CHILLY SCENES OF WINTER GUEST (1997)
(Mirabella-November 1997)
Qui la traduzione
Neither rain, nor cold, nor swarming paparazzi could keep Alan Rickman from making his directorial debut. Emma Thompson presents a warm account from her side of the camera.
I first saw Sharman MacDonald's The Winter Guest, directed by Alan Rickman, in 1995 at the Almeida Theatre, an intimate north London venue that serves excellent plays with its draught beer. I was drawn back three times, fascinated by the unsevered umbilical tug between a recently widowed woman and her mother; the teenage son whose father's ghost thwarts sexual ambition; two elderly women with little separating them from death but the prospect of an inferior meringue; and the haunting setting of a Scottish coastal village clutched in the crystallized fist of winter.
I didn't hesitate when Alan suggested filming it, even though he'd asked my mother, Phyllida Law, to play my mother. Thin ice, some suggested, but we trusted that our love of Scotland (Ma is from Glasgow) and a mutual interest in the more recherché malts would prevent serious schism.
Sharman MacDonald, bright and quick as robin's eyes, and Alan, with his deep molasses voice and half-closed lids, were the perfect parents for a screenplay that captures the tick-tock of joy and pain produced by life's unceasing oscillation. "What you've got to remember," intoned Alan, "is that these characters are pinioned by ice. They can't go anywhere. The stiller you are the better. You -," he pointed at my mother, "need to stop being so endearing, and you -," fixing me with a beady, hazel stare, "need to stop looking after everybody. Just act."
Alan brings all of the brilliance of his acting to a directorial technique that is sharp and subtle as a Venetian-glass knife. He'll just insert it into some sham skin you've created and cut it away, but however close to the bone he gets, he never draws blood. He's alarmingly specific. Every aspect of the production was minutely considered. He'd glare at a costume with his head cocked to one side, narrow his eyes and finally say something like "too structured," or rush at a pile of photographs or a blanket and tweak them about until satisfied. He sent drawings of how he felt I should look (extremely useful) and suggestions as to how I might approach playing Frances (a lot of French actresses got mentioned, I seem to recall).
Shooting began in November 1996, in the Kingdom of Fife, on Scotland's east coast, where the weather changes from cerulean perfection to wild tempest with all the caprice and violent unpredictability of Robert De Niro's taxi driver. Two of Alan's technical team were American and wholly unprepared for the temperatures. The first day out on location, Steven Rundell (who's white) went a delicate shade of eau de Nile, and Blondell Aidoo (who's black) went a rich navy. All hopes of being warmer indoors collapsed when our studio turned out to be a converted beet mill, a tall brick refrigerator of a building. Rocket heaters blew uselessly into the void. Force-eight winds battered the rafters, giving the sound crew instant ulcers, and the bus shelter built by production designer Robin Cameron Don was plucked from its moorings in the village and destroyed. "We may have to do a spot of post-synching," screeched Alan, leaning into the gale at a 45-degree angle. The tide was always against us. We shot on beaches until the sea lapped at our ankles, the mossy old boots of Seamus McGarvey (director of photography) often completely submerged. "It'll preserve them. Salt water," he'd say cheerily. The single most pervasive aspect of the shoot turned out to be the flu. One by one, every individual in our little caravan wheezed, blanched, and fell over. (Antibiotics appeared on the craft services table). The only ones to escape were Alan and Seamus - but then Alan was concentrating so hard that he didn't even notice the onset of frostbite in three of his toes. Mercifully, my mother's costume, a fur coat which became known as Eunice, prevented us from shooting in the rain, because, when wet, it looked exactly like what it was - a collection of dead rats sewn together.
A typical day went something like this: rise in the dark, shower, creep into the bitter dawn, and try to read the sky as we drive to the location. Change in damp trailer, first warming footwear up in a microwave oven. (This works, but you have to be careful. I came in one morning to find the place thick with noxious fumes. Ma had melted the nylon in her socks. I then ruined a boot by overcooking it.) Layer upon layer of thermal underwear on, through which the wind cuts effortlessly. Trot into fog/snow/hail/whatever, hoping not to get too cold to move lips. Find Alan's nose sticking out of a quantity of black Gore-Tex and ask it questions. Settle on action and act till toes freeze, whereupon return to trailer to re-microwave shoes and gaze longingly at a bottle of Macallan. Back out after defrosting, and so it goes on until about 4:00 p.m., by which time we lose the light, and there's no life left in us. Fall upon whisky, return to hotel, sit under hot tap, eat with sainted mother, bed at nine. On days off we would walk into St. Andrews (golf mecca) and buy knitwear.
Evidence of the lengths to which our benighted tabloid press will go arrived at our hotel in the shape of "tourists" or "students" who would site as near as possible, sometimes leaving ill-concealed tape recorders in handbags in case anyone said or did something juicy. I tried to bribe one of the youngest members of the cast (Douglas Murphy, who's twelve) to say, "Isn't it a coincidence that both Alan and Emma are necrophiliacs?", but Mother vetoed it.
Since we lived our days on set and our evenings like an order of mildly racy nuns, the KGB (as the press became known) developed a hungry, desperate air until one night, out of pity, Seamus and Alan considered walking upstairs hand-in-hand.
The pair of them worked together brilliantly. Seamus, whose sensitivity, humor and intelligence shine out of his blue saucer eyes, is the best kind of friend to have behind the camera. Alan makes you laugh with his dry-as-cuttlefish wit, remains calm in the face of all the crises a shoot inevitably brings, and has that capacity, essential in any director, to create a family in which each member is equally valued. He is, I suppose, the ideal parent - consistent, judicious and intrigued.
I saw him most recently in Los Angeles, where we visited Steve and Blondell at their computer graphics facility, where they were working on the film. It was odd to watch images of the frozen North in all that Californian warmth. "Jeez," said Steve, "I know it was cold, but boy was it beautiful." It made us melancholy. Said Alan reflectively, "I think that experience would almost have been worth losing three toes."
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RICKMAN MOVES TO DIRECTOR'S CHAIR WITH 'WINTER GUEST'
By Iain Blair (Distributed by Los Angeles Times Syndicate)
CNN Interactive - December 17, 1997
Alan Rickman, one of Britain's most versatile screen and stage actors, happily and seemingly effortlessly bounces from hero to villain roles, from romantic period comedies to explosion-filled contemporary action films.
He played Hans Gruber, the ruthless terrorist, to Bruce Willis' protagonist in Die Hard; starred as the equally nefarious Sheriff of Nottingham, foe to Kevin Costner in Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves; and appeared as the shy and sensitive Col. Brandon opposite Emma Thompson in Sense and Sensibility.
Now Rickman has reteamed with Thompson for The Winter Guest and has expanded his craft even further by moving behind the camera and making his directorial debut.
Quiet and introspective, The Winter Guest, which opens December 25, examines the strained relationship between a recently widowed Scottish woman (Thompson) and her mother (played by Thompson's real-life mother Phyllida Law).
Mother played part on stage
Rickman didn't have to work very hard to get Thompson and Law for the movie.
"Emma didn't do the play, while Phyllida played the mother in it; but whenever the film version came up, it was sort of automatically assumed that Emma would do it, too," he explains.
"Of course, on an obvious level, she helped finance the project, but it's also a great part for her, as well as being a great gift to her mother, as she helped make it possible for a really wonderful performance to be recorded."
Ask the director if there was any sense of competition between his two stars and he laughs. "No, fortunately they get on really well and you actually forget that they're mother and daughter. You just think, 'Here are these two noisy individuals who will not shut up!' You can't keep them quiet. You'd have to hit them over the head."
Why did Rickman choose The Winter Guest as his first directorial effort?
"I'd commissioned it in the theater, and so it was like I was glued to it," he says. "It wasn't a conscious choice, and I certainly didn't think it would be a movie. But then forces combined, and it seemed like a good idea. I definitely wasn't going to let anyone else muck about with it."
Sink or swim
The actor could have picked an easier project with which to make his debut.
"We shot the whole movie on location in Scotland and had to build the interior in a grain store, so we didn't do anything in the safety of a studio, which proved to be a real problem," he admits. "On top of that, two-thirds of the film (takes place) outside, and most of those scenes are set on a beach with a frozen sea."
In addition, the entire story takes place in just four hours, which means, the director explains, "You can't have hundreds of different sky conditions. And it was shot in October, November and December of last year, so we only had good light from 9 a.m. until 3 p.m., and none of the snow and ice that is such a (substantial) part of the film's background."
Fortunately for Rickman and his team, modern technology in the form of high-end digital visual effects came to the rescue. "I couldn't have done the film without computer graphics," says the director, who claims he knew "absolutely nothing" about the technology before he started and now knows "almost nothing."
"It was a bit like jumping in the deep end on your first film, but I believed in the script by playwright Sharman Macdonald, and it was about something that really mattered to me," he said. "If you're going to be driven by anything, it might as well be passion or belief in what you're doing. And I suppose I saw it as a challenge -- why not take it on?"
Working closely, Rickman and effects supervisor-producer Steve Rundell created more than 75 digital shots for the film.
"All the ice was created digitally. We had some clear blue skies that had to be digitally altered to match the rest, sea gulls were added digitally, and we even extended the natural mist at the end," reports Rickman. "There was one scene where we removed a figure, so it was partly cosmetic, partly incredibly creative -- and completely crucial to the look.
Reliance on special effects
"Basically this film couldn't have been made until now, because the level of sophistication allows the effects to be both believable and not really noticeable," adds Rickman.
"And I couldn't do the film without knowing that that whole side of it was going to be taken care of. It was either that or go to Iceland, and then it's too cold and you won't get the insurance to put your actors on the ice, and the architecture doesn't match. And we wouldn't have had the budget."
Rickman scouted locations in Scotland "by just driving around everywhere until we found what we wanted. Everyone said we were mad trying to shoot there at that time of year, and I don't know how we ever got insurance or finance, but we did."
The Winter Guest was shot on a $6 million budget.
"We had about two months of preproduction when the art department got set up and the sets were designed and we put the crew together," he reports. "I knew from the very start we'd have to use a lot of effects shots, as the art department could give me maybe 100 yards of snow and ice -- but I knew I needed a horizon, and it had to look like infinity."
Rickman: Restraints spurred creativity
Shooting for the effects was "fairly exacting," Rickman says. "So the guys had to come in and tell us whether we could have minimal camera movement, or if it had to be a locked-off shot every time the sea appeared in frame."
Did such technical restraints limit Rickman's artistic vision? "Not at all," the director says, "because I think that true creativity is also linked to discipline. Even if it's just a budget nailing you down, it helps creativity.
"It was a great experience, and sometimes it was just awful," sums up Rickman, "but I imagine that's true of any film. You can't predict what it's going to be like, but I'm very proud of the results. We even finished on time and on budget. It was a scramble, but we did it."
Is Rickman eager to repeat the experience of directing?
"With the right project, absolutely," he says. "And even another one with special effects. In fact, my next film is full of them, though this time I'm appearing as an actor. I'm playing an angel in Kevin Smith's new film, Dogma, so there's a lot of wings sprouting out of people's backs."
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COMPATIBLE COMPATRIOTS
By Kristine McKenna
Los Angeles Times - Monday, December 22, 1997
Among the fruits of the 1995 critically acclaimed film Sense and Sensibility is the friendship it fostered between actors Alan Rickman and Emma Thompson. Thompson, who starred in that film and wrote its Academy Award-winning screenplay, created a part specifically for Rickman, and the two got on famously during the shoot.
So when it came time for Rickman to make his directorial debut, The Winter Guest, which opens Wednesday, the 51-year-old actor wanted Thompson on board. An adaptation of a play based on an idea of Rickman's, The Winter Guest premiered onstage in 1995 at London's Almeida Theater, in a production directed by Rickman and starring Phyllida Law--a veteran stage actress who happens to be Thompson's mother. And, as the central relationship in The Winter Guest is between a mother and daughter, and Thompson and Law were both available, the casting of the film seemed obvious to Rickman.
Shot last year at the East Neuk of Fife, a string of fishing villages on Scotland's northern shore, The Winter Guest came together so smoothly that it left Thompson and Rickman eager to work together again. And so we find them, at a grand old home in Pasadena that's doubling for New Orleans, which is the setting for Judas Kiss. A thriller written and directed by Sebastian Guiterrez, the film stars Thompson as a hard-boiled FBI agent and Rickman as an elegant detective.
"It's been sort of accidental, but I think we're a good team," says Rickman during a break in filming. "We play a kind of tatty Bogart and Bacall in this film--only Emma's Bogart and I'm Bacall."
"Our sensibilities are similar," adds the 38-year-old actress. "As I was writing Sense and Sensibility, I knew Alan was the perfect person to play Colonel Brandon--it was tough persuading others of that though, because at that point Alan was typecast in dark roles. So, it was gratifying to read the reviews that said, 'There is another side to Mr. Rickman--and here it is!' "
The dark roles Thompson refers to include Rickman's comically diabolical turn as the Sheriff of Nottingham in the 1991 Kevin Costner vehicle Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves and his performance as a German terrorist in the 1988 blockbuster Die Hard, which marked his film debut.
"Die Hard was a classic of its kind," Rickman dryly points out, "and I'm happy to have been in it, because I probably wouldn't be sitting here talking to you without it."
Which isn't to suggest this is where Rickman wants to be late in the afternoon of a chilly fall day. An old knee injury has flared up, leaving him in considerable pain, and when he finishes for the day he's going straight to the doctor's. Thompson senses it's up to her to supply the high spirits for the interview and rises to the occasion admirably.
Rickman came to Pasadena from Maine, where he'd been shooting Dark Harbor, an independent film he describes as "a strange love story in the vein of The Crying Game--I play a lawyer and husband.
"I spent most of this year in London doing post-production on The Winter Guest, which wrapped last December, and I'm now in the midst of doing three movies back to back," continues Rickman, who heads to Memphis in February to shoot Kevin Smith's Dogma, which also stars Linda Fiorentino and Ben Affleck.
Thompson came to Judas Kiss from the set of Primary Colors, Mike Nichols' adaptation of the best-selling novel, which wrapped in L.A. in August.
"I adore Elaine May, who wrote the script, and it was a real treat working with those two," Thompson says. "Most of the 14 films I've done, however, have been independents shot in Europe and Great Britain. I've been offered many American films which I've declined, and it's always for the same reason; the script's no good. I'd rather earn my living screenwriting or doing a bit of journalism than act in a film I didn't believe in."
As to what drew her to Judas Kiss, Thompson says "the script was strong, Alan and I have Southern accents, and I get to have a gun--I've never played a gun-slinging woman before!"
New Orleans is a long way in every regard from the Scottish fishing village where The Winter Guest takes place. Set in real time on a day so cold that the sea has frozen solid, the film examines the dramas propelling a handful of lives. We observe a middle-aged woman whose husband has recently died, and the son she ignored while nursing his father. We meet this woman's mother, an elderly lady whose rapidly failing health may soon make her dependent on her daughter. We see two young teenagers as they have their first sexual experience, a pair of young boys who pass the afternoon gazing out to sea while discussing the mysteries of the universe, and a pair of spinsters whose friends have all died.
"There are five sets of couples who have relationships they must negotiate their way around, and my hope is that people will find points of contact in all of them," Rickman says. "Every character has a starting point, something to work through, and some kind of moment of resolution. The film offers no easy answers to the things these people are struggling with; rather, it simply looks at a moment in time when the tide has been temporarily stilled, thus creating a moment of reflection."
Of his first foray into directing, Rickman says, "I expected to be terrified but I wasn't, because I'd surrounded myself with all these experts. One of the pleasures of filmmaking is the cushion of support that inflates around you, and you really feel it as the weeks go on."
Among the experts he recruited was Phyllida Law, who describes Rickman as "a very fastidious director. Alan has a piercing intelligence and he's merciless in his allegiance to the script--he knows every word, and if we inserted so much as a sigh, we heard from him.
"I play a woman close to death, who fears the departure of her daughter will leave her desperately lonely--I'm clutching at her, and she can feel that trap," Law continues. "Emma and I aren't at all ratty with each other, and Alan was concerned we might get on too well, but I don't think our own relationship bled into our performances. I think we're able to work well together, probably because we've had similar problems in life.
"My two daughters aren't virgins about death and have dealt with lots of it within the family. Families can be smug and comfy, but ours hit the bad bits and came through it, and I admire Emma greatly. She's a woman of tremendous courage, which I take no credit for."
Says Thompson: "My mother was widowed at 48 and that had a powerful effect on our family. We have a friendship, really, and we live in adjacent houses and can see into each others' kitchens. My character in the film is at the peak of her resistance to the attentions of her mother, however. She wants to get away from the house where she nursed her dead husband, so when she sees her mother's hand shake she snaps, 'Don't do that!' What she's really saying, of course, is 'Don't be ill and make me stay and look after you.' "
Rickman interjects, "It's a moment that comes to many of us, that point when the roles switch and the child must become the parent.
"You either accept the responsibility and look after your parents, or you don't, " adds the actor, whose own mother died during the editing of the film. "Like Emma's mother, my mother was widowed young--I was the second of four children and she raised us on her own."
All the women in The Winter Guest are without romantic partners, so in that sense they too are on their own. Thompson is quick to point out, however, that their lives are far from empty.
"We've been socialized to feel that anything other than a romantic love relationship is second best," she says with exasperation. "Romantic love has taken precedence over all other relationships, probably because it offers an escape from reality. It's a complete con, of course, because it doesn't last, and anyone who says it does is lying.
"We continue to look for it though because we're like rats in a tunnel looking for cheese where there simply isn't any," she says with a laugh. "The difference between a rat and a human being is that rats finally get the point; human beings, on the other hand, will continue to scurry down the cheeseless tunnel forever, thinking, 'It's gonna happen one day, I just know it.' "
"That would be a great title for a film: The Cheeseless Tunnel," Rickman says with a laugh. "I'd go see that."
The Winter Guest is a small, thoughtful mood piece, and is the furthest thing imaginable from a special-effects film. So it's surprising to hear Rickman say that "technically it couldn't have been made before now. It would be impossible to shoot at a location cold enough for the sea to freeze, so our frozen sea was created in the computer."
Adds Thompson: "The ice is a powerful analogy for our condition. We, too, become static when we're unable to face change, and we're observing these people as something in them is cracking. Some kind of tectonic plate in their psyche is shifting ever so slightly, and it frees them to step out of that frozen moment and move into the next chapter of their lives."
The Winter Guest suggests that one thing these characters are sure to find in the next chapter of their lives is moments of loneliness; in the end, the film is a meditation on loneliness and the things people do--both appropriate and inappropriate--to assuage it.
"The film says that loneliness is there and must be dealt with," Thompson says. "People resist it ferociously, of course, but loneliness is something one does come out of and it can teach you things. One of the nice things about The Winter Guest is that it suggests that whatever human condition you find yourself in, you shouldn't regard it as some sort of sickness. Most American films imply that any form of unhappiness is simply not to be borne and that a happy ending is essential, but I don't accept that.
"I'm fed up with movies targeted at teenagers," she says. "It's not that I don't want them to make Raiders of the Lost Ark because that's one of my favorite films, but I'm sick of being infantilized by pop culture. Artists are responsible for expressing everyone's views, not just people in the throes of the most romantic, fantasy-driven part of their lives. And that's one of the things I love about The Winter Guest; it says, 'Look, even at 12, you can experience existential despair, so let's grow up!' "
Edited by Arwen68 - 8/7/2022, 17:18