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.”
Mirabella, Nov-Dec, 1997
