Alan Rickman, the beloved British Shakespearean actor best known for his roles as Professor Snape in the Harry Potter films, and the villainous Hans Gruber in Die Hard, has sadly passed away in London today from cancer at age 69.
His death was confirmed on Thursday by his family who stated that he passed away “surrounded by family and friends.”
Rickman, a former member of the Royal Shakespeare Company whose career began on stage, was known especially for his arch facial features and distinctive vocal baritone. Among the sixty-eight movie and television credits to his name, he appeared in such popular films such as Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, Love Actually, Sense and Sensibility, and Truly, Madly, Deeply.
Last year, while Rickman was promoting his directorial effort A Little Chaos, Filmink’s Cara Nash sat down to talk with the venerable actor/director about his epic period piece.
You directed some theatre during the years you did Harry Potter, but when you picked up the script for A Little Chaos, did you feel ready to direct something again?
It’s not a conscious thing when you read a script that you think you want to act or direct. But images start jumping around and you either want to say the lines or you want to form those images into concrete pictures and that was always the thing with this film. I also liked the fact that although it had this rather challenging period backdrop, it’s the simplest love story at heart so it needed me to put the camera on two people figuring out who they are as much as 80 people going up a staircase or a garden being built. I liked that – it’s a period film without being a period film.
You were originally approached to play the chief landscape artist Andre Le Notre?
Yes, but that was ridiculous! [Laughs] And by the time we actually got around to shooting it, it would have been even more ridiculous. I’d certainly never thought of playing Louie either but that became an economic necessity. There’s so much inaccuracy in our take – firstly, Sabine could never have existed. That’s a writer’s imaginative creation. Le Notre was 70 at the time of this story, but we were able to go, ‘We’re making a movie! So he’s now 35’.
Was that element something you helped to bring in when you came on board? You’re also credited as a screenwriter?
Jeremy Brock [co-writer] and I made more structural decisions. The whole story, the script and the good writing in it was Alison Deegan. The creation of Sabine is all hers. Jeremy and I were really the ones with the pickaxes rearranging the bricks.
You mentioned that you had to play Louie for economic reasons. Were you reluctant to act in the film as well?
I don’t know how people act and direct in the same movie, I don’t know where people put their concentration. All I know is that I’m not in it that much and Louie is a character people come to, he doesn’t go to anyone else. Therefore, you knew you were playing someone who was either standing still or sitting still. [Laughs] So in a way, he’s like a film director. He’s watching, he’s in a position of power, he makes choices and everyone runs around following them. I hope I wasn’t like that! But the role made it more doable than it might have been, but it’s still not ideal. Still I’d rather to have just directed.
Does directing change your process as an actor – in terms of how you approach scenes or how many takes you give yourself?
Somebody who had done it before warned me that the great danger of being in a film that you’re also directing is that you never give yourself enough takes. With regard to your own scenes, you really feel ‘Okay, done that, moving on!’ It is a real danger.
The central idea for the film is this balance between chaos and structure when it comes to creativity – did these ideas inform your own approach as a director?
I think it’s a really deep-seated belief of mine as an actor – you can’t have real chaos without order or an understanding of it. When I talk to young actors, I always find myself talking about the fact that discipline and freedom are two sides of the same coin. There isn’t any real freedom in art without people who have come before and understood the rules. A lot of the great abstract artists are also great drafts people and they know what a line is before they throw the paint down. There’s a lovely tension between the two things and it’s great when you see those rules disturbed a little bit.
And as a director, everyone is looking to what you think, but you’re also trying to create an environment where there’s some freedom in it. You kind of know what you’re aiming at, but you want the actor to live in the moment and invent right now. I don’t want them to fulfill what’s playing in my head, I want them to be alive to the set. There’s a big structural element in order to create some freedom.
It does very much feel like a contemporary story…
Yes, I feel like it does play like a very modern story that just happens to be in different clothes.
Were you conscious of tweaking certain things to ensure it did feel like a modern story?
Very conscious. For example, I would tell the costume designer not to make them look like costumes, they have to look like lived-in clothes. And I told the hair and make-up department to make sure the actors didn’t look like they’d just come out of hair and make-up. It drives me nuts on films! Anytime that happens to me as an actor, I immediately mess it up.
Did Kate Winslet fully grasp the character of Sabine or did she come to you with certain questions?
Yeah, all the time. As you can imagine, if you’ve got an actor directing, there’s going to be a conversation all the time and you want her to be as in charge of the character as me, and even more so because I want to put the camera on her when she’s listening. I want to watch her figuring out who she is in the silent shots. So her mind has to be alive all the time. What you get with Kate is someone who arrives phenomenally prepared, but then like we were talking about, there’s this endless balance of order and chaos at play – so she arrives prepared and then she drops it. She’s alive to the moment, but the body is still obeying the rules of the period.
You studied graphic design when you were a young adult. Did you leave that profession to pursue acting?
I’m a great advocate that young people shouldn’t have to decide exactly what they want to do at 16. When I was 18, it was will I go to art school or will I go to university and read English? In the end, I went to art school and became a graphic designer and worked at that for three years and went to drama school when I was 25. It’s no accident that somewhere along the line I started directing because both bits of me have been tuned up. Now there’s a potential conversation between the bit of me that trained as an actor and the bit of me that trained as a designer so on a film set, I do have shorthand conversations with the production designer, the costume designer and the DP. It’s part of me and it would have been wrong to deny that at 18, as wrong as it would have been for me to go to drama school at 18 because I wouldn’t have been able to handle it. I think everyone has a different machine going on inside them and as much as possible, people should figure out what they’re made of.
As an actor, do you still feel as hungry for roles and are you searching for different things? Has directing changed your feelings towards acting?
In a way, if directing is the order, acting is the chaos. Acting is a very animal activity and you then have to find the order in it to serve that but ultimately it’s an animal response to a piece of writing. Directing, you have to see all the animal stuff going on and make some order out of it so it’s just looking down the different end of the telescope.
R.I.P Alan Rickman, 1946-2016.
