Mayfair Entertainment International, the majority backers of this £4.5 million movie, also claimed that Rickman’s character didn’t have the sexual magnetism that Potter intended and withdrew their £3.2 million contribution.
‘The 57 changes are substantial and were made without any consultation with us,’ Mayfair’s joint managing director Ian Scorer told Nathanson, complaining that Rickman had turned Mesmer into a distant, inaccessible figure rather than a hot-blooded sensualist.
Mesmer’s new owners, Film Finances, disagreed, defending Rickman’s script changes. ‘Obviously he was very proactive as the lead actor. He did have input,’ James Shirras, director of legal and business affairs, told me.
‘One of Mayfair’s complaints was that Rickman’s performance was not sufficiently erotic. But if he wasn’t then that’s the way he chose to play it.’
Mayfair go further, alleging that Rickman refused to lick the eyelids of a young blind female patient because he was concerned that it would make him look like a lecher. And Scorer also alleged that at a private screening of Mesmer in Los Angeles in February 1994, Rickman had wanted to make the ending more political. ‘Instead of the final scene between Mesmer and the blind girl being played to piano music, he wanted the sounds of gunfire and helicopter engines from Sarajevo.
‘He thought it needed some really punchy, violent noise rather than the lyrical, touching finale. It was meant to make it more politically correct, but people said, “Whaaat? Mesmer was in Paris in 1780, not in present-day Bosnia!”’
Co-producer Lance Reynolds also rent his garments in anguish at the memory, claiming he had spent five years developing and nursing the project with Potter. ‘The changes were very much done by the director and Alan Rickman, and I was not consulted,’ he told Nathanson. ‘I would see the rushes, call a meeting with the three other producers and express my concern, but it would be forgotten. I was jumping up and down and saying “This is not the film!”
‘I was upset as I adored Dennis Potter. That was the point of working all those years on it – and not to have people rewriting his work.’
It sounds heart-rending as well as garment-rending, and certainly makes a good story, but it’s not the complete picture. Rickman was portrayed as a killjoy Dave Spart whose starring role had gone to his head and who was just the kind of humourless lout that would (like the Hackney headmistress Jane Brown) denounce Romeo And Juliet for being ‘heterosexist’. It was enormously damaging, and Scorer and Reynolds sounded very convincing.
It was felt at the time that Mayfair seized on an opportunity to validate pulling out of the film. They therefore criticised alterations to the script, which had been made without that much collaboration with Dennis Potter because he was too ill.
James Shirras of Film Finances Services Ltd, the new owners of Mesmer, was also acerbic in the spectacular way that only lawyers can be when they cast off the legal jargon, let their wig down and tell you what they really think.
‘You’ve been on my conscience,’ he admitted when I contacted him for a second time to try to arrange a talk about the Mesmer fiasco. ‘Fascinating is not the word for Mesmer. You need to be resilient to stick with it to the end.
‘Mayfair said Rickman was not sexy enough, which is ridiculous. This is a man who has more fans turning up to see him than Hugh Grant at the première of An Awfully Big Adventure, which I attended. Rickman has a big following.
‘There were certainly cash-flow difficulties at the beginning, during the first few weeks of filming. Neither Rickman nor Roger Spottiswoode were paid properly until the fifth week. However, the suggestion disseminated in certain quarters that money which should have been available to meet production expenses on Mesmer was diverted elsewhere is without foundation.
‘The major cash-flow problems at the beginning meant it was difficult for the producers to get their ducks in a row. That caused discontent on the set. Roger and Alan were implored to keep on working; they were extremely good about it.
‘To some extent, they blamed Mayfair for the difficulties. But they had to be kept sweet, and I understand it was not always easy to do that.’
The budget for Mesmer was eight-and-a-half million dollars. There were quite a lot of deferments for what’s known as the ‘Talent’, standard moviespeak for the director, producer and stars. The deferments for Rickman and Spottiswoode were six-figure sums in dollars. The cash budget of approximately six million dollars made it eight-and-a-half million dollars in total for the production.
‘Film Finances now has the rights of distribution, which Mayfair were supposed to acquire,’ says Shirras. ‘We have now appointed a sales agent and sales are now being made. You would think there would be a lot of interest in one of Dennis Potter’s last scripts, but . . .
‘Our misfortune was that Mayfair ever agreed to finance the film based on that script. They prepared a legal case based on the divergences between the film as delivered and the original script. The discrepancies are very, very minor. It doesn’t amount to a row of beans. They put their case to arbitrators, and the arbitrators believed them, to many people’s amazement. I was very surprised.
‘We knew the script was very, very odd. Mayfair were saying that it had been turned into a doctor-patient relationship as opposed to a man and his lover, but that assertion is so unverifiable,’ says Shirras with exasperation.
‘Alan had apparently been impressed by the script, though; I think he had found more in it, frankly, than most people did.’ Indeed, one friend says: ‘Alan found it terribly significant.’
The originating producer, Lance Reynolds, has been smarting about it all for years. ‘I worked for five and a half to six years on Mesmer and it was such a bitter experience,’ he squeaks. ‘I would like to gracefully decline about commenting on working with Alan Rickman. Dennis Potter was very important to me and I was very close to him.’
When I spoke to him in the autumn of 1995, Reynolds alleged: ‘I have not even been paid for Mesmer.’
This was disputed by James Shirras, whom I contacted at around the same time. ‘It was not true that Lance Reynolds was not paid,’ he insists. ‘And if he felt things were going wrong, why didn’t he do something about it? He was there for the whole shoot. I think it’s fair to say that his relationship with the other producers was not all it might have been.
‘We at Film Finances tend to get involved in these things when a producer needs to borrow money from a bank. They started shooting in September 1993. We were contacted about providing a completion guarantee. We look at the project and the individuals involved and decide whether they can do it. We were familiar with the Hungarian-Canadian producer Andras Hamori, so we were happy with him. Frankly, he was the reason why we got involved in the first place.
‘Lance Reynolds was the originator of the project. He got some money for Mesmer from Bowie’s business manager Robert Goodale. Goodale had nothing to do with the making of the film; he simply lent some of Bowie’s money to the project for development.
‘Another producer was Wieland Schulz-Keil, who had recently done John Schlesinger’s The Innocent . . . which I believe was a problematic production. Schulz-Keil brought in the German film studio Babelsberg in Berlin, so it became a British-German-Canadian co-production.
‘Andras Hamori was the hands-on producer, responsible for managing the production. Schulz-Keil and Reynolds had less clearly defined roles, but were supposed to be around. Someone at Mayfair must have said at the sight of the finished product, “How the hell are we going to get our money back out of this?”
‘So they cited the script changes as a reason for pulling out of their contract. Most distributors who want a long-term future in the business would be extremely reluctant to do this.
‘We lost the arbitration and paid the money back to the bank, so we are now trying to dispose of the territories from Mayfair that we inherited. Selling films is not really our business.
‘This kind of arbitration is in fact extremely unusual,’ point
s out Shirras. ‘The Mayfair case was so preposterous, to say that this was not the film they wanted delivered. I thought they were trying it on. We didn’t agree that the film didn’t conform to the script. Their case was utter nonsense, but it had the virtue of simplicity and clarity. They must have been incredibly surprised when they won; and the arbitrators did say that Mayfair should consider themselves fortunate.
‘The arbitration was essentially about who was going to pay the bank off . . . Mayfair or Film Finances. It should have been between Mayfair and the producers, but if the producers lost the case, we would have had to pick up the tab. We could have called in the producers as witnesses, but we formed the impression – mistaken, as it turned out – that the arbitrators didn’t want the producers to appear.
‘Roger Spottiswoode and Alan Rickman both appeared as witnesses. They said it was nonsense about many changes, that film is always a collaborative thing. Roger had in fact been in touch with Dennis Potter, who said “You will just have to work it all out on the floor.”
‘The arbitrators’ decision is really very difficult to understand, except on the basis of a very narrow and legalistic construction of the relevant contracts,’ he concludes with a shrug. ‘I felt from the very beginning that it would have been better in front of a High Court judge. But it was written into the contracts that we should go to arbitration if any difficulties developed, the reason being that arbitrators are appointed by the disputing parties for their knowledge and understanding of the film industry. I suspect that if we had been able to go to the High Court, Mayfair would not have gone ahead with the action.’
There are some who question the good taste of a peculiar feature of the film. Director Roger Spottiswoode, of course, sees things differently. ‘You can play mad, but there are people who are severely subnormal who still look normal. We did bring some asylum patients out of Bratislava for a couple of days of filming. There are a limited number of things one can do; these people didn’t really know what a film is, for example.
‘But they seemed happy. You have to be careful not to exploit them, but there are precedents for using real patients: they did that in One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest.’
Spottiswoode stands by the film he made. ‘The arbitration was an attempt to get out of paying for the film,’ he alleges. ‘Obviously it succeeded. None of that was to do with Alan or myself.
‘The main concern was that Dennis had written a very dark script about a very dark character, and the financiers had thought it would be a light, airy, sexy romp. It’s about a character who’s ambiguous. They wanted something simpler, nicer, hopefully more commercial.’
As for Mayfair’s allegations that Alan tried to turn the film into a metaphor for Bosnia with the sound of gunfire and Sarajevan helicopters, Spottiswoode admits: ‘Alan did have an idea that there should be a more modern sound at the end to show people the contemporary relevance. I tried it and I didn’t think it would work in the cinema. It’s very theatrical. It was hitting the nail on the head too much. But with no ideas around, a film is dead. One discards the bad ideas.
‘Alan is a man of strong ideas; you have to work them out with him. He doesn’t like to be a tool. The same has been said of Gene Hackman,’ he adds diplomatically.
‘Mesmer was a very difficult, prickly, complex character, and Alan had great courage to play him. Mesmer was compelling and brilliant, but also extremely difficult and unpleasant. Both ludicrous and expressive. There is a tension there: Mesmer is impenetrable. He’s endlessly pompous and arrogant: he married a woman for her wealth and then paid no attention to her. He was quite contrary.
‘The movie was not a big blockbuster. It’s a small, interesting, dark film. Alan won the Best Actor award in Montreal when it was screened there. But it probably won’t make him a big star, it’s not that kind of film.
‘Clearly Mesmer was quite erotic and strange. When he strokes Maria Theresa’s breasts in the first scene, we played it as if the characters didn’t quite understand what they were doing . . . we didn’t want to give a twentieth-century consciousness to a pre-Freudian time. I could have made the film more explicit, but that would have been wrong. Sexuality was repressed then.
‘Our medical ethics are recently come by. Cartoons of the time showed Mesmer’s group therapy as orgasm, or what we would call primal scream therapy. It was all about the discovery of the unconscious.
‘Mesmer disappeared back into the tragedy of history. So did the girl in this film, Maria Theresa. She was supposed to have regained her sight for a few days after meeting Mesmer, but she died blind.
‘All this was just around the time of the French Revolution, with the growth of new ideas. It was at the end of the Dark Ages, in a way. There had been almost no medical progress until then. And a man who dared to suggest that the mind and body might be connected was considered a fool. Mesmer was very much ahead of his time; would that great geniuses were nice people, too. I don’t think he was.’
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.
Alan Rickman Page 25
