69th Academy Awards · 1997
The English Patient
Directed byCooked up by Anthony Minghella
“In love, there are no boundaries.”
“Secrets, desert maps, and a very dramatic situationship. 🏜️”
The storyThe lore 📖
In the 1930s, Count Almásy is a Hungarian map maker employed by the Royal Geographical Society to chart the vast expanses of the Sahara Desert along with several other prominent explorers. As World War II unfolds, Almásy enters into a world of love, betrayal, and politics.
Near the end of World War II, a kind nurse named Hana cares for a badly burned patient in an old Italian villa. In flashbacks, we learn he's a mapmaker who explored the Sahara Desert in the 1930s and had a secret crush that turned into a tragic love story. It's giving slow, sad, and gorgeous desert scenery. 🏜️📖
What critics & audiences sayThe receipts 🧾
Tomatometer
86%
Fresh
#75 of 98 winnersFamous linesLines living rent free
We die. We die rich with lovers and tribes, tastes we have swallowed, bodies we have entered and swum up like rivers, fears we've hidden in, like this wretched cave.
We're the real countries. Not the boundaries drawn on maps, the names of powerful men.
Every night I cut out my heart. But in the morning it was full again.
My darling, I'm waiting for you. How long is a day in the dark? Or a week?
In case you're still wondering, This is called a supersternal notch.
I can still taste you. I try to write with your taste in my mouth.
For the heart is an organ of fire.
Katharine: Shall we be all right?
Almásy: Yes. Yes. —Absolutely.
Yes is a comfort. Absolutely is not.
Read to me will you? Read me to sleep.
Quotes via Wikiquote
Filming locationsWhere they shot it 📍
Fun factsFacts that go hard 🤓
- 20th Century Fox wanted bigger stars, with producer Saul Zaentz recalling executives asking, "Could we cast Demi Moore in the role?" Fox pulled out just three weeks before shooting, and Harvey Weinstein's Miramax stepped in.Wikipedia · Production
- The film is the subject of a Seinfeld episode, "The English Patient," in which Elaine is shunned by her friends and co-workers for disliking it.Wikipedia · Reception
- The English Patient was the first digitally edited film to win the Oscar for Best Film Editing.Wikipedia · Lead
- Editor Walter Murch, veteran of the Godfather films and Apocalypse Now, dreaded cutting the film's many flashbacks; the final cut has over 40 jumps in time, and his talks with novelist Michael Ondaatje became the book The Conversations.Wikipedia · Production
- To get the film made, cast and crew deferred $10 million in salaries; years later many were still waiting, and Saul Zaentz sued Miramax for $20 million in 2006, a case still unresolved when he died in 2014.Wikipedia · Production
- Once Miramax took over, Anthony Minghella's preference for Kristin Scott Thomas as Katharine was finally honored; she went on to earn an Oscar nomination for the role.Wikipedia · Production
- The film became the highest-grossing film in Miramax's history, with a worldwide gross of $232 million.Wikipedia · Reception
- The burned title character is a fictionalized version of a real man, Hungarian desert explorer László Almásy, who died in 1951, as an onscreen statement at the end explains.Wikipedia · Lead
- Saul Zaentz became interested in working with Anthony Minghella after seeing his film Truly, Madly, Deeply, and Minghella then brought him Michael Ondaatje's novel.Wikipedia · Production
- The film's desert plane crash at the camp was staged with a half-size scale model of the biplane.Wikipedia · Production