ROOFTOP JUMPING GETS DIRECTOR MINGHELLA NERVOUS

Breaking and Entering director Anthony Minghella became extra cautious filming when an off-set accident occurred.

The art of Parkour, an untrained style of free running and jumping from rooftops of buildings is all the rage in Britain.

Breaking and Entering director Anthony Minghella wanted to show the sport in his film and took extra precautions with safety measures with newcomer Rafi Gavron. However an unexpected tragedy made him nervous.

“Of course the crew was also on these rooftops as well and we were all attached to these guide ropes checking and I got a call to say that the window cleaner had fallen out of the window of my house! He was seriously injured, our window cleaner of 20 years which was very ironic because there we all were being told by the safety people to be careful and our window cleaner had fallen off his ladder. Oddly that made me so nervous throughout the shooting that we were extremely careful with everything we did because Rafi Gavron who was playing the boy did a lot of the stunts himself and he is a free runner which is such a preoccupation in Britain right now and in Europe; this game of running and jumping across rooftops, not something I’d recommend to anybody.”

Despite being safe on the set Anthony set the limit as to what he would allow his actors to do themselves.

“There are a couple of very dangerous stunts I’m sure they would’ve done by themselves but we weren’t allowed to do that. And the fact it’s the funny nature of film is that this boy is capable of doing twice as much as he did but we just couldn’t risk him injuring himself so it’s slightly less than he’s capable. This is his first film and he wanted to do everything and say, ‘look how good I am.’ We had to say, ‘no you can only do one flip or two.’”

Anthony auditioned hundreds of free runners throughout Europe for the role but settled on Rafi because he could act as well.