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Alan Rickman makes his directorial debut

Actor Alan Rickman's debut feature, The Winter Guest, was sadly appropriate last September when the director introduced it at the Venice and Montreal Film Festivals. His meditation on mortality set in a frozen Scottish coastal town and starring the mother-daughter team of Phyllida Law and Emma Thompson complemented the mood of audiences mourning the death of Princess Diana.

"Emma and I were in Venice the Sunday morning we got the news," he remembers. "I know Emma felt a very personal connection because they are very similar ages and both are on a journey as single women. I don't want to go into that too much; it's too personal to Emma. But you can imagine. There was something about Emma's essence that reminded me about her. And also, I had to introduce the film in Montreal a day or two afterward. So I did speak about that. Whatever are the truths or complexities in there . . . I think it was upheld by that brilliant speech her brother gave . . . she was on the side of the more sensitive world. The film tries to put a hand up for the simple connections between people worth hanging on to. So I don't think it was so much about death, it was about life. People are facing all sorts of difficult cliff edges; this film is about the fact that next to you, if you only noticed, is somebody putting their hand out."

In the case of The Winter Guest, some of the hands extended are those of a parent and a child. Rickman was first inspired to do the film after listening to Scottish playwright Sharman Macdonald tell him an anecdote about herself and her ailing mother. He encouraged her to turn it into a play; eventually the two developed it into the film.

"She was a writer I greatly respect and her work has often contained as an essential theme relationships between mothers and daughters. It was something she was talking about, a few images she gave me of this moment in her life that was where she was having to become the parent. And I've since experienced that. Many people have. Or will. It doesn't get written about that often. It's a shadowy, unspoken part of people's lives."

To give flesh and blood to this shadowy area, Rickman was fortunate enough to enlist Emma Thompson -- with whom he worked in an opposite capacity in Sense and Sensibility, in which he was part of the cast and she was the screenwriter -- and her mother, Phyllida Law. "They've been cast together before, but they've never done anything like this before where they've nailed their colors to the mast. The mother/daughter thing we just treated as a happy accident. It had nothing to do with the daily shooting except they were happy to share a trailer. You take it for granted; you don't realize what you've got until you look at it in the editing room. Then with a shock you realize they tip their head at the same angle when they listen to the boy at the piano. Or in the scene where they move around the fridge with a carton of milk, they're not physically careful with each other. There's an intimacy."

There's an intimacy, also, to the film's bleak setting, which Rickman tried to make a kind of objective correlative to Macdonald's meticulously crafted language. "I kept talking about moonscapes to the DP [director of photography]. I was looking for surfaces that didn't look like Scotland or anywhere, really. There is something about the writing that isolates the characters, and because it isn't quite naturalism it needed to be a background with its own thoughts, not just an adjunct they're walking on, but something with an energy. And something eternal; what they walk into shouldn't be completely depressing, it should also be optimistic. I hope it's funny as well, in the face of all that. Even if it's literally about life and death.

-- P.K.

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