Life in the Slow Lane

Sorry - I don't know who the woman is who interviewed Alan here, so I'm just calling her "Woman":

Woman:
. . . and prepare to be seduced by this mesmerizing sound. The glass harmonica in the hands of the 18th century doctor Franz Anton Mesmer, unconventional pioneer of psychotherapy. Alan Rickman played him in a 1994 film written by Dennis Potter, around which a certain mystery hangs. Alan Rickman will be joining me later.

Now, if Esterhauser(?) ever got his hands on a biopic of 18th century physician Franz Anton Mesmer, you can bet there would be the sound of ripping silk within a minute or two. The screen writer who did tackle the story of the man who believed he could cure madness without medicine was the late Dennis Potter. And for his performance as Mesmer, Alan Rickman won the Best Actor award at the Montreal Film Festival. The sensational element here is that the film, made in 1994, was never released in Britain. Mesmer was convinced that a natural force he identified as animal magnetism could cure mental distress. To the consternation of the medical establishment, he applied his powers to anyone from impoverished asylum inmates to rich young women identified as suffering from hysteria.

Scene from Mesmer

Alan Rickman, as Mesmer, leaping to the unconventional aid of a stricken pianist in an award-winning performance from 1994, never seen in British cinemas. Now, for the first time, you can see it on DVD. Alan Rickman joins me here in the studio.

So how did this happen? Why was it not shown?

AR: I think the easiest thing to say is legal wrangles to do with distribution and, uh, it was actually quite an important case at the time because it meant that from that time onwards, pink pages had to be produced on any day of filming if there were changes, "pink pages" being - it's just the phrase - it means a rewrite of a script when a change has been made.

Woman: So are you allowed a certain number of changes, then? Is there - is there a kind of legal(?) norm for what . . .

AR: Sure, you can make the changes, they've just got to be recorded. You know - some of ours were made like on the hoof with Mesmer, but they were very little, those ones.

Woman: Now, the essential issue was that you had departed from Dennis Potter's script in the filming. Was this a complaint brought by Potter himself?

AR: Uh, no, not at all, because he had died before the film was released, sadly, but certainly, when Roger Spotiswoode, the director, spent time with him - he was too ill, unfortunately, to join us on the set, but he spent time with him before we started filming - he said, very specifically, "Well, whatever doesn't work, you'll fix" and it's a very live form - alive form of the English language that Dennis Potter puts on the page and a lot of exclamation marks all over the place, and that's like telling you how to act it - well, that was some of the exclamation mark acting you heard there - quite a lot of the rest of it's pretty quiet. Any kind of, uh, set during the making of a film is like a marketplace, much as the rehearsal room in a theater, you know, and it's up for grabs between the writer and the director and the actor and, having been given that validation by Dennis Potter, I think what we were doing was only honoring his script, not changing it. And it has to be said that some of the changes that were talked about were things like - we didn't say "the" and we didn't say "a", so . . .

Woman: And was there any sense that they weren't happy with the direction or the form that the finished film had taken?

AR: Uh, difficult to say, but I think I - you know, this is a real person. He really lived and whenever I've done that before - it's - you can feel these people sort of sitting on your shoulder a bit, and you become very defensive of them, however they're judged by other people or history, and certainly all of my research told me that Mesmer never actually put his hands on any of the young, fairly unclothed women - not naked, they were always wearing kind of shifts - his hands never touched them. I was being encouraged in another direction and I refused.

Woman: 'Cause it's certainly - it's very erotic even without the touching, it's still quite an erotic film, isn't it?

AR: I think it's meant to be erotic, yeah, and, um, funnily enough, things are more erotic when you don't kind of go whole hog.

Woman: Do you think that, from your studies of Mesmer - and fascinating character - and I guess, in some ways, the forerunner of psychotherapy in so far as he advocated not a talking cure but a kind of empathetic cure for people who were percieved to be disturbed. Do you feel that he was sincere - that he wasn't a charleton?

AR: I think if he was alive now, he'd have an extremely successful practice in Harley Street and make very big and successful visits to any of the spas that - or health farms - that you go to, where people lie on a bed and get reflexology or whatever, you know - now they've been given names. I guess what he was doing then was probably as close as you can get to hypnotism - you know - it just hadn't been invented yet. The iron rods in water and the tides in people's bodies and it being affected by phases of the moon is arguable, but the essence of what he's doing about, um, you know, we have some sort of control over the rhythm of our bodies, I think is perfectly accepted now.

Woman: And how great a blow was it when you realised - I don't know how long you'd been working on it - but when you realised it was not to be released?

AR: It - do you know, it's just part of the fabric of one's career. If you put your neck on the chopping block often enough you know that you're going to feel the knife occasionally, and I think that's an important part of my working life, is to test myself against pieces of work. And, particularly, you know that if you're going to attach yourself to something written by Dennis Potter, history tells you that some form of controversy's going to follow you around, and I was proud to be part of it. Still am.

Woman: And do you think - you know, it was your film - you absolutely were the lead and, at this stage, God knows, you haven't been short of film work since, but do you think that things might have been slightly different - you might have been offered different kinds of roles - if this had been released then?

AR: You can't second-guess any of that stuff, I mean, the trouble with success is that people want you to repeat yourself, so I don't know how many Mesmer movies would be likely to have got made on the back of that one - it was very much a one-off.

Woman: Alan Rickman, thank you, and Mesmer is out now on DVD, as is Alan Rickman's latest film, Snow Cake.

Yes, thank you, Alan Rickman. Very interesting and enlightening!