He played Hans Gruber, the ruthless terrorist, to Bruce Willis' protagonist in Die Hard; starred as the equally nefarious Sheriff of Nottingham, foe to Kevin Costner in Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves; and appeared as the shy and sensitive Col. Brandon opposite Emma Thompson in Sense and Sensibility.

Now Rickman has reteamed with Thompson for The Winter Guest and has expanded his craft even further by moving behind the camera and making his directorial debut.

Quiet and introspective, The Winter Guest, which opens December 25, examines the strained relationship between a recently widowed Scottish woman (Thompson) and her mother (played by Thompson's real-life mother Phyllida Law).

Mother played part on stage

"Emma didn't do the play, while Phyllida played the mother in it; but whenever the film version came up, it was sort of automatically assumed that Emma would do it, too," he explains.

"Of course, on an obvious level, she helped finance the project, but it's also a great part for her, as well as being a great gift to her mother, as she helped make it possible for a really wonderful performance to be recorded."

Ask the director if there was any sense of competition between his two stars and he laughs. "No, fortunately they get on really well and you actually forget that they're mother and daughter. You just think, 'Here are these two noisy individuals who will not shut up!' You can't keep them quiet. You'd have to hit them over the head."

Why did Rickman choose The Winter Guest as his first directorial effort?

"I'd commissioned it in the theater, and so it was like I was glued to it," he says. "It wasn't a conscious choice, and I certainly didn't think it would be a movie. But then forces combined, and it seemed like a good idea. I definitely wasn't going to let anyone else muck about with it."

Sink or swim

"We shot the whole movie on location in Scotland and had to build the interior in a grain store, so we didn't do anything in the safety of a studio, which proved to be a real problem," he admits. "On top of that, two-thirds of the film (takes place) outside, and most of those scenes are set on a beach with a frozen sea."

In addition, the entire story takes place in just four hours, which means, the director explains, "You can't have hundreds of different sky conditions. And it was shot in October, November and December of last year, so we only had good light from 9 a.m. until 3 p.m., and none of the snow and ice that is such a (substantial) part of the film's background."

Fortunately for Rickman and his team, modern technology in the form of high-end digital visual effects came to the rescue. "I couldn't have done the film without computer graphics," says the director, who claims he knew "absolutely nothing" about the technology before he started and now knows "almost nothing."

"It was a bit like jumping in the deep end on your first film, but I believed in the script by playwright Sharman Macdonald, and it was about something that really mattered to me," he said. "If you're going to be driven by anything, it might as well be passion or belief in what you're doing. And I suppose I saw it as a challenge -- why not take it on?"

Working closely, Rickman and effects supervisor-producer Steve Rundell created more than 75 digital shots for the film.

"All the ice was created digitally. We had some clear blue skies that had to be digitally altered to match the rest, sea gulls were added digitally, and we even extended the natural mist at the end," reports Rickman. "There was one scene where we removed a figure, so it was partly cosmetic, partly incredibly creative -- and completely crucial to the look.

Reliance on special effects

"And I couldn't do the film without knowing that that whole side of it was going to be taken care of. It was either that or go to Iceland, and then it's too cold and you won't get the insurance to put your actors on the ice, and the architecture doesn't match. And we wouldn't have had the budget."

Rickman scouted locations in Scotland "by just driving around everywhere until we found what we wanted. Everyone said we were mad trying to shoot there at that time of year, and I don't know how we ever got insurance or finance, but we did."

The Winter Guest was shot on a $6 million budget.

"We had about two months of preproduction when the art department got set up and the sets were designed and we put the crew together," he reports. "I knew from the very start we'd have to use a lot of effects shots, as the art department could give me maybe 100 yards of snow and ice -- but I knew I needed a horizon, and it had to look like infinity."

Rickman: Restraints spurred creativity

Did such technical restraints limit Rickman's artistic vision? "Not at all," the director says, "because I think that true creativity is also linked to discipline. Even if it's just a budget nailing you down, it helps creativity.

"It was a great experience, and sometimes it was just awful," sums up Rickman, "but I imagine that's true of any film. You can't predict what it's going to be like, but I'm very proud of the results. We even finished on time and on budget. It was a scramble, but we did it."

Is Rickman eager to repeat the experience of directing?