YOU'RE Serbian?" a social worker asks Juliette Binoche, an immigrant whose son has got into trouble with the police in Anthony Minghella's 'Y Breaking And Entering.

"No, I'm Bosnian, " she replies.

"It's complicated. I'm a Muslim."

The word 'Muslim' hangs there in a way Minghella didn't originally intend. "Hearing it now sounds like the volume suddenly got doubled, " he tells me. He'd written Breaking And Entering before the London tube bombings. The day it happened he was filming a scene in King's Cross with Binoche and Jude Law. Law plays a successful architect whose cool upper-class world becomes accidentally involved with hers through a chance burglary in his office. "We were shooting just around the corner from the bombs, " Minghella says. "The movie collided with what was going on in the city."

The subsequent backlash against Muslims gives a heightened resonance to the movie's theme of putting faces on London's invisible immigrant underclass.

"The job of the filmmaker is to say it's too easy to pass judgement on people, " he says. "Of course terrible things are happening. But does it mean terrible people are doing these things. I don't know. I suspect not. The last thing I want to do is make a film that says you can throw bombs at each other and torture each other and that's fine because you're not a bad person.

It's not that I think people are incapable of being bad. It's quite evident that people have done terrifying things often in the name of something else, in the name of country, in the name of religion.

But I would have to think that there's a version of the world we live in where that would cease."

Since his debut as a writer/director with the surreal romance Truly, Madly, Deeply in 1990, 52-year-old Minghella, who grew up on the Isle of Wight, the son of Italian ice-cream makers, has made his international reputation with big-budget literary adaptations, winning an Oscar in 1996 for The English Patient and picking up more Oscar nominations for The Talented Mr Ripley and Cold Mountain. "When I was doing Cold Mountain someone remarked that my budgets doubled with every film, and was it my ambition to make a $200m picture? I said I dearly hoped not."

Breaking and Entering is his attempt to get back to basics. "I wanted to see if I could write an original film again. Since Truly, Madly, Deeply I'd written very little. When you haven't written an original film for a long time you're nervous that you've got nothing to say and then your discovery is that you've too much to say. I think the film is a little pot that I'm trying to pour a lot of my feelings into."

Perhaps a clue to Minghella's true nature is in his handwriting.

"It's very small, " he admits. "I learned to type when I was a student at Hull University because nobody could ever read it. It's probably indicative of my way of looking at the world, which is very miniature, whereas as a filmmaker I love scale. And somewhere in those two realities, that's where my films live. They're either too small for the scale or too big for the frame."

Cold Mountain started him thinking about writing something small and personal again. "I remembered a play I started to write after Truly, Madly Deeply but then abandoned. Back then I was very entranced by magical realism. I'd worked on a series for Jim Henson's company called The Storyteller, which was full of these very bold narrative ideas . . . a giant who'd lost his heart, or a man who went on a journey to find out what fear was. I loved those stories and it was great for me to learn how to tell them. Truly, Madly, Deeply was a story like that. Instead of saying what if you passed through a relationship but missed it so much you wanted it back, it was what if you lost somebody through death and you wanted them so much that they came back. I started to write Breaking and Entering about a couple who came home to discover their flat had been burgled and then when they did an inventory of what had been stolen found that things had been added and what had been added told them what was wrong with their marriage."

Breaking And Entering was to be a movie about London which, unlike his other movies, Minghella wouldn't have to research. "I thought I just want to go and make a movie about this place I live in and know, but then I discovered I had to research every line of the film, that I didn't know anything about London and certainly not about the people who come into the film. I went out with the police around London at night. I met a lot of architects. I went to Bosnia and Sweden to learn more about the characters of the two women in the film."

A few days before we met in London, Minghella had made his debut as an actor in an adaptation of Ian McEwan's Atonement. "It was just for a day, doing a scene with Vanessa Redgrave. I had to remind myself that I wasn't directing. No, no, no, I've got to say my lines. I think that often in film if you do a different job you learn about your own job a bit more."

'Breaking And Entering' opened nationwide on Friday