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How The Talented Mr. Ripley went from “a total disaster” to a starry success

ELEGANT AND RADICALLY AHEAD OF ITS TIME, The Talented Mr. Ripley WAS AN OSCAR ANOMALY THAT EVOLVED INTO A GENERATIONAL TOUCHSTONE

The early cut of Anthony Minghella's 1999 film, adapted from Patricia Highsmith's 1955 novel, plopped its eponymous con artist (Matt Damon) into a seaside Italian town—where aimless scion Dickie Greenleaf (Jude Law) had started living with his girlfriend, Marge (Gwyneth Paltrow)—as if he'd fallen straight from the sunny Sicilian skies. Sydney Pollack, whose company Mirage Enterprises financed Ripley, gave the director a piece of advice as they discussed the inevitable edit to follow: "You can drive the bus wherever you want to go, but if it says 'hell' on the front of it, you've got to let people know when they're getting on board." Coming off of her own dizzying awards run for Shakespeare, Paltrow expressed some reluctance to get back on the trail: "So far, I've only felt sort of the traumatic part of it," she told the Los Angeles Daily News around Ripley's release.

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