Finding order amid chaos

Alan Rickman has long been one of Britain’s finest actors, a first-rate villain — his Die Hard character Hans Gruber is routinely ranked as one of the all-time great bad guys — movie-stealing character actor and, after Truly, Madly, Deeply, widely embraced as the thinking woman’s crumpet (a title recently seized by Benedict Cumberbatch).

What’s often overlooked is Rickman the film director. His debut feature, The Winter Guest (1997), won a prize at the Venice Film Festival for his leading lady and constant collaborator Emma Thompson (Sense and Sensibility, Love Actually).

Rickman has finally made his second feature film, a romantic drama set in France during the reign of Louis XIV and centred on a gardener (Kate Winslet) who has been hired by the famed landscape architect Andre Le Notre (Beligan actor Matthias Schoenaerts, of Rust and Bone fame) to build an amphitheatre cum outdoor ballroom on the sprawling, spectacular grounds of Versailles.

Rickman, as well as directing and co-writing, plays King Louis, a man surrounded by all the best that life in 17th century France has to offer and constantly surrounded by thousands of worshipful courtiers, who most cherishes a private moment in his peaceful, beautifully designed garden.

But the heart of the story is the blossoming relationship between Winslet’s Sabine De Barra and Le Notre, which begins as a clash of views on what makes an aesthetically pleasing garden — his designs are based on maths and geometry, hers are more in touch with the natural world — but they ultimately come together in the battle to complete the Rockwork Grove.

Rickman says he had a wonderful experience making The Winter Guest and has often directed for the theatre, where he has maintained a parallel career to the better-known one he has in movies. What sidetracked him from making more movies was a little franchise called Harry Potter.

Rickman played the pivotal character of Severus Snape, a top-ranked wizard and a teacher at Hogwarts who initially begins as a coldly sarcastic character and possible major villain who evolves into one of the most complex and beloved of all of those with a stake in Harry’s destiny.

“When I started in the series Jo Rowling had only written three books, so I didn’t know I was going to be there for all the movies,” Rickman explains during a recent rare visit to Australia to promote A Little Chaos.

“Many elements need to come together when you’re making a movie as opposed to simply acting in one. So it was impossible to squeeze in a film of mine while Harry Potter was in production. The Potter films were a huge commitment,” continues the 69-year-old graduate of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and former member of the Royal Shakespeare Company.

While A Little Chaos is not in the Harry Potter league in terms of budget, scale and special effects it is a step up from the modest Winter Guest and far grander than Rickman had anticipated.

“I didn’t go looking for a big period film — not at all — what I loved was the freshness of the writing and the fact that Alison (screenwriter Alison Deegan) took a piece of history and wrung its neck,” intones Rickman in the famously rich, melodic voice that makes women swoon and men jealous.

Indeed, the wringing of history’s neck is what has annoyed some critics because the convention-defying character played by Winslet did not actually exist and the events depicted in the movie are almost entirely fictional.

“We’re not pretending A Little Chaos is history. It is deeply historically inaccurate and completely implausible but that’s the point. Women in that period were not allowed to perform tasks such as designing and building a garden, so by giving her an actual job we were highlighting that anomaly,” Rickman explains.

While Harry Potter is a world away from A Little Chaos — the catering budget alone on a Potter flick could have paid for much of this modest period piece — Rickman admits that working on the blockbuster gave him the confidence to direct big action sequences and, most crucially, the gorgeous CGI-enhanced sequence revealing the completed garden.

“I am so proud of that (final) shot because it is so accurate. That ballroom built by Kate’s character actually exists and it is in precisely the place we show at the end.”

Deegan initially wrote A Little Chaos with Rickman in mind to play Le Notre. “But as time went on and I got older I edited myself out,” laughs Rickman. “Also you’d be an idiot to direct and play Le Notre, who is one of the film’s two main characters. But the producers needed me to finance the movie.”

Rickman’s presence also helped attract Winslet, with whom he worked with in Sense and Sensibility.

“I couldn’t have done A Little Chaos without someone I trusted as much as I trust Kate; she is phenomenal on every level,” he says.