Alan Rickman creates ‘A Little Chaos’ as the Sun King

Surprisingly tall, with features softened by age, a calm, understated demeanor and that smooth, English-accented baritone for which he is famous, the award-winning 69-year-old actor is kingly in real life as well as onscreen. Known for his ability to convincingly play heroes and villains — or a combination of the two, as he did as Severus Snape in the eight “Harry Potter” films — Rickman brings to one of history’s most colorful monarchs a humanizing sensibility. Set in France in 1662, and depicting the relationship that unfolds between the Garden of Versailles’ builders — the real-life (though fictionalized) André le Nôtre (Matthias Schoenaerts) and the fictional Sabine De Barra (Kate Winslet) — “A Little Chaos” serves as a professional reunion for Rickman and Winslet, who last worked together in 1995’s adaptation of Jane Austen’s “Sense and Sensibility.” Winslet’s De Barra is a strong, professional female character who forms an unlikely friendship with the king, a situation that, Rickman stresses, could not have happened in an era when women were treated as “decorative objects.” “It doesn’t really feel like a period drama to me,” Rickman said, noting that the social issues the film tackles are still relevant. What follows is “maybe one of the most honest conversations of (the king’s) life,” Rickman said at a June 16 director’s talk at the Film Society of Lincoln Center. “It makes you very humble, really, a scene like that, because it’s so well-written and you realize that all actors are at the mercy and the service of the writer,” Rickman said. [...] it takes care of itself because it’s a very piquant situation between the two of them — neither of them has ever had a conversation like that before under those circumstances. “You have to wait for a film to assert itself, I think, and that doesn’t really happen until the editing room,” he said. In addition to technical challenges — such as the intrusion of airplane traffic over the 17th century set — and the artistic particularities of film, there was also, aptly, the ever-present element of chaos.