‘Snowcake’ blessing for Alan Rickman
By Bruce Kirkland – Toronto Sun / Canoe
What a surprise! For Alan Rickman, the crusty, urbane and sublimely talented English actor, getting sent to Wawa, Ontario, was a pleasure, not a curse.
“I just thought, ‘Whoa, what an adventure!’ ” the 60-year-old Rickman enthuses in a recent Toronto visit. Rickman, who was born in Hammersmith, London, of Irish and Welsh parents immediately after World War II, had never heard of the Northern Ontario town of Wawa. But he thought it sounded like a unique opportunity when the film Snowcake became a British-Canadian co-production and Wawa, with its giant Canada Goose, became the location for the story.
“You have to go somewhere and I like working in small communities, (although) I feel guilty, a bit, because films tend to colonize where they are.”
Some filmmakers are arrogant, he admits, citing absurd examples: “Cut those six trees down, they’re ruining our eyeline. Does that house have to be there? Kill that person!”
But the Snowcake shoot under Welsh director Marc Evans, with his Galaxy Quest pal Sigourney Weaver and Canadian Carrie-Anne Moss as co-stars, turned out to be a blessing. In Wawa, no trees were cut, no houses removed and no citizens killed. The biggest problem was not enough snow in early April, but locals even hoarded snow in their garages, out of the sun’s gaze, for the filmmakers to use on set.
“In this case, I think it was a very happy coming-together,” says Rickman. “And you’re not making some crazy action movie in a town; you’re actually making a film about a small-town community. I like the middle of nowhere. It’s very focusing and everybody’s energies get concentrated. You’re really thinking about the work and it’s good to get away.”
The cast and crew stayed in chalets at the Wawa Motor Inn. “That hotel, along that line of chalets, is where Glenn Gould used to come to get away from it all,” Rickman says of the now legendary and eccentric Toronto pianist who once revolutionized classical music. “It’s got mystery.”
The movie Snowcake has mystery, too, an inner power that glows from its central characters: an autistic adult (Weaver), her feisty neighbour (Moss) and a stranger (Rickman) who arrives in town because of a terrible tragedy.
Rickman was the first to sign on when he read British writer Angela Pell’s screenplay. Pell has experience with autism, through her 10-year-old son. Snowcake transforms Pell’s reality into a moving fiction about adult autism.
It was so powerful, and such beautiful writing, he could not resist, Rickman says.
“You leap at it. It’s like water on a desert, in the refreshing sense that her imagination is so open and that she writes something that is so uncircumscribed.
“It was hard to get it done for all sorts of practical and, obviously, financial reasons. So there is a very real sense of achievement that, at a certain point in one’s working life, if you really roll up your sleeves, you walk into the unknown, and you get on with it.
“We got on with it. We did it and it’s there and I think everybody involved with it is proud of it.”
Rickman has a surprising answer to the “Why this story?” question: “Because the world’s come off its hinges. And, unless we can fight hard to tell stories that, on some level, are saying: ‘This is who we were, this is who we’ve become, this is who we could be, this is what we shouldn’t be!’ … ”
Rickman does not complete the “unless” part of his sentence. Instead, he re-frames his answer: “We tell stories about each other to each other. That’s all I am. I’m part of a storytelling chain. I’m an element in that, as an actor and sometimes as a director.
“Otherwise, I don’t have a function. Otherwise, it’s just showing off or selling clothes and magazines. And that’s fiddling while Rome burns — and Rome is burning!”
