Director Anthony Minghella has travelled so much for the past 20 years - making such films as The English Patient, The Talented Mr Ripley and Cold Mountain - that he has a half-packed suitcase ready at all times. “I don't bother unpacking,” he explains, “I just top it up.” For his latest film however, the Oscar-winning director returned home to his native London.

Breaking and Entering tells the story of Will, a landscape architect (Jude Law) working on a vast urban redevelopment project in London’s King’s Cross. When Will’s offices are broken into, his quest to recover his laptop computer leads to a passionate encounter with Bosnian refugee Amira (Juliette Binoche) which threatens to destroy his relationship with his Swedish American girlfriend (Robin Wright Penn).

“I was interested in writing about the different ways there are to steal things from people,” Minghella says. “I think there can be emotional crimes that are worse than the theft of a computer.”

Was it a conscious choice to make a film with a contemporary setting?

Yes, it was quite deliberate. When I was doing interviews for Cold Mountain someone said to me, “So basically your movies have doubled in cost and size from one to the next,” which was a horrible equation to be making I thought.

So the structure of this film preceded the content in a way. I knew I wanted to make a smaller personal film before I knew what that smaller personal film would be.

And one of my fears was that having decided to write something set in London I would have nothing to say. I went to this cottage where I go to write and just hoped I would come back with something.

The characters in the film all have to make choices that will have far-reaching consequences. Do those turning points in life particularly interest you?

They are inherently dramatic, but they are also more common that we realise. Every day we elect a course. We love one person thinking we might have loved someone else.

We make choices and those choices having consequences. You do one thing, but you also think, ‘I might have done something else’. You’re in a restaurant and the food arrives and you think ‘I wish I’d had the steak’ and the person opposite you thinks they should have had the salmon.

Breaking and Entering has a pretty complex structure and storyline, but what was the initial idea behind the story?

Fourteen or fifteen years ago, I began writing a play called Breaking and Entering and it was about a couple that returned home and discovered that their flat had been burgled. When they came to do an inventory of what had been stolen, they discovered that things had been added.

I tried writing it twice and it went nowhere. But then when I was in Romania making Cold Mountain, our offices in London were being repeatedly burgled and I was reminded of the idea for the play and I thought that perhaps a petty crime could create a vehicle for me to examine a city and also a city which embodies so many different types of experience.

There's a vast migrant class in London. The Juliette Binoche character in the film is Bosnian but she could have easily been Slovenian, Brazilian, Mexican, Nigerian, etc.

Breaking and Entering forces us to reexamine a lot of preconceived ideas about immigrants. Was that your intention?

I didn't want anybody to feel they were being told off, but what's the point of fiction if it doesn't challenge some of our preconceptions?

The only films that I've seen in my life that have stayed with me are films that have asked something of me.  So the most dignified character in the film is Amira and she has really strong values. The first thing she does with Will is to give him back his wallet.

I remember when I first came to London and was trying to make my way as a young playwright, I was sleeping on a friend's couch and he would have a cleaner come in every week. I asked her one time where she was from and she said I'm from Argentina and I'm an analyst. It was my first collision with the fact that the job has nothing to do with the person.

Jude Law has been a huge object of interest in the tabloid press in the last year. Do you worry about how that impacts people seeing the film?

You can't know when you cast a film what is going to happen nine months or a year later. And I don't follow those things. I do know that in this country in particular there's a constituency that has elevated these actors that then feels it necessary to destroy them.

Breaking and Entering seems poised between a certain optimism about people and the world we live in and a certain anxiety or despair. Are you optimistic about the world? About filmmaking?

As far as films go, I think every movie begins with optimism and ends with a certain disappointment. The product never quite matches up to the initial idea, but I'm optimistic about the cinema.
Every year, people are ringing the death knell of cinema and then there's another wonderful film comes along.

And about the world in general?

I'm very optimistic about the capacity we have to be good and be generous to each other, but I'm also anxious because I think the damage that is being done to the world in the name of religion and the name of country is terrifying. I think we're in a dangerous time. I'm nervously optimistic. The world is a brittle place.