel that he said his editor had passed to him that he thought I might react to." It was Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain.

  Weirdly, within weeks, Minghella would receive three more copies of the book from various people. "I took that as some sort of oracle that I'd better pay attention to it, and before I finished reading it, I knew I would do it."
actors
Jude Law
Nicole Kidman
Renée Zellweger
Natalie Portman
Kathy Baker

director
Anthony Minghella

locations
Romania
South Carolina

outtake
Stripes rocker Jack White not only sings on the movie's soundtrack, he also has a small acting role as Renée Zellweger's husband.


  The rest was up to the gods of fate and Hollywood deal-making. Soon it was reported that Tom Cruise was cast as Inman, a wounded and world-weary Confederate soldier who miraculously survives his wounds, deserts his company and makes a perilous journey home to North Carolina to be reunited with his sweethearts Ada.

  Then Cruise pulled out of the movie to star in The Last Samurai.  After this happened, Cruise's ex-wife, Nicole Kidman, suddenly decided she'd like to play Ada — whose journey of independence involves running a farm without help from her father (dead) and her fiancé (missing in action), and amounts to a parallel plot in Frazier's novel. The cards thus shuffled, Renée Zellweger came on as Ruby, the drifter who enters Ada's life and offers her friendship and hard work. Law was also signed to replace Cruise, and take on Inman's journey through a gauntlet of outlaws, angry bears and devastated victims of war.

  Did we mention this was the biggest-budget of Minghella's career? That's one Oscar-winner (Kidman) and two Oscar nominees (Zellweger and Law) for a reported combined salary of $35 million. And that's not including what it cost to get a supporting cast that includes Natalie Portman, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Giovanni Ribisi. As Minghella himself notes, he'd gone from a crew of 20 for his breakthrough films Truly, Madly, Deeply, to more than 200 for Cold Mountain, between location shoots in Romania and South Carolina.

  Of course, a cast like that is a veritable tabloid-generator, keeping the movie on people's minds for more than a year prior to release. There was the discounted Nicole/Jude romance rumor. There was the birth of Law and wife Sadie Frost's baby, which saw Law go AWOL from the South Carolina shoot and cost the production a reported $150,000. And then, of course, there's a movie in there somewhere.

  "Cold Mountain is a hopeful kind of love. I think your life is your life. There's ups and downs, and you maneuver within it and you accept that it's a journey, however long, however short," Kidman said at the Toronto International Film Festival.

  The question now is where this journey will take Minghella and his film on Oscar night.

—Jim Slotek