Ahoy, squirts! Quint here. This is pretty crazy. I was invited to the press junket for HARRY POTTER AND THE ORDER OF THE PHOENIX earlier in the year and was asked who I wanted to sit down with and my number one was Alan Rickman.

That didn’t happen, but as luck would have it I was talking to one of the Paramount publicists and we were going over SWEENEY TODD and I was talking about how much I loved Rickman and would love to talk to him. A few days later the interview was arranged and I was notified the morning of.

It was a bit frightening, to be perfectly honest. Not only was it sudden, but Rickman is a pretty intimidating personality. But I got a few laughs out of him and I didn’t completely geek out and quote Hans Gruber to him or anything, so I call it an unqualified success. Enjoy!

Alan Rickman: Hello.

Quint: Hello, how are you doing, sir?

Alan Rickman: Good, thank you. How are you?

Quint: I’m doing very well. I have to say I’m a huge fan of your work, so it’s exciting to talk to you.

Alan Rickman: Thank you very much and thanks for talking to me.

Quint: Hopefully this won’t be too painful for you, but I only have a few questions for you.

Alan Rickman: OK.

Quint: I hope you will forgive me, because I haven’t seen SWEENEY TODD yet, but I’m seeing it this weekend, so hopefully I don’t ask too pedestrian of questions about the project, but…

Alan Rickman: Oh, don’t worry about that.

Quint: Alright, well I guess I would like to start with the material and what the main attraction in the film was. Was it working with Tim Burton or was it getting a chance to do this very famous story in a film adaptation?

Alan Rickman: I think it was really all of those things. It’s one of those special jobs where the names on the piece of paper beforehand absolutely match the experience afterwards, so expectation in hindsight for once are equally rewarding. It was an incredible thing to anticipate doing and it was pretty wonderful doing it and I think the film is magnificent. I’m very proud to be part of it.

Quint: I can’t wait to see it. I have friends who have seen it and the love it and say that it’s just as great as Tim Burton has ever been. They keep saying that it is his best since ED WOOD, which is high praise in my book.

Alan Rickman: I think it is absolutely that. I think it might be his best film ever and I mean it’s sort of comforting in a way to be able to be that objective, because you have to… Well, you know, it’s dangerous to call things a “work of art,” but I think it is. It’s really the sum of its parts and it has staggering cinematography and Johnny [Depp] and Helen [Bonham Carter] are absolutely wonderful in the two leading roles and the costumes are amazing… The sets are extraordinary… It’s sort of breathtakingly good.

Quint: I can’t wait.

Alan Rickman: And it’s unflinching. That’s the other thing I admire about it; it’s so completely unflinching in terms of… in a way the blood becomes a character and so it’s not something for people to be nervous of as it requires a different level of… it has different personalities depending on who’s throat is getting cut up. (laughs)

Quint: Yeah, one of the other writers for the site saw it in Chicago before he left and he was biting his tongue not to spoil anything in the film for me, but he described one sequence and he wouldn’t tell me who it was, so I don’t know who it is, but he described one sequence…

Alan Rickman: Well, I don’t want to spoil it for you either. It’s sort of the thing where everybody will have their own relationship to the movie, like all good movies I think.

Quint: Definitely having the surprise, especially with somebody with such a good eye for art direction like Burton and seeing how he tells that story on screen.

Alan Rickman: Absolutely. Well, I hope you see it on a big screen rather than a DVD.

Quint: Oh definitely yeah. It will be big screen with a great Austin audience and the audiences here in Austin are some of the best audiences in the world and I think that they are going to be really into it.

I’ve been lucky enough to spend a lot of time over the last ten years visiting film sets, but I’ve never been to a musical set and, you know, I’ve been to fantasy and horror and drama and I’ve seen some of the great filmmakers work, but I’ve never once been on a musical set and I was just wondering how the tone and atmosphere on a set like that compares to a traditional set, especially one as vibrant as I would imagine a Tim Burton set to be.

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Alan Rickman: Well, I can only talk about it from my perspective; A) of course one of the great things about the movie is the way speech moves into song imperceptibly and out again and back into speech and so it’s not a big number. It’s not that at all. It’s a complete departure in terms of film musicals and so there aren’t any big dance numbers and so it’s very different, so in that sense it’s pretty much the same as making another movie except of course when it comes to the songs you are lip-syncing and having to develop that skill.

Quint: Had you had experience in singing professionally?

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Alan Rickman: Only in a kind of miniature way as in I sang a bit in a movie called TRULY MADLY DEEPLY, but that wasn’t exactly… It’s not as exposing as this and I had a little bit of theater, but this is like “Oh, and now you have to sing and… really sing,” but fortunately the lyrics are as important as the music and so you have a kind of double focus and it’s… maybe less nerve-wracking than it might be and the lyrics have to be matched as well as the music and so good… He’s a genius, that man.

Quint: Being on the internet, there’s a lot of negative people and I’ve seen a lot of criticism on Burton’s stuff, but I just have to admire his look. You look back at all the greats, they do have their style. Hitchcock’s movies you could tell what they looked like and I just love seeing Burton’s finger prints over his stuff. It’s almost become reassuring after twenty years of making movies to see somebody’s style. It’s not like he blatantly repeats himself even. It’s certainly recognizably Burton, but PEE-WEE doesn’t exactly look like ED WOOD which doesn’t look like BIG FISH…

Alan Rickman: Absolutely. I said to somebody the other day that anybody who doesn’t like this movie doesn’t deserve it. (laughs)

Quint: Well I really hope that I like the movie, then.

Alan Rickman: (laughs)

Alan Rickman: I’m in a general kind of cesspit in this film, so you know I’m not mincing up any limbs and…

[Both Laugh]

Alan Rickman: So yeah, we are all in the same boat really and in actual fact that all of the dark characters are sort of, as it happens, from a very small list. They just happen to be movies that get a lot of publicity.

Quint: Well, I love your lighter stuff too, like GALAXY QUEST and DOGMA and what you have done in that and I’m actually a big fan of the ambiguity… the greyer characters like in LOVE ACTUALLY or PERFUME. But even with your darker characters you seem to give the same amount of sympathy to them… The most despicable people can be…

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Alan Rickman: You can’t judge them. It’s for you to say “despicable.” It’s not for me to say that when I’m playing and it’s like that. I’ve got these two movies coming out, one in Sundance called BOTTLE SHOCK and another one called NOBEL SON that was at Tribeca that comes out in March and you know, those are the ones where you can’t actually put labels on them at all. They are who they are and that’s kind of how I view any character you play.

Quint: Yeah. Well you look at the big roles being the Sheriff of Nottingham or Hans Gruber and they are without question the audience favorite, do you seek out roles like that where it can be… even with the lighter characters, especially like GALAXY QUEST, where I think your character steals that film and that’s a really hard film to steal, especially with Sam Rockwell and Sigourney [Weaver] and what they do in that film, but I just wonder how much of that is up to you to strike that balance and how much of that is on the page.

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Alan Rickman: I think that just depends, you know you work in so many dimensions. Mentioning Sigourney, she and I did a film that means a lot to me called SNOW CAKE that came out last year where she’s playing an adult autistic and I’m incredibly low key in terms of who he is, but you are working in three dimensions. I think with some of the things that you have talked about, one’s working in two dimensions, because we aren’t really interested in the inner psyche of Alexander Dane. That’s not the point of the film and it’s an incredibly witty take on all of that, but it owes more to other traditions I think than people who live in three dimensions. It’s just a different way of approaching things.

I don’t know how to answer these questions honestly, because it’s like you read the script and then you get on with it and you use whichever colors are appropriate from the paint cupboard in a way and you have to be very selective. Some of them are just not appropriate and it depends on the part.

Quint: Are you very choosy with what comes to you? It sounds like now that you definitely pick your projects with care.

Alan Rickman: Yeah, I suppose, I mean because I still work in the theater and I direct and it’s a balancing act and then there are things that one is committed to that you know that they are going to be there for like the next year or two years and no, it is a bit pick and mix I suppose at the moment given that it’s an industry that rewards people under, what it feels like, under twelve. It’s a different world now if you’re a bit older than that and of course it’s worse for women or particularly difficult for women over a certain age, so I guess instinctively I gravitate towards independent movies which don’t get the same attention unless you are lucky. Having said that, of course one also enjoys doing the kind of big playground numbers which is what it feels like, just jumping into a playground.

[The representative says there is time for one more minute.]

Quint: That’s cool and I guess in this last minute I would just like to follow up on what you had to say about your upcoming projects. You said you had one premiering at Sundance, right?

Alan Rickman: Yeah, that’s called BOTTLE SHOCK which we shot it in Sonoma this summer. It’s the true story of a blind wine tasting that took place in 1976 in France with a French Jury, where American wines beat the French.

Then NOBEL SON is from the same director actually accidently. The two movies are from the same director, Randall Miller, and I’ve seen one of them. NOBEL SON I think is terrific and I hope the same is true of BOTTLE SHOCK which is being edited as we speak.

Quint: Cool and thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me and I really appreciate it.

Alan Rickman: Oh not at all. Thanks a lot.

Quint: No problem, have a good day.

Alan Rickman: Thanks, bye.

Hope you guys dug the chat. I was politely asked beforehand to not mention Harry Potter, so I did not. Honestly, though, I love his work in that series, but if I could delve into any of his well known characters for a while it’d probably be me talking Hans Gruber… I had to really resist the urge to ask him his thoughts on LIVE FREE OR DIE HARD…

Enjoy SWEENEY TODD… I’ve now seen it and I love it to death. Such a damn fun movie. Anyway, hope you guys have a happy holiday!

-Quint
quint@aintitcool.com