ACT HARD

By Brian Pendreigh

 (The Scotsman August 27, 1997)

 

Alan Rickman - In conversation with director Faynia Williams

Alan Rickman's acting career has ranged from classical theatre, where he played Hamlet, to blockbuster Hollywood movies Die Hard and Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. He has just directed his first film, The Winter Guest, starring Emma Thompson, which was filmed in Fife, and will premiere at the Venice Film Festival. He was back in Scotland last week to deliver the annual BAFTA Scotland/Scotsman Celebrity Lecture. It took the form of a conversation with his friend, Faynia Williams, who directed him on stage in The Brothers Karamazov in 1981.

FW: Alan, pitch the film The Winter Guest to us.

AR: The film grew from a conversation with Lindsay Duncan during the years, it seems like a lifetime, that we were doing Les Liaisons Dangereuses together. And it was a conversation about her mother who was ill at the time. But it was the kind of illness that has some very funny sides as well as some very sad sides. I said to her that I thought that this was the kind of story that doesn't get told often enough, and at the time was in a position to commission somebody to have a conversation with her and see if a play might come out of it.

For some instinctive reason - and instinct seems to have played a huge part in the birth and growth of this film - I knew it should be Sharman MacDonald. Anyway, some years later a play came out of it. Out of the blue came a request from the Almeida Theatre [in London]. At that time, Phyllida Law had spent the previous five years nursing her own mother, and parents, in fact, through long illnesses and it was the first time she had been able to go back on stage for five years.

There was some kind of serendipity following this project, because I cannot imagine anybody else playing this part. It so happens that she's Emma Thompson's mother. It so happens that that helps you to finance the film. It also happens that it's very hard on Sian Thomas, who was brilliant in the stage version. So what it arrived at last year, having had its run at the Almeida Theatre and the West Yorkshire Playhouse, was sitting on the terraces of Cannes having to pitch the movie.

I don't know what the rules are. I don't know what the game is, but you discover it very quickly at Cannes on those terraces - which is, you sell the film in very many different ways according to who you are talking to. It's either a film about a mother and a daughter, or it's a film about teenage sex. I didn't care what I told them it was about. I knew what it was going to be about, and so I would say anything.

FW: You've worked with some wonderful writers. Is that your starting point . . . the script?

AR: I'm nowhere without one. What am I going to do? It's a mysterious process. As I sit here now, I have no particular idea how we as actors do what we do. A lot of it's certainly to do with discipline and training. But, I suppose the moment of performance and the impossible horizon that you're always looking for is this curious balance between discipline, absolute discipline, and absolute freedom of spirit. If you can ever get the two to happen at the same time, then you have something extraordinary. But, of course, it's impossible.

FW: What's the difference between preparation for theatre and preparation for film?

AR: The practicalities are very different. I don't know that the preparation is. Sometimes it's very good for actors to actually have to just do it and get it over and done with. My most recent experience of that was doing Michael Collins and, actually, that was an interesting case in point. It's a real problem playing somebody who really lived [he plays statesman Eamon De Valera], especially if the director [Neil Jordan] is biased against them. At the read-through his first words to me were "So, do you hate him yet?" My immediate instinct was to put on a boxing glove and say "No."

I read the books and watch the tapes and work on the accent and all of that. And then it gets to the first day of shooting. I had flown in the night before. I arrive on the set and I think that I'm going to get in a car and be driven through this unbelievable set that had been built of O'Connell Street and the Post Office. Five thousand extras were coming that day and cars being driven through the main street. And I thought I was going to get this sort of drive-by as an easing-in process.

But Neil came up and said, "Well, we're going to do the speech then, are we?" I said, "Oh, are we? Are we going to do that first?" He says, "Do you have the accent?" I said, "Yes." "Do you have the glasses?" "Yes." And that was my rehearsal, being asked these questions, and then being marched down onto what looked, more and more as we approached it, like a scaffold. And all I could hear was this roar of 5,000 Dubliners. And I couldn't see them until I walked up.

What it proved was, thank God, I'd done the homework; thank God that you know that a bit of courage is necessary as an actor, and there was no running way, because where was he going to get 5,000 people from again? If I screwed up that was a big screw-up. Just as well really not to think about it too much and get it over and done with. And, having got it over and done with, I was much more relaxed through the rest of the film.

FW: You started in art school, you then changed to drama school. Why?

AR: I never see it as a change. And I think it's a great tragedy that, certainly in England when I was growing up, you had to decide what the rest of your life was going to be about at around 16, in terms of what A-Levels you were going to do if you were going into further education. And I was fortunate in various ways. One was that I had a school that believed that you could do Art and Physics at A-Level if you wanted to, and it also had a very strong drama tradition. I had a family whose catch-phrase was always "Well, whatever makes you happy."

FW: Did you act in school?

AR: When you could fight the English staff off the stage for the best parts.

FW: What did you play?

AR: Some very illustrious female roles - it was an all-boys school. I was the definitive Volumnia in Coriolanus. I went to art school, always knowing that I would probably act eventually.

FW: You've never been a snob about high art and low art . . .

AR: I see the words Die Hard. We're not here to be admired. I think that's a dead experience, to have the audience sit in front of something and just admire it. I don't see the point.

FW: And Les Liaisons led to Die Hard, didn't it?

AR: Insofar as I was on Broadway, the play was a huge success and I had a sense of having a kind of two-week shelf life after it finished. And it was offered in that period of time. And, not really knowing quite what it was going to be, I said "Yes". In many ways, I'm proud of that film, because it's always been the best of its kind and it has many quietly subversive elements going on inside it.

FW: Did you worry about the violence?

AR: I did worry about it and, indeed, on some levels, fought it. I couldn't fight the explosions and, to a large extent, I thought "Well, you're in a cartoon." It was where it was connected to anything real that I fought.

FW: You're a very private person and yet stardom has thrust you into the public. How do you keep your privacy?

AR: I don't think of myself as particularly private. My friends all know who I am. My family certainly do. It's just that I don't think that stuff is anybody else's business.

FW: But that, combined with . . . you are very picky about whom you work with, and you also know exactly what you want to get out of something . . . has led to . . you gaining a reputation for being difficult.

AR: Says who? Juliet Stevenson has got a huge reputation for being difficult amongst certain directors. I've worked with her - God knows, often enough - with the most life-enhancing results. That's because of what she gives. But what she gives is so uncompromising and so always searching, that maybe some people can't take the questions.

FW: I was warned off you and I'm very glad I took the risk. We almost came to fisticuffs. . .

AR: But, we're here.

 

 

 

Originally on KelClancy's Page - now not accessable