Alan Rickman stalks into the room, a study in dishevelled hauteur, emphasised by the hooded eyes, Roman nose and curling upper lip that has made him America's favourite Euro-villain - particularly with the ladies. He doesn't like giving interviews, though what I take initially for disdain strikes me later as more a manifestation of chronic shyness rather than charming obfuscation.
In short, Alan Rickman is not your usual kind of actor. He talks quietly, precisely. Fine hands, at odds with the craggy face topped by trademark widow's peak, pivot at the wrist as delicately as a temple dancer's as he speaks. It comes as no surprise to learn that he started life as an artist, a graphic designer, first at Chelsea School of Art, then the Royal College - though he left only a year into his MA - followed by several years on the job before winning a scholarship to RADA.
But we are not here to discuss his enviable career as an actor, but his first crack at directing. Although The Winter Guest has already achieved critical success, first at the Venice Film Festival, then at the Chicago International Film Festival where it took top prize, Rickman is wary, giving me a wan smile and over-measured "thank you" when I tell him how much it moved me.
His defensiveness is perhaps not surprising. For once the above-the-title legend "Alan Rickman's The Winter Guest" is no Hollywood hype. The film is 51-year-old Rickman's baby, a baby he both fathered and delivered, and that has been years in gestation.
It all goes back to the 1985/86 season with the Royal Shakespeare Company when Alan Rickman eased himself into the front line of English theatre actors as the manipulating womaniser Valmont in the hugely successful Les Liaisons Dangereuses, which eventually transferred to Broadway. His costar was Lindsay Duncan and it was stories she told him of her relationship with her seriously ill mother that prompted Rickman to commission a play from Sharman Macdonald, who he had championed since reading her first play When I Was A Girl I Used To Scream And Shout, and which he was instrumental in getting staged. The Winter Guest duly opened in Leeds in 1995 before transferring to the Almeida in London. Centred around a dying mother and grieving daughter and set in a remote Scottish seaside town when the sea has frozen over, its staging presented huge problems for the designer. Right from the outset, says Rickman, "the piece itself was hungry to expand into the other medium".
Actors-turned-director regularly elicit fine performances from their cast but Rickman has not allowed himself to be trapped in those performances. It is a very visual film. How much was his approach informed by his earlier career?
"I think it has guided my choices as an actor. I don't mean parts, but just if you have your eye trained it affects what you do in a rehearsal room or on stage in terms of its space and a sense of texture and colour. And things like that can be translated into your work. Sculpture even. I think that Sharman's work is very sculptural and so I'm aware of lots of cross currents rather than separating things out. As far as I'm concerned each discipline informs another.
"I don't really separate them. But clearly the work that I did as a graphic designer was of crucial importance to the conversations between me and Seamus McGarvey and the production designers and the art directors. The framing of the shots, the colours, the textures of the landscape - everything."
The Winter Guest is an extraordinarily confident and uncompromising work from a debut director. Rickman was determined not to be side-stepped by film professionals who thought they knew best. "I very specifically didn't choose people who talked in those terms. The choice of Seamus was very much guided by meeting this incredibly open, wide-eyed joyous spirit who I knew would go hand-in-hand with me and not make me forelock tug."
Seamus McGarvey, the up-and-coming cinematographer from Armagh, was just a name on a list of available directors of photography. "I saw he had done this film called Butterfly Kiss that I really liked. Then I went to meet him in Glasgow where he was shooting John Byrne's film of Slab Boys. And that was it was far as I was concerned. Some instinct in me said I would rather go with a young spirit. We could make our messes together. But he is so technically equipped anyway, and so passionate. He's terrific, but he's also the person I needed on the set every day. I didn't need people who were going to say `Oh, we know how to do this'."
Evem with Rickman's name on the screenplay and the director's chair, he acknowledges The Winter Guest would never have happened without Emma Thompson on board. Thompson's mother Phillida Law was in the original production, where her daughter was played by Sian Thomas. Four members of the original cast of eight remain and Rickman's face furrows as he talks of the painful decision to sacrifice Thomas's "brilliant" stage performance to the great god Hollywood.
"But also, there was a rightness about it for the film which even Sian acknowledged. Of course it was tough for her and me and it was a difficult thing to cope with in one's head and it will continue to be difficult for her. She knows how brilliant she was. And she also knows that we'll do something else down the line and I just hope that somehow makes up for it."
To have mother and daughter playing mother and daughter, particularly when the daughter is Emma Thompson was clearly dream casting, though during the shooting Rickman says he would "forget about them being mother and daughter".
"When I say forget about it, you don't take it for granted. You can't when you look at it in rushes and you see these two profiles and you see the ease that they move around each other. But you forget about it on the level that you're talking to them as individuals, not as a collective."
Alan Rickman does not believe his inexperience behind the camera was a disadvantage. "Every project has its own rules. But you don't know what they are until you start but you have to try to make sure that the circumstances exist on a practical level that give you time to discover what its own rules are and how you deal with it on a day to day level."
Rickman's problems on The Winter Guest included two 12-year-old boys who had never acted on film before. The first "boring" thing was to make sure they knew the text backwards, which involved two weeks of rehearsal. "By the time we started shooting I had schooled them into some awareness of stillness so that they weren't fidgeting as well as speaking. So that there was a sense of `when we're in front of the cameras we're going to be quite still, or if we move we're going to chose how to move'.
"And then on a personal level they were never for a second patronised by any member of the cast or the crew as the kids on the film. They were absolutely treated as equals, as adults, included in every outing, every late night beanfeast that was going and their chaperone would let them stay up for. It was much more important to me that they were having a good time with Emma Thompson, their mate rather than this movie star."
The performances Rickman gets from these boys are quite simply staggering. They have bunked off from school; the frozen sea is a magnet they just cannot resist. In the original stage play - and indeed screenplay - the lure of the ice ends in tragedy. Now the ending is ambivalent.
"It may be a happy ending. I cut a lot of stuff that would have made it much more obvious that they had died. Because in the end it is too important to me that the film is a celebration. And if you like, without bashing the metaphor, it's about saying they're walking off into the future that any 12-yearold wants to walk off into, the world that we as socalled adults build for the youngest to walk out into. "What is it? They can't see it through the mist and it's cracking under their feet."
Although theatre remains Rickman's first love, he has no wish to impose theatrical givens on film performances, his own or other actors'. "Peter Barnes, the writer, says that to him the theatre is like working in oils and film is like working in water colour. They are different disciplines. In one of them you need to be able to use yourself in a different way, much more speedily and take advantage of the moment. To come to film too prepared could be a problem as well. Too unwilling to throw it away and do something else."
The Winter Guest opens in the Screen at D'Olier Street, Dublin, on January 9th