At first, Anthony Minghella had no idea what he was looking at. It was early morning, barely dawn, foggy and bitterly cold. The director was being driven to the Cold Mountain set in a remote corner of Romania, “full of that familiar apprehension and misery that you have each day when you’re shooting,” he says, and something was loping down the road in front of him. “Just a silhouette of a creature; I couldn’t work out what it was.” He thought it might be a bear. The cast and crew saw them all the time in Transylvania; after dark, they strolled the streets of the village where the production was bivouacked. As he got closer, however, Minghella realized the figure was Jude Law, his leading man, out for a run.

This was not unusual. For months, Law had been bulking up to play Inman, a farmer, carpenter, and Confederate soldier who deserts after a near-fatal injury and walks hundreds of miles home to Ada (Nicole Kidman), the minister’s daughter he loves with blind and blinding faith. “She’s the place I’m heading, and I hardly know her,” Inman says. Law was determined to grow strong not by working out in a gym, but by doing things Inman would have done: digging ditches, sawing wood, hammering nails.

That’s why his silhouette was odd—he wasn’t simply jogging. He was running down a road at sunrise before a grueling day of shooting with his trainer on his back. “His trainer,” Minghella says, “is a very, very big man.”

Inman doesn’t say much. Law has maybe 50 lines in the entire movie. “Jude didn’t have the luxury of language, the ability to make his performance through the turns of the lines, so he was determined to get inside the physicality,” Minghella says. “Not simply to get some muscles, but a sense of endurance. I kept saying to him, ‘It’s Sisyphean, this film. You’re constantly knocked over and knocked back; you’ve got this huge weight on you.’ ” He carried his trainer because he wanted the weight.

This article originally appeared in the March 2004 issue of PREMIERE Magazine.