Alexandre Aja honoured to be given the chance to direct Anthony Minghella film

Filmmaker Alexandre Aja was honoured to pick up the reins on The 9th Life of Louis Drax following Anthony Minghella’s death.
The director’s son Max Minghella, who appeared in Aja’s 2013 film Horns, asked the French moviemaker to take the lead on the project, which he started adapting as a father-and-son piece.
“We were shooting Horns and Max told me about this novel that his father Anthony was supposed to direct before he died,” Alexandre tells WENN. “Max told me he was writing the adaptation and he asked me to read it and I was not expecting such an emotional overwhelming experience reading it.
“I felt it was, on one hand, an amazing Hitchcockian mystery with a complex character and darkness, and, on the other hand, the relationship of the boy with his mother and father was something that was very new and different from anything I’d read before.
“The first time I read the script it made me cry. And I read the script about 300 times and each time I cried, so it was a good sign that I make the movie.”
Aja reveals he never actually met Anthony Minghella, but came close as a young filmmaker: “He was doing Cold Mountain and I was shooting High Tension at the same time and we were both in Romania in the same hotel,” he remembers.
“I was with a tiny group of 10 people and he was with an army of 200 men! But unfortunately we never actually met.”
Throughout filming The 9th Life of Louis Drax, Aja imagined what the late Minghella would do if he was behind the camera.
“It was very hard to not think about Anthony coming on set every day because some of the scenes of the movie – the relationship of the son to his father – was very similar to the relationship Max Minghella had with his father,” Alexandre shares.