BILL PULLMAN
   AND
    ALAN RICKMAN

Even though they are from different parts of the world, acclaimed actors Alan Rickman and Bill Pullman are more similar in their careers than one might think.

Both started in the theater, both have taught and directed plays, and both have appeared in independent films as well as some memorable blockbusters. For Rickman, it started as Hans Gruber in DIE HARD and has continued with the HARRY POTTER franchise and last year’s SWEENEY TODD. With Pullman, it started with RUTHLESS PEOPLE and has continued with INDEPENDENCE DAY, LAKE PLACID, and THE GRUDGE. In BOTTLE SHOCK, the two veterans play the main roles in the real life story of an American winery about to change the world’s perception on where the best wine is made.

Alan Rickman plays British wine store owner Steven Spurrier, living in Paris and trying to find a way to boost business. He finds it in traveling to the Napa Valley in California and bringing the best wines from America to judge in a blind tasting contest against the French, where he meets vineyard owner Jim Barrett (played by Pullman).

To promote BOTTLE SHOCK, Pullman and Rickman were paired to talk to the Crypt about the film and their backdrop in the theater, working with husband and wife producers Randall Miller and Jody Savin, and the benefits and differences between stage and film.

COLONELSCRYPT: What brought you both into BOTTLE SHOCK?

ALAN RICKMAN: I read it and kept turning the pages, that’s what it gets down to a lot of the time. You have to take a shovel to get the page over sometimes but this was a great story. I had no clue about it actually happening. That was news to me and it was full of rich, diverse characters where you couldn’t condemn any of them. It was full of complex relationships and was set in a beautiful place.

BILL PULLMAN: It’s simpler for me. I get to work with Alan. Actually, we had worked before and I think also that it’s so good to do this type of interview because when you answer second then you get to think about things. I remember being worried and I think Alan was worried too because we had done this other movie with Randall Miller and Jodi Savin and we liked this idea of a repertory theater, you know, like Woody Allen, using actors again but we were going to be sent a script that maybe is going to be bad and maybe you’re going to say no to and deny yourself this thing that you’d like to think would work but if it doesn’t come off the page, you won’t do it. I was very apprehensive when I first read it.

AR: I was too but I knew that it was based on somebody else’s script and they were re-writing it but you have to have that level of trust within you.

CC: Did you have any knowledge of the wine industry before accepting the film?

AR: Not me, nothing.

BP: I think it’s like this thing where if you’re from a certain area that’s made wines but has never gotten respect and I grew up in the Finger Lakes area of New York state and the Finger Lakes wine has never gotten a lot of respect. When you’re from there, you love the beauty of the lakes, the long, wooded hills, and the experience of going to these wineries and it’s kind of quaint, then you know that everybody in the world is disparaged, and then they start making great wines. I guess I thought I related it as a story of what could happen to Finger Lakes wine maybe someday and it would be like the next generation of this story.

CC: Was it a challenge in playing characters based on real life people and have you spent any time with the real life people you both play, Steven and Jim?

AR: I have done it a few times I realize on two other occasions. They were actually historical characters so you have a responsibility to massive research on those people and you have to do a lot of homework.

BP: Were they dead?

AR: Yeah, it was Rasputin and Eamon de Valera in MICHAEL COLLINS so yeah, they were dead but they were true characters in that there are people who think they’re fabulous and there are other people who think they’re awful. Half of Ireland worships the memory of de Valera and the other half doesn’t. That’s trickier than what I did in BOTTLE SHOCK which was borrow Steven’s name and the circumstances because in no way it is an impersonation of Steven Spurrier because that wouldn’t be really appropriate. I spoke to him on the phone and got his blessing to steal his name really.

BP: I had played one person who was alive and on set in my career and he has since become a good friend oddly enough. The movie was THE SERPENT AND THE RAINBOW and this guy Wade Davis was an ethnobotonist who was hired by Harvard to go down to Haiti and determine the anesthetic that was being used to make people into zombies. That’s my guy. That’s a lifelong friend. It’s interesting but with these movies you are allowed a little license.

CC: How was it seeing the collaboration between Ranall and Jodi as writers?

BP: I think it was because Alan and I had worked before with them on NOBEL SON about two years ago that I believe Alan would agree with me that I have great admiration for them. I am amazed at a relationship that can be completely involved with each other creatively and also at the same time being completely involved in raising a family, having two kids. I’ve never been in this situation in my life.

AR: It’s phenomenal but I think it’s something of a yin yang thing. They are absolutely complimentary to each other, not just in size. They seem to function with absolutely no sleep from what I can see. They don’t seem to require it, especially Randall because he’s editing as well and he’ll finish a day on set and then go back and start editing.

BP: That’s the one critical thing I’ve ever heard Jody say about Randall is that he will stay up late. She goes to bed early so when he’s done editing at 2 or 3 in the morning, he’ll come into bed all charged up saying, “I just got this call from this person and they’re totally making me mad,” then he’ll just pass out. She’ll wake up from this and will spend all night thinking about it. It’s the one little snag that they are still working at.

AR: But they are a force of nature and I think it’s about their combined energies as well as their separate energies. You think of them together all the time and it’s like one word: RandallandJody.  

CC: Did you learn anything about wine over the course of the film, like telling the difference between the tastes?

BP (To ALAN): You already knew a little beforehand. Did you know a lot more?

AR: I don’t know. I didn’t know a lot. I’m just like everyone else who goes to the wine store to get a bottle of wine for dinner. I don’t ever sit around comparing wines with no relationship to eating or friends or a function. It’s taken a while but if anything at all I realize now I do have the guts to send a bottle of wine back which of course in my teenage years would never have happened. We would drink this stuff and then carry on. If it’s corked, I know what that smells and tastes like, I send it back. That’s as far as I can go.

CC: Were there free wine samples on the set for you to drink?

AR: Grape. Juice.

CC: Alan, when you play a character who’s perceived as a bit of a snob or an outsider by everyone else, how does that factor into your performance?

AR: The last thing you should ever do as an actor is put labels on a character you’re playing. You don’t judge them yourself. It’s all information but there is a moment in the movie where Bill calls me a snob and hopefully I sound surprised and say, “Am I?” It’s like he hadn’t thought of it before. I think it also has to do with language and as an English person to be called a snob, it’s much worse than perhaps it is for an American to use that word. We had a lot of discussion about that line while we were making the movie because I thought of it just as a piece of writing. I wasn’t sure about it but that had to do with my reaction as an Englishman to that word. It’s very emotional. To answer your question, my way around it was to play it like something that never occurred to him but that has to do with being from the upper class where you never get criticized, well not terribly.

BP: It was something that we all were thinking about. I remember thinking that it was a natural thing to tell him that he was kind of a snob. It would frame it in a way where I wasn’t totally throwing away his personality. I was just saying it was an aspect of it. Then Randall said, “No I think it’s kind of a snob. It’s a snob.” I go back and think that this was the time period where you didn’t have to put a lot of an English spin on things to slide it in a little better. It was better and it was much more true to the character to come in at him more bluntly.

AR: Ultimately, it all underlines something that is helpful in that you are playing a product of a country with a class system and you’re walking into a country that doesn’t have it in a way. This is something in England that you still have to deal with.

CC: Even though that line is in the film, were there any instances were improvisation would be allowed and words be changed?

AR: Definitely. Randall is in there with his sleeves rolled up. He reminded me a lot of Mike Newell where I’ve actually seen Mike Newell raising his fist up at a cloud and meaning it, shouting “You bastard” and mean it. Randall has a little bit of that. Making the movie fills his whole body.

BR: It was curious in observing what suggestions Alan had to Randall and how he would take a while and come back with some very good things in the movie. Not to give it away but the guacamole and the Kentucky Fried Chicken I thought was a contribution that Alan could make with no words but created some incredibly succinct moments. My favorite moment in the film was when the guy who brings the guacamole to you and it was astounding to see you two sitting in the same bubble of air.

AR: I was very worried about him because he looked so vulnerable and fragile. Talk about an alien. This guy was terribly sensitive and shy and he was thrust into this scene but he was so fragile. I thought he was going to fall apart and all he’s got to do is deliver the guacamole. In between takes, he was holding it up. He knew what he had to do and he did it.

BP: This guy comes in and Alan is watching him like an alien. He’s not editorializing him and that’s what I liked about it because if there was one cynical response you had to him, it would’ve sunk the scene.

AR: I hope he survived the experience. There wasn’t any aftercare.

CC: Alan, you had a few scenes with Dennis Farina which was very enjoyable. Was there more than what we saw in the film?

AR: No, that was it.

CC: How was it working with him because there was a natural flow between you coming from two different backgrounds?

AR: When you meet someone like Dennis, you just go with the flow. There’s no point in doing anything else and that was the strength of it. I suppose time marches where you learn where to put your energies and that is just be with Dennis because there’s no point in trying to steer the ship in any other direction. That was a mirror of that relationship anyway which is what was so good about it. He’s trying to drink my wine without paying any money.

CC: Being that you both have done theater work, do you find the reaction of a theater audience greater than the reaction at a film premiere?

BP: I think both of us when you come to see the edited process of what you’ve done because you think of yourself of having a timing and rhythm when you’re doing a scene but when you see it edited together, there’s another persona that is there giving you the timing and the rhythm. You can feel it in your body. Sometimes I have that rhythm where I think that I should’ve entered a room earlier and I think that Randall was able to get pretty good timing with this for somebody who didn’t do this through the test marketing system. I’ve gone through movies with the big studios where you’ll sit with an audience and you’ll hear a response where it’ll be the same movie where you’ll hear these deep laughs and there are others where you hear laughs that go to the Adam’s apple. The studio will go to the cutting and the timing that goes to the Adam’s apple. It’s happened to me, not all the time, but it’s great that Randall was able to get the sense of the audience without having done that system.

AR: A friend of mine came to see it in the Hamptons last night, a director in England and she said that she loved the fact that the movie took its time so there’s that plus we’ve only sat with an audience a couple of times now. You can’t blur it. You can always tell when there’s an absolutely innocent response to a film from an audience because they are actually being given a story properly and they’re not being manipulated. It’s being allowed to tell itself so the laughs come out of situation or recognition. They’re not being told to laugh. They let the story happen.

CC: What’s next for you both?

BP: I have a bunch of movies coming out in the fall. I have PHOEBE IN WONDERLAND with Elle Fanning and Felicity Huffamn. There’s SURVEILLANCE, directed by Jennifer Lynch, David’s daughter, and NOBEL SON with Randall and Alan.

CC: NOBEL SON was made before BOTTLE SHOCK right?

AR: Yes but it’s a good way round. To answer your question, I have NOBEL SON in October and HARRY POTTER AND THE GOBLET OF FIRE in November and after that I’m going to direct a play in London.

CC: What’s the play?

AR: It’s called CREDITORS and it’s by Strenburg. BOTTLE SHOCK has been no preparation whatsoever.

CC: Thank you so much gentlemen.

BP: Be good.

AR: My pleasure.

(Special thanks to Falco Ink)