| Questa è la trascrizione dell'intervista ad Alan inserita nel DVD Region 2 di Close My Eyes. Non male l'ultimo brano, dove parla della vita sessuale di Sinclair.
Alan Rickman on playing Sinclair
Well, I liked his energy and the fact that he’s curious about everything and looked people straight in the eyes. He didn’t kind of ignore people. Curious about everything but completely hopeless with the dishwasher. And couldn’t even work out that there was an on/off switch. You know, he’s in the kitchen surrounded by suds and he hasn’t actually turned the damned thing off. So that’s endearing, and his curiosity gives you a sense of his energy. But it wouldn’t be enough were it not for the fact that he gets caught up in a human situation which is perhaps completely outside his experience and his education, where he’s come from, and what he ever expected to encounter. And I liked the fact that he dealt with it sensitively.
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I think he does know what’s going on at the end, but he hasn’t got the vocabulary to discuss it and, in a way, that’s one of his strengths, I suppose, is that there’s a kind of silent caring for her because I think, if my memory serves me correctly, he just, he’s stroking an injury on her leg, putting some cream on her leg and saying, “I don’t want to know.” But as far as I was concerned, the way he said, “I don’t want to know,” said he already knew. I don’t know where you’d begin. I think that what’s great about him is that he didn’t say, “Get out of my house,” in any Victorian kind of manner. He was gonna deal with it. That was pretty grown up.
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I came back from America straight into, well, I think they were two-thirds of the way through the shoot. I decided to turn that to my advantage. I didn’t have any option, you know, and I just thought it was an interesting atmosphere to walk into and I thought, “Well, that’s a Sinclair kind of thing. This is interesting,” and used that energy to my advantage. And also Sinclair’s sort of lack of knowledge about personal things. And so the difficulty was, of course, developing a proper relationship with Saskia. But I knew her from before, so that was easier than it might have been. And then it just honestly became practical like filming does, and all that nonsense, the arty nonsense, goes out the window. And you find yourself, because it was the hottest summer, I mean, the film was blessed in that sense because it was lifted into an atmosphere of its own. Every day that we needed it, there was this blazing sun. Sometimes more than was needed. I mean, you’re shooting a picnic and the cheese is melting into the cloth. We can’t eat it because it’s now glue. And we were having to use sunshades. And it turned Clevedon and that area of the river into something mysterious and almost like something out of Beverly Hills. If there were a river in Beverly Hills, that’s what it would look like. So you were constantly made uneasy by the surrounding.
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Well, I suppose the decision I took about Sinclair and his attitude to money was that he was born to it. He wasn’t a self-made man in that sense. He was obviously clever at business, but it’s been something he’s been surrounded by all his life. And so therefore, much like many of the British upper classes, they do have a sense of humor and irony and devil-may-careness about money. And I suppose I was feeding off of that, to a large extent.
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Sinclair’s sex life is the sex life of many a British male, I think. I don’t know about him, cause he’s fictional, but when I was at school, an all-boys’ school, there was absolutely no sex education. We used to have to beg the divinity master to “tell us about sex, sir,” instead of religion. That was just in a kind of titillating way. It wasn’t really to get any information, although I suppose we must have done, because he was a responsible guy. And I’m sure Sinclair comes from that background. It’s just ignorance. And when he makes love to his wife and then turns over and reads a book, I don’t think it’s out of a hard heart or an insensitive soul. He just doesn’t know, that there might be more to it than that.
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