Compatible Compatriots

Among the fruits of the 1995 critically acclaimed film “Sense and Sensibility” is the friendship it fostered between actors Alan Rickman and Emma Thompson. Thompson, who starred in that film and wrote its Academy Award-winning screenplay, created a part specifically for Rickman, and the two got on famously during the shoot.

So when it came time for Rickman to make his directorial debut, “The Winter Guest,” which opens Wednesday, the 51-year-old actor wanted Thompson on board. An adaptation of a play based on an idea of Rickman’s, “The Winter Guest” premiered onstage in 1995 at London’s Almeida Theater, in a production directed by Rickman and starring Phyllida Law--a veteran stage actress who happens to be Thompson’s mother. And, as the central relationship in “The Winter Guest” is between a mother and daughter, and Thompson and Law were both available, the casting of the film seemed obvious to Rickman.

Shot last year at the East Neuk of Fife, a string of fishing villages on Scotland’s northern shore, “The Winter Guest” came together so smoothly that it left Thompson and Rickman eager to work together again. And so we find them, at a grand old home in Pasadena that’s doubling for New Orleans, which is the setting for “Judas Kiss.” A thriller written and directed by Sebastian Guiterrez, the film stars Thompson as a hard-boiled FBI agent and Rickman as an elegant detective.

“It’s been sort of accidental, but I think we’re a good team,” says Rickman during a break in filming. “We play a kind of tatty Bogart and Bacall in this film--only Emma’s Bogart and I’m Bacall.”

“Our sensibilities are similar,” adds the 38-year-old actress. “As I was writing ‘Sense and Sensibility,’ I knew Alan was the perfect person to play Colonel Brandon--it was tough persuading others of that though, because at that point Alan was typecast in dark roles. So, it was gratifying to read the reviews that said, ‘There is another side to Mr. Rickman--and here it is!’ ”

The dark roles Thompson refers to include Rickman’s comically diabolical turn as the Sheriff of Nottingham in the 1991 Kevin Costner vehicle “Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves” and his performance as a German terrorist in the 1988 blockbuster “Die Hard,” which marked his film debut.

“ ‘Die Hard’ was a classic of its kind,” Rickman dryly points out, “and I’m happy to have been in it, because I probably wouldn’t be sitting here talking to you without it.”

Which isn’t to suggest this is where Rickman wants to be late in the afternoon of a chilly fall day. An old knee injury has flared up, leaving him in considerable pain, and when he finishes for the day he’s going straight to the doctor’s. Thompson senses it’s up to her to supply the high spirits for the interview and rises to the occasion admirably.

Rickman came to Pasadena from Maine, where he’d been shooting “Dark Harbor,” an independent film he describes as “a strange love story in the vein of ‘The Crying Game’--I play a lawyer and husband.

“I spent most of this year in London doing post-production on ‘The Winter Guest,’ which wrapped last December, and I’m now in the midst of doing three movies back to back,” continues Rickman, who heads to Memphis in February to shoot Kevin Smith’s “Dogma,” which also stars Linda Fiorentino and Ben Affleck.

Thompson came to “Judas Kiss” from the set of “Primary Colors,” Mike Nichols’ adaptation of the best-selling novel, which wrapped in L.A. in August.

“I adore Elaine May, who wrote the script, and it was a real treat working with those two,” Thompson says. “Most of the 14 films I’ve done, however, have been independents shot in Europe and Great Britain. I’ve been offered many American films which I’ve declined, and it’s always for the same reason; the script’s no good. I’d rather earn my living screenwriting or doing a bit of journalism than act in a film I didn’t believe in.”

As to what drew her to “Judas Kiss,” Thompson says “the script was strong, Alan and I have Southern accents, and I get to have a gun--I’ve never played a gun-slinging woman before!”

New Orleans is a long way in every regard from the Scottish fishing village where “The Winter Guest” takes place. Set in real time on a day so cold that the sea has frozen solid, the film examines the dramas propelling a handful of lives. We observe a middle-aged woman whose husband has recently died, and the son she ignored while nursing his father. We meet this woman’s mother, an elderly lady whose rapidly failing health may soon make her dependent on her daughter. We see two young teenagers as they have their first sexual experience, a pair of young boys who pass the afternoon gazing out to sea while discussing the mysteries of the universe, and a pair of spinsters whose friends have all died.

“There are five sets of couples who have relationships they must negotiate their way around, and my hope is that people will find points of contact in all of them,” Rickman says. “Every character has a starting point, something to work through, and some kind of moment of resolution. The film offers no easy answers to the things these people are struggling with; rather, it simply looks at a moment in time when the tide has been temporarily stilled, thus creating a moment of reflection.”

Of his first foray into directing, Rickman says, “I expected to be terrified but I wasn’t, because I’d surrounded myself with all these experts. One of the pleasures of filmmaking is the cushion of support that inflates around you, and you really feel it as the weeks go on.”

Among the experts he recruited was Phyllida Law, who describes Rickman as “a very fastidious director. Alan has a piercing intelligence and he’s merciless in his allegiance to the script--he knows every word, and if we inserted so much as a sigh, we heard from him.

“I play a woman close to death, who fears the departure of her daughter will leave her desperately lonely--I’m clutching at her, and she can feel that trap,” Law continues. “Emma and I aren’t at all ratty with each other, and Alan was concerned we might get on too well, but I don’t think our own relationship bled into our performances. I think we’re able to work well together, probably because we’ve had similar problems in life.

“My two daughters aren’t virgins about death and have dealt with lots of it within the family. Families can be smug and comfy, but ours hit the bad bits and came through it, and I admire Emma greatly. She’s a woman of tremendous courage, which I take no credit for.”

Says Thompson: “My mother was widowed at 48 and that had a powerful effect on our family. We have a friendship, really, and we live in adjacent houses and can see into each others’ kitchens. My character in the film is at the peak of her resistance to the attentions of her mother, however. She wants to get away from the house where she nursed her dead husband, so when she sees her mother’s hand shake she snaps, ‘Don’t do that!’ What she’s really saying, of course, is ‘Don’t be ill and make me stay and look after you.’ ”

Rickman interjects, “It’s a moment that comes to many of us, that point when the roles switch and the child must become the parent.

“You either accept the responsibility and look after your parents, or you don’t, “ adds the actor, whose own mother died during the editing of the film. “Like Emma’s mother, my mother was widowed young--I was the second of four children and she raised us on her own.”

All the women in “The Winter Guest” are without romantic partners, so in that sense they too are on their own. Thompson is quick to point out, however, that their lives are far from empty.

“We’ve been socialized to feel that anything other than a romantic love relationship is second best,” she says with exasperation. “Romantic love has taken precedence over all other relationships, probably because it offers an escape from reality. It’s a complete con, of course, because it doesn’t last, and anyone who says it does is lying.

“We continue to look for it though because we’re like rats in a tunnel looking for cheese where there simply isn’t any,” she says with a laugh. “The difference between a rat and a human being is that rats finally get the point; human beings, on the other hand, will continue to scurry down the cheeseless tunnel forever, thinking, ‘It’s gonna happen one day, I just know it.’ ”

“That would be a great title for a film: ‘The Cheeseless Tunnel,’ ” Rickman says with a laugh. “I’d go see that.”

“The Winter Guest” is a small, thoughtful mood piece, and is the furthest thing imaginable from a special-effects film. So it’s surprising to hear Rickman say that “technically it couldn’t have been made before now. It would be impossible to shoot at a location cold enough for the sea to freeze, so our frozen sea was created in the computer.”

Adds Thompson: “The ice is a powerful analogy for our condition. We, too, become static when we’re unable to face change, and we’re observing these people as something in them is cracking. Some kind of tectonic plate in their psyche is shifting ever so slightly, and it frees them to step out of that frozen moment and move into the next chapter of their lives.”

“The Winter Guest” suggests that one thing these characters are sure to find in the next chapter of their lives is moments of loneliness; in the end, the film is a meditation on loneliness and the things people do--both appropriate and inappropriate--to assuage it.

“The film says that loneliness is there and must be dealt with,” Thompson says. “People resist it ferociously, of course, but loneliness is something one does come out of and it can teach you things. One of the nice things about ‘The Winter Guest’ is that it suggests that whatever human condition you find yourself in, you shouldn’t regard it as some sort of sickness. Most American films imply that any form of unhappiness is simply not to be borne and that a happy ending is essential, but I don’t accept that.

“I’m fed up with movies targeted at teenagers,” she says. “It’s not that I don’t want them to make ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’ because that’s one of my favorite films, but I’m sick of being infantilized by pop culture. Artists are responsible for expressing everyone’s views, not just people in the throes of the most romantic, fantasy-driven part of their lives. And that’s one of the things I love about ‘The Winter Guest’; it says, ‘Look, even at 12, you can experience existential despair, so let’s grow up!’ ”