The one role Alan Rickman was forced into playing: “It wasn’t my choice”
When creative folks make movies in Hollywood, they often discuss the push-pull between art and commerce. Everyone wants to make the most fulfilling, creatively challenging pieces of cinema, but at the end of the day, they also need audiences to pay their hard-earned money to see their films. Alan Rickman found himself in a strange situation in 2014, though, when he was pushed toward playing a role he didn’t want because of commerce – but it was for a movie he was directing himself.
Throughout his career, theatre and film legend Rickman only stepped behind the camera twice. His first effort was the little-seen 1997 drama The Winter Guest, which starred his future Love, Actually co-star Emma Thompson. It then took 16 long years for Rickman to become passionate enough about another project that he knew he wanted to helm himself.
The result was 2014’s A Little Chaos, a period drama about the construction of the Gardens of Versailles in the 1630s. Rickman put together an incredible cast for the film, including Kate Winslet, Matthias Schoenaerts, Stanley Tucci, and Rupert Penry-Jones.
However, there was an issue when it came time to cast King Louis XIV, the monarch who tasked architect André Le Nôtre with building the Gardens. You see, Rickman didn’t intend to star in the film; he simply wanted to direct it. But his producers had other ideas.
During an interview with Screen Daily, Rickman admitted that his decision to play Louis’s small but pivotal role was mostly financial. When asked if he was always slated to play the famed monarch, he grumbled, “No, it wasn’t my choice. There was some pressure from the producing element as it solved one or two problems”. The Die Hard star got further into the weeds when he spoke to Movies and reiterated that he didn’t initially want to play Louis. He revealed: “I tried hard not to, but it was a case of economics.”
When it came down to it, if Rickman stepped into the role, it meant the financiers didn’t have another wage to pay. Rickman admitted, “You add up the numbers, and here’s an actor you don’t have to pay immediately. It makes the sums add up, and the producers just say, ‘You’re playing it’.”
One of the reasons Rickman was reticent to play Louis was pure practicality – it made his job as director harder. When he moved in front of the camera, it meant he had to delegate his directorial processes to another member of his talented crew. He explained, “It’s not easy. You need the help of other people who are looking down a lens, like Ellen Kuras the DP.”
However, Rickman soon began to see parallels between his task as a film director and Louis XIV’s task as the project coordinator of the Gardens of Versailles. He mused, “I suppose the fact that there is such a watchful nature to somebody called Louis XIV. It’s a very isolated existence…You could see the mindset of a movie director might be his mindset.”
Elaborating on this notion to Entertainment Weekly, Rickman explained that directors need to be like the all-seeing eye on movie sets. They need to have a vision and then be able to execute that vision through the efforts of other people—”Move that”, “Don’t do that”, “Do it this way”, “Change this colour”—and that’s exactly what Louis was doing with the Gardens.
Indeed, by the end of proceedings, Rickman seemed to have warmed to the performance he’d been forced into. He smiled, “I have a feeling Louis probably would’ve been a great film director”.
