ScreenWize

When director Marc Evans first read Angela Pell’s script for the film Snow Cake, he didn’t really notice the references to disability and autism. “To be honest I was attracted to the humour and the warmth of the writing” he says in his soft Welsh accent. “It comes from a really true place, and the way Angela writes is very personable. You want to meet those people, and I wanted to meet her. Then to find out it was her first script made it even more exciting.”

 
Pell lives in Brighton, England, and learnt her trade writing comedy and reading rejected television scripts. “I think when you read bad stuff it gets your imagination working overtime on how you would do it differently. It’s much better than reading published scripts of great films,” she says. Her approach clearly paid off. “It was one of the scripts that changed the least from the writer’s draft to the director’s,” says Evans, “although we did make subtle changes when Alan and Sigourney came on board.”
 
Alan is, of course, Alan Rickman, currently one of Britain’s most sought after actors, and starring with him is Sigourney Weaver, who plays Linda Freeman, a woman living with a form of autism. Pell wrote the script with Rickman in mind for the part of Alex Hughes, a sad and introverted Englishman travelling in Canada in search of his past and his future. After a car accident he ends up staying with Linda where they develop an odd but very genuine friendship. When Evans was told that the film had been written for Rickman, he decided that they might as well bite the bullet and ask him. “It’s a bit easier here in England to get access to actors, so we sent him the script and went to talk to him, to try and convince him to do the part.” In true British fashion, Evans set aside one hour over tea for the task. Rickman didn’t need any arm-twisting, and agreed within five minutes. “If this was a house” Rickman told Evans with his customary dryness, “I’d ask you to take it off the market.”
 
Rickman shot to fame on the big screen for his role as the villain Hans Gruber in Die Hard back in1988. Since then he’s juggled villains such as The Sheriff of Nottingham, Rasputin, and Severus Snape (from the Harry Potter series) with comedy roles in films like Dogma and Love Actually. Yet his first love is the theatre, and he regularly wins awards for his stage acting in Britain. For many people it’s the distinctive voice that defines Rickman, his tight-jawed drawl capable of withering the enemy with either malice or wit. It was not surprising he was asked to provide the voice for Marvin the Paranoid Android in the film version of Douglas Adam’s The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.
 
It was Rickman who suggested to Marc Evans that Sigourney Weaver be approached for the part of Linda. She and Rickman had worked together in the cult comedy film Galaxy Quest and had become good friends. Weaver quickly agreed to take the role, attracted to challenges of playing an independent and free spirited autistic woman who lives in the moment, and who just about manages to care for herself in a small house in a small town in regional Canada. She was also keen to work with Rickman again. “Alan, to me, is one of the greatest actors in the world, and there’s nothing he can’t do,” she says. “He has such subtlety and such intelligence.” With these two big names signed up, it wasn’t hard to then convince Canadian-born Carrie-Anne Moss to play Linda’s neighbour Maggie, a character who tempts Alex to linger longer and helps him deal with the losses in his life.
 
Whilst the usually fraught casting process was a breeze for Evans, things became more challenging in rehearsals. “We rehearsed with the writer present and it was then we changed small things, although it was fundamentally the same script” says Evans. “I like having access to the writer especially at this early stage and so do the actors, because no one has better knowledge of the characters than the writer.” But it was difficult for Rickman to adopt the usual process of getting his character mapped out. “What happened in practical terms,” says Evans “is that when we laid down the ground rules for the film, Sigourney - who is an actor who researches intensely – was determined to abide by the rules of the autistic condition while she was in character. This put Alan in a strange position because usually there’s a sort of complicity between actors about how they create a scene: they negotiate with each other and it becomes seamless. But with Sigourney playing an autistic character, there was no negotiation at all: she was only going to follow the rules of the condition. Even though they were great mates, there were arguments as Alan had to find his own way to respond to her, probably like it would be in real life.”
 
The challenges of dealing with autism were not new to Pell who is the mother of a seven-year-old autistic son. Yet Evans admits she was intuitive enough as a first time writer not to use him directly in the story. “It was a very personal script inspired by being a parent, but Angela was very smart in choosing another way to write about autism. She created Linda, who is a very high functioning adult, actually based on another person who both she and Sigourney got to know very well.”
 
It’s Linda and her uncompromising view of life that has the greatest impact on Alex’s spirit in the film. She asks him direct questions, tells him what she thinks and demands little in return other than for him to take out the garbage. She is a character utterly without artifice, and it is this that warms the frozen soul of the Englishman stuck in the tundra. Yet although Linda might have easily become the main character in the story, she has no traditional character arc. “There’s a strange and precarious balance between the two leads” says Evans, “but it can’t be her film because she lives in the moment and doesn’t change. It becomes Alex’s story. He’s the one with the journey.”
 
The film is set in a small town called Wawa, nestled on the northern shores of Lake Superior in Ontario. It was chosen partly as an authentic Canadian town and partly because of its snow. “The snow is important in the script”, says Evans “but as we got towards the end of the shoot, spring was coming in fast. We had locals out looking for snow drifts for us. We needed all the snow we could find.” But the coming of the sun was also a blessing for Evans. “The light was beautiful for us in the spring and we got some lovely footage as winter melted away,” he says, “and the script actually suggests a change of season as a way of reflecting the changes that occur to Alex.”
 
Evans ultimately sees the film as a kind of warm memoir. “It’s like a re-telling of a life-changing incident, a memory of something special in a person’s life, something that can never be repeated,” he says. “I think it’s that genuineness and warmth that we all saw in the script, and it’s that that audiences are responding to.”

Filed Under: Interviews by Simon