Alan Rickman (34 page)

Spottiswoode is as angry as Shirras over the result of the arbitration.

According to Mayfair's allegations, Alan Rickman had a hands-on approach to Dennis Potter's script and a hands-off approach to the sexy side of Mesmer. In fact, a valuable insight into the way he works on a film set was provided by his friend Catherine Bailey's
Late Show
profile on BBC 2 in November 1994.

Alan is everywhere on the set, as omnipresent as Woody Allen's Zelig even for the shooting of scenes that he's not in.

Spottiswoode is overheard muttering about how long it's taking as Alan paces up and down in front of the camera, talking about options. Rickman is obviously desperate to direct.

‘It's difficult to make it specific in that dress without making it obscene,' he worries after a scene with his leading lady, a
décolleté
Amanda Ooms who is prone on top of a piano. He consults with the director and bites his nail nervously (a Rickman habit well established in
Robin Hood: Prince Of Thieves).
‘It's getting a bit blurry,' he says querulously of the way he wants to play it in his mind's eye.

Rickman admits to Bailey that he asks questions not because he's trying to be difficult, but in order to be ‘clearer. So you know where to place this peculiar energy called being an actor. I enjoy the corporate thing. I would never get involved in a one-man show . . . I don't know what that's for.'

As for his famous deliberation over parts: ‘The yeses and the noes are all to do with the script . . . you either want to say those lines or you don't. One is constantly asked, “Just be yourself.”' He thinks for a few moments, waiting several perfectly timed beats before his answer, and smiles mirthlessly. ‘Whoever that is.'

Rickman is filmed opening the car-door for the Hungarian chauffeur on location, absolutely unheard-of behaviour from the star of a film. But then Alan always wants to be thought of as the good guy. ‘It could be a heap of shit,' he says fatalistically with a nervous grin, discussing the outcome of
Mesmer.
He takes care to introduce Catherine's camerawoman to members of the cast – Gillian Barge, Simon McBurney and Amanda Ooms – plus even the makeup man.

As for his notorious perfectionism, he admits: ‘Maybe it's just tenacity or something . . . never wanting to let go. Maybe one
should let go more often. But the work could achieve so much; and so little is asked of it most of the time.' There speaks a frustrated director whom life has cast as a great actor instead. He did indeed throw his weight around in one way.
Mesmer
cast-member Simon McBurney, the Artistic Director of the avant-garde troupe Theatre De Complicité, recalls being roughly handled by Rickman on set. ‘Mesmer married a widow with a son by her first marriage; I play that son, Franz. Franz is a skulker and tells on Mesmer to his mother, who suspects Mesmer of having sex with his patients.
Au contraire
, it's Mesmer who throws Franz down the stairs for trying to rape a girl.

‘So I have a very volatile relationship with him: several days of being thrown back against a wall by Alan Rickman! He really gets into his part and doesn't hold anything back.

‘But it was a very happy and enjoyable show. It was difficult because Potter could have no part of it; he was dying at the time. The actors – Alan and Amanda Ooms and Gillian Barge and myself – formed a strong bond together.

‘It was the first experience I had had of working with Alan, and I now consider him one of my friends. I was really impressed by his astonishing courtesy. He's polite to everybody. He was genuinely thoughtful about the extras in Hungary, who were paid a pittance and didn't even have a hot meal. He wouldn't work until they had been fed.'

Spottiswoode, however, has a plausible explanation for the great Extras' Lunch Saga: ‘Our extras were treated the same as they are on every film. They get boxed lunches prepared in the hotels, while the main cast get hot meals because they have far more work to do and have to be on the set longer.

‘But Alan becomes very passionate about causes; it happens with many actors. He is quixotic: it's a sweet side to him. Sometimes he's right – and sometimes he's wrong.'

‘When he starts to work, he's very precise and incisive,' says Simon McBurney. ‘He's very intelligent and doesn't suffer fools gladly. His concern was always with trying to achieve the best possible scene. He's fantastically rigorous on every level: I found that extremely endearing.

‘But he's not difficult in an unconstructive, childish, pointless way. Jeremy Irons was pulling everything his way in the movie
Kafka
. Alan doesn't do that.

The number of film actors who misbehave on set makes Alan's own position more remarkable. He was always concerned with such things as whether people had a lift to and from the set. On the majority of film sets, it's
de rigueur
for leading actors to misbehave. It's mistaken for egomania, but in fact it's a monstrous insecurity. This is a preposterously insecure profession because you go down as quickly as you come up. These things don't last for ever. So it makes his attitude all the more remarkable.

‘He was a supporter of my and many people's work, he makes it his business to see other people's work. He's one of the few actors at the peak of his profession who does that. We got on well. We shared a love of rollercoasters, and we went to the park in Vienna where they shot
The Third Man
, the Prater Park. We got on the rollercoasters and screamed our heads off. There was one horrendous one that pushed you up backwards.

‘But every time I thought I knew what Alan was like, I found he had changed. He's a very enigmatic and surprising person. He's a giggler, but he's quite imposing. I didn't know where I was with him at first.

‘He was very terrifying and scary on set, working with such intensity. Acting is such a strange and curious thing to be doing, it's a very weird job. Everyone has their own methods. Gillian Barge is not an improviser, she learns her lines until she's word-perfect. With Alan, it was much more introspective. He wouldn't necessarily always communicate it, you would have to intuit it. But compared with taking a theatre company round the world, being on a film set was like a holiday. I felt like a dog let off a leash.

‘Alan and I went out to the wine district for one day, and we also went on some incredible walks. I have a lot of friends in Vienna, so Alan and I were hanging around in cafés and cooking meals with them. He was very sweet. He was helping an Austrian friend of mine with his role as the father in my production of
Lucie Cabrol.
He's considerate that way.

‘He has a seriousness, not an aloofness. When the project was conceived, it was conceived with his name attached to it. He's the principal actor holding the whole thing together, and he would spend a lot of time behind the camera as well as in front of it.

‘I think that kind of thing can be quite intimidating; but Roger is not a tyrant director like Coppola, his style is much more
collaborative. Alan brings his own allure to the film. He treated the entire script with enormous respect. He was concerned to portray the complexity of Mesmer as a man who was out of his time. To portray him as a sexual philanderer is not true to the intentions of Potter. Mesmer came to the conclusions that only Freud came to a hundred years later.

‘Medicine was enormously politically dominated: it was divided between healing and surgery, and surgery won. Mesmer was stumbling upon an early psychotherapy, and this was illuminated by a confrontation with sexuality. The ambivalence of that is what's fascinating.

‘There is a very strong sense of the loneliness of this man, and there were some very mesmeric sexual moments in the film . . . a simmering sexuality there. Potter brought out a lot of the wry humour and humanity, and we almost revolve inside Mesmer's head. It's a very internal drama – a man trying to make sense of the world. He develops an unspoken sexual relationship with Amanda Ooms as a patient who has been sexually abused by her father. There's an ambivalence about her character, and my spying on her sessions with Mesmer adds to that.

‘We filmed in a wonderful castle at Fertod in Hungary, a sort of Versailles in semi-ruins. It's now up for sale. We also filmed in a medieval town called Sopron. I enjoyed myself terrifically.

‘I think the finance people in films are sometimes psychopathic,' is Simon's final verdict. ‘It's just a great great shame that
Mesmer
was never followed through. Having so many co-producers didn't help; they were always turning up on the set.'

So what of the movie itself? The cinematography has a luscious integrity, perfectly in keeping with the period; and all begins well as two dainty eighteenth-century clockwork figures revolve on a music-box to the lush sounds of a Michael Nyman composition in unusually romantic mode. The image could be taken as a metaphor for the way so many competing interests chased each other round in ever-decreasing circles.

The whiskerless Rickman looks youthful and vulnerable in the role. His theories of animal magnetism are mocked by the surgeons from the Royal Society of Medicine, which has summoned a special assembly to examine his claims. One can't help thinking of the Inquisition. They question him about his visit to a lunatic asylum with a sympathetic fellow doctor. ‘We walked through the pillars
of misery and Dr Mesmer wept. I saw him take away a seizure,' testifies the colleague. A dropsical leg has also been cured. Mesmer has persuaded people that a cure lies in their own hands, can be part of their own experience.

We see a flashback of a girl having fits. Mesmer strokes her face and chest, encouraging another sceptical physician to follow suit. She raises herself up after what looks like a faith-healing session. The other doctor disputes the cure and insists on bleeding her instead. ‘Open up one of her veins.' He thinks Mesmer's methods are pure superstition. ‘Passion and medicine do not mix. The moon is a symbol of lunatics.'

Rickman's Mesmer, moving around as if in a dream or trance, insists: ‘I have made a discovery that will lift pain and misery.' In the role of his wife, Gillian Barge conveys a most ambivalent attitude towards her man: she jeers at him, yet boasts of him to others: ‘My husband has an original mind.' Nevertheless, she describes him as ‘the son of a shitarse gamekeeper. Don't I pay the bills and give you some sort of entry into a better society?' And she calls him ‘a genius living on his wife's charity'. His only defence is sarcasm, referring to her ‘generous spirit, tact, charm and missing back teeth'.

Most of the time he seems in a world of his own, and the interior life of Mesmer is never satisfactorily explored by the script. The man is little more than a romantic ideal, despite all Rickman's efforts to give this sketch some depth.

He tells a shallow woman on a balcony: ‘We could hear the music of the heavenly spheres if only we strained to listen.' He also informs her, in one of the script's more stunning
non sequiturs
, that man is the only animal to know it will ultimately die.

The next scene shows a blind girl in a veil, playing the piano. She then has a fit, writhing on the floor as if in the grip of a grand mal. She is Maria Theresa, played by the extravagantly beautiful Amanda Ooms. Mesmer watches, transfixed. The surgeons are about to bleed her when Mesmer rises and says: ‘This young woman is in urgent need of the attention of Franz Anton Mesmer.' He shoves them unceremoniously aside. ‘They should never cover such an exquisite face.' A distressing tendency to refer to himself in the third person is the first sign of Mesmer madness.

Ooms lies moaning on the piano; Rickman raises his hands like a conductor. When he places his hands on her face and body, she
screams. He runs his fingers down her bodice. His nostrils dilate and he flings his head back as she goes quiet.

He mumbles about the sun being a magnet that draws us out. ‘There's an unseen force . . . an animal magnetism moving from me to you,' he whispers. ‘You can feel it, you can feel it. Here is your patient. She has not been harmed.' Then he stalks away.

As is his wont, Rickman wears no wig; he dislikes too much artifice. His hair is swept back from his face, and he reeks of repressed sensuality. Everything in the film conspires to turn him into an enchanted figure, the focus for all female eyes but not quite in touch with his own urges. There's an air of wonderment about the character, who seems to be working out the plot as he goes along. Of course he's ridiculously idealised. We hear the music of magical prisms from a chandelier in his study where he holds court, a Copernican globe in the background.

As his colleague applies an instrument of torture to a weeping Maria Theresa's sightless eyes, we see a flashback to the girl being sexually assaulted by her father. ‘If only you knew my ache,' he says, his hands on her breasts, ‘you can have anything you want.' She asks to be taken to Mesmer. In a glib piece of camerawork, Mesmer's face dissolves into a shot of the moon.

The journey back to childhood, where the watching, waiting, eavesdropping child is the father of the man, is integral to a Dennis Potter screenplay. The film shows us the young Mesmer, perched on a rock and listening to the beat of the universe. The adult Mesmer is still haunted by him.

A pretty waif adores Mesmer and tells him outside his door that she loves him. ‘You think you do,' he says gently. When Maria Theresa is brought by her father to Mesmer's house, they walk in the garden and the besotted waif watches jealously from her window as she plays her music box. This is Francesca, the young cousin of Mesmer's wife.

‘I can hear the turn of the world,' says Maria Theresa. ‘And can you hear the human heart?' Mesmer asks her whimsically. ‘When I was a boy, I too could hear the turn of the world.' There follows a very intense scene in which he strokes her lower arm and holds her hand, telling her that she would never want to see for herself the contamination of the world.