Interview with Robin Hardy

Jonathan Murray

 

The following interview is taken from a question and answer session with Robin Hardy, chaired by Jonathan Murray, at ‘The Wicker Man: Readings, Rituals and Reactions’ conference, 15 July 2003.

Jonathan Murray: I’m particularly interested in the judgement of Michael Deeley, the gentleman who in spring 1973 took over the helm of British Lion, the production company responsible for financing The Wicker Man; he said that The Wicker Man was one of the ten worst films that he’d ever seen. It does make you wonder what the other nine were. I know that he’s disputed it since. Is that – to your knowledge – an accurate quotation?

Robin Hardy: I don’t know. He didn’t say it to me; he said it to Christopher Lee.¹ So I don’t know whether it’s an accurate quotation or not. But I think that’s what he felt. You’ve got to remember that we were hounding him, saying, ‘Why the hell aren’t you distributing this properly?’ Either he was going to say, ‘Well, I’m prepared to spend the company’s money on this in distribution’, or, ‘I think it’s one of the worst films I ever saw, in which case I’m not going to spend the money on distribution.’ And he did much more than that; the film had won the Grand Prix de Film Fantastique at the April 1974 Third International Festival of Fantasy and Science Fiction Films in Paris; the replica model of the Wicker Man had been raised on the Croissette at Cannes during the 1974 Film Festival and caused a huge comment. And he had it pulled down and didn’t show the film.²

Deeley believed that he had to destroy the credibility of the man whose job he was taking, which was Peter Snell. This happens all the time in the film business. Lots of films have been buried because the new incoming Chief Executive wants his own slate, and doesn’t want some resounding success coming from the man he’s actually forced out. That was what British Lion had done; they had forced Peter Snell out. So I think that’s really what that quotation was about.³

It is true that the distribution people charged with selling the film had no idea what it was about: ‘Lots of people dancing, religion, what is this?’ They were, and most distributors are, extremely good people, kind to their children, good to their dogs, but they might just as well be running a motel. It’s just a business to them. You make a comedy, and you can see it’s a comedy, people fall about and laugh, and ideally there’s canned laughter as well, and you can sell it as a comedy. You make a horror film, and there’s got to be blood, there’s got to be spooky music. But one that just has everyone singing, dancing, laughing and having sex? ‘You must be mad: that’s a porno film.’ You can imagine the thought processes behind this. I knew the people concerned and it didn’t surprise me one little bit.

But it was sent to Roger Corman, who was one of the leading B-movie producers in America, and who nurtured some of America’s best directors at the time, and he thought it was terrific and he wanted to distribute it.⁴ But he wasn’t going to put up as much money as a tax shelter group, Beachead Properties, who became the first legal owners of the US rights to The Wicker Man.⁵ In those days in the United States, you could get a 10:1 write-off on your taxes for putting up money for film distribution. Let’s say for the sake of argument you put up $1m for the distribution, you get $10m off your taxes.⁶ It’s a great deal. It doesn’t do much good for the Federal Revenue, I must say, and it didn’t go on for that long afterwards.

But of course legally Beachead were supposed to distribute the film properly, spend money on prints and advertising and do all the normal things. They did none of these things. They showed the film once in San Diego at a drive-in in the middle of the night, and once in Atlanta – I actually saw the reports. So we sued them and I had the guys involved sent to prison. I’m not kidding. They hadn’t just done it to our film, they’d done it to twenty films, and we weren’t the only people who were pushing for them to be sent to ‘Club Fed’, as they used to call it.

So we had to start from scratch and distribute the film ourselves, which is what we did. We raised the money in the States to distribute it.⁷ America was a more fruitful place to distribute the picture at the time. One has to remember that the early seventies in the UK was a time when the average suburbanite had not even been to one film a year. Films had almost disappeared. Television was remarkably good, and all the cinemas had been turned into bingo halls, and the cinema was almost dead.⁸ There was not a whole class of young people – as there is now – who had been through Higher Education, who had seen films, talked about films, talked about media, read books. That was a very thin layer in Britain then. Obviously, it’s changed dramatically since then.

But in the United States, there were five thousand universities, which forty percent of the population were attending, with not much to do except go to movies. It was the perfect place to distribute a movie like this. We just went from city to city, avoiding New York and Los Angeles. Every time we arrived in a city, we rang up all the radio stations and the local newspapers. Every American city has nothing but media, and they all wanted to write a story, and wanted you on the radio that morning, wanted you on television. And so we went. Christopher Lee gave up almost a year of his life to do this. And the numbers kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger in Variety every weekend. Then finally, we really acquired courage and took the film to New York and Los Angeles and did pretty well there too, though we didn’t begin to have the money to compete in that market.

As a result of that, people back in the UK – as so often happens – noticed that this film, which a few aficionados and a lot of critics had liked, was doing major business. By that time it was more than seven years after it was made, and that was in itself remarkable.

JM: I read a contemporary quote from The Wicker Man screenwriter, Tony Shaffer, where he refers to the early seventies film industry in this country – ‘or what’s left of it’, he says.⁹ I can’t think of a less promising time to make as ambitious and, in generic terms, unclassifiable a film as The Wicker Man. Do you ever wonder what would have happened had you been working, say, twenty years earlier, with more sympathetic studios and bigger native audiences, or twenty years later, in the eighties and nineties, when there was an upsurge in British cinema again? Perhaps the film would have been more sympathetically received.

RH: I don’t know. In the fifties and sixties, we still had a big filmgoing audience. There were still three cinema chains; cinema-going was still something people did on Friday and Saturday nights, the culture was still there. By 1970, it was almost dead in the water. So either earlier or later, it would have worked better, yes it would. But the thing to do would have simply been to have opened it in the States and not bothered to have opened it in England. It’s like Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994). If Four Weddings and a Funeral had been opened here, it would have been dead, all those critics saying, ‘People in fancy dress going to upper class weddings, that’s a terrible thing, you can’t have that’; it would have received awful reviews and the film would have been dead in the water here. Once it was a huge success in the United States, it was able to come back here, because we like things that are successful elsewhere, particularly in the US.

JM: I suppose the other thing that interests me about it is that there’s a history of movies being made in Britain specifically for the transatlantic market, and everybody gets – well, the flip side of the coin you talk about, where something is successful in America first – these things that are made for international success, critics get quite excited here, and then they flop abroad. As you say, there were a lot of complimentary responses to The Wicker Man in Britain, but the response in America, it seems to me from reading the reviews, later when it opens there, is more excited and blanket in its praise for the film.¹⁰

RH: Well, I think one has to say that the American audience was much more sophisticated then, and the reviewers were much more sophisticated. There was an appetite for film there. I mean, critics respond to what audiences feel; if you go – as we did – to see films in specific cities with the critics, they responded to the fact that they came out with an audience going, ‘What was that all about?’ So, I think that it was a sort of spontaneous combustion, in a way, from the critics.

JM: How did you feel about the way that the film was marketed? I know that a lot of people here will have done this: in Allan Brown’s book on The Wicker Man, there’s an appendix of contemporary reviews at the back,¹¹ and for people who’ve looked at reviews held in the British Film Institute library, I found myself very curious to see how critics in this country took to the film. When I read all those reviews, one of the first things I wrote for just about all of them was, ‘He gives the plot away’; ‘She gives the plot away.’ I was horrified to find out about promotional posters at the time that actually had the burning wicker man on them. It’s like having a poster for Psycho (1960) with Anthony Perkins in a ladies’ wig.

RH: Well, I told you what the distribution people were like. They would have done that to Psycho, they were that dumb. We had – I hate to say this – very inferior people in the film industry, we really did. No-one wanted to be in the British film industry – it was a loser’s game. People who remained in it were ‘not quite right’. The only reason Michael Deeley and co. wanted to control British Lion was that it had other assets. They then took it public, and they made a lot of money, selling it almost immediately to EMI. They were pretty smart. They made some money out of films – no-one else was doing so – simply by using the corporate means they had. What actually happened was they made The Italian Job (1969) – which was a successful film – with Michael Caine and Noel Coward. They put the money they got from that into a building – it was one of those times that the property market was going up and down – and they sold the building at the top of the market. They bought the majority of the shares in British Lion at that time, and they got rid of The Wicker Man and fired Peter Snell. They had Don’t Look Now (1973) – which was a successful film – and something called The Red Pony (1973), which was a fairly successful young person’s film, and they sold the whole thing almost immediately to EMI, and got what financiers call ‘a good exit’. They cashed in, and they did all that in a couple of years.¹² That’s what really happened, and what the film was about, what any film was about didn’t seem really relevant at all.

JM: This sounds like a good point to move away from these depressing, Machiavellian manoeuvrings and ask if people have questions about the movie that they would like to put to Robin.

Audience member: I’d like to ask you to tell us a little bit more about the painstaking process you went through; your part in restoring what has eventually earned the name of the ‘director’s cut’ version of the film; your opinion of the two shorter versions that have certainly been extant in this country; and how important it was to you, personally, as a fulfilment of your vision for the project, to see that longer version put out.¹³

RH: Well, when I went to try and get the film into distribution in the United States, I found this bunch of young people who wanted to do it, because they’d read the Cinefantastique article.¹⁴ I told them what the longer version was like, and they said, ‘We must raise some money and must recreate that, because there’s no point in distributing the shorter version if you say the longer version is so much better.’ They believed me.

So we then went to Mike Deeley, and we said, ‘Can we please have the negative?’ And we actually had a right to have the negative, because we were in the process of suing people for not distributing the thing properly, which could have come back to him, because he’d done nothing to see that it was done, and he simply said, ‘There is no negative, it’s been lost.’ So, that was a blow. But one of the students, who has since become a very successful distributor himself,¹⁵ contacted Roger Corman, who had received a copy of the film. He was the first person Peter Snell had sent it to. We asked Corman if he had any of the negative material, and he said, ‘No, I haven’t. But we might have a print. Would you like a print?’ And we said ‘Yes’, so we got a print which had only ever been screened once.¹⁶

So that in effect became a negative. Of course, we had to take it five or six generations. These days, it would have been easy to do: take it to video and back again, no problem. But it was very painstaking at the time and quite expensive. We had to do it frame by frame; it was called the ‘liquid gate’ process. The thing had to be put through a machine called an Oxbury, and the loss of quality by the time we had been through those generations to get back to a negative is quite evident in the director’s cut. You can see it’s much more grainy. However, it still tells the story. So that was the film that we then went round the United States with and distributed.

Audience member: Can you cast any light on the story that the music to Carmina Burana¹⁷ was going to be used as the background music before the film’s composer, Paul Giovanni, got involved?

RH: No, I can’t. I can’t have necessarily heard of everything. I suppose it’s possible that someone talked to Peter Snell about that. But Paul Giovanni was going to be the composer from the start, as far as I was concerned. I was introduced to him by Peter Shaffer,¹⁸ and Peter had a lot to do with the film, because Tony Shaffer was about to write Hitchcock’s last film, Frenzy (1972)¹⁹ and so he was only actually on location for about one week. And so Peter stayed – you must remember, these guys are not only very good writers, they’re identical twins – and so he stayed behind and he was Tony’s alter ego. Whenever I had a problem with the script, I went to him and I said, ‘I think we should alter this line’, and he said ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ or ‘We could do this.’ He was my writer, Peter was. He didn’t write the original script, Tony did, but that is actually how it happened. And, of course, Peter Shaffer and Paul Giovanni were very close friends, and they were working together on the music; by that I mean that Paul was totally in charge of the music, but Peter was there to help with the lyrics.²⁰

Audience member: You’ve explained why you chose Scotland for your location. Why specifically did you choose Galloway? Did you consider other possibilities?

RH: Well, I was looking for an island. And as you can imagine, it’s very, very difficult to film an island. I mean, you’ve got to fly up, way, way up, to see the island in one piece. And there doesn’t happen to be a Summerisle – well, there is a Summerisle, there are several Summer Isles, up in the north part of the Inner Hebrides, actually – but they’re quite tiny islands and I don’t think anyone lives on them to speak of. Curiously enough, and one of the many curiosities, is that I understand they grow apples there. And so, we decided to use a series of locations which were fitted together to create the island.

Fitting together the architecture was quite difficult. So I chose locations, first in Plockton²¹ as the kind of port part of the town, and then down in Galloway, to complete the town, to get the other parts of it that Plockton simply didn’t have. Plockton is tiny, there’s only about two streets. There was no castle up there that was appropriate. We used Culzean Castle and the Kennedy Castle, the name of which I always forget [Lochinch castle]. And I mixed those two, so you arrive outside Culzean, you go into Lochinch, you go into the next room in Culzean; it’s a mixture.²²

Audience member: Why did you put the bogus thanks to Lord Summerisle at the beginning when within seconds it become clear that the film is not going to be a pseudo-documentary?

RH: Well, I don’t know that it’s clear in a second; we obviously didn’t think so at the time. I’m not sure that it’s one of the best decisions we made, but it seemed like a good idea at the time.

JM: The first of many games?

RH: Well, yes, it is. It’s part of the general games-playing.

Audience member: Could you say something more about your use of sources, the intellectual sources for the film? You mentioned The Golden Bough²³ sitting by your bedside; you mentioned Cecil Sharp’s books and song collections.²⁴ Is there a way in which you and Anthony Shaffer, self-consciously or deliberately, explicitly worked in elements from just these, or did you bring other stuff in from popular media, in particular, popular representations of witchcraft?

RH: We were looking for a story that would work as the antithesis of the ‘Hammer film’.²⁵ There are only one or two plots in the whole of the Hammer canon. That’s going to be my argument when we make the next film²⁶ and are accused of making another Wicker Man.

I suppose the other intellectual sources come from the whole background of one’s reading, from one’s life, really. As I explained, here were two people who could just as easily have been married, we talked and talked everyday. We worked everyday and we had common terms of reference. As I’ve explained, Tony wrote detective stories with Peter early in his youth, so he was very much into sending up the English detective story in all its class consciousness. For instance, Sleuth²⁷ shows a certain love for Agatha Christie’s assumptions and attitudes.

I was always very interested in religion and so was Tony. His twin, Peter, wrote one of the great Christian/Pagan plays of the twentieth century, The Royal Hunt of the Sun.²⁸ I think it’s one of the most brilliant things Peter ever wrote. We were very much into what Peter had written, what Peter had done. Peter was always on the horizon, producing one fantastic play every three years.

Audience member: I hesitate to ask this, because the film is so much of its own kind and is so innovative, but when you were talking about the suspense and the detective story, I was thinking about some of your casting and just wondered if we have something like the ‘Hitchcock blondes’ manipulating the man who thinks he’s in authority and thinks he knows the narrative when he doesn’t; he’s being deceived.

RH: I don’t think we thought about it in the Hitchcock tradition, although it’s true that Tony was about to work with Hitchcock. Tippi Hedren and all those ladies. . . Perhaps we naturally thought of blondes as manipulative, I don’t know.

Audience member: I suppose the other thing is that Hitchcock loved bringing menace to the small town, like in Shadow of a Doubt (1943). You also have a small community full of menace. It suddenly struck me: you could play an intertextual game.

RH: Well, yes, the thing is, as you suggest, it’s like Chinese Boxes, inside each Chinese Box, there’s another Chinese Box inside another Chinese Box, and that actually is part of the whole ‘game’ thing.

Audience member: Can I just ask: do you feel that it is for the audience to decide what side they are on morally, that you and Anthony Shaffer weren’t going to make any decisions for them?

RH: I suppose you’re right, in that we feel the audience should make their decision. In other words, it would have been a work of propaganda if we’d made a film which said, ‘These are bad people doing this nasty thing to this Christian’, or vice versa. That doesn’t mean to say that we didn’t have a moral point of view personally. Personally, I’m absolutely against burning policemen.

Audience member: I wondered if it was meant to be a Faustian pact, whereby the Summerislanders had all this joy and happiness but they had this terrible secret with which they paid for it.

RH: When I wrote the book based on Tony’s screenplay and our original discussions about the story,²⁹ it occurred to me: ‘What might go on after the burning of the Man?’ To see what happened in the aftermath. . . But on the whole I don’t think that’s a very good idea. It’s much more interesting to do a variation on the theme where you see other possibilities on the theme. And that is what I hope to do in May Day [Cowboys for Christ].

JM: Would it be too forward to ask if you could tell us a little bit more about your current project?

RH: Well, May Day could even be called American Innocents, which I happen to think is a very pertinent subject at the moment. American innocents may bring the world to ruin, in my view. In this particular case, it’s a bit of a parable: two young Americans who are sent – rather like Mormons are, or Seventh Day Adventists – to proselytise door-to-door. They find themselves in – yes, you guessed it, Scotland – and meet Christopher Lee. . .

JM: But the great thing is, they’ll have been to university, have therefore seen The Wicker Man, and will be in some way prepared. . .

RH: No, they haven’t seen The Wicker Man, I don’t think. They’re from the Bible Belt; one is a sort of gospel singer and the other is a nice kind of cowboy figure, and they’re both quite sympathique. But they’re doomed.

Audience member: Have you already written the book of May Day?

RH: ‘Yes’ is the answer to that. And the screenplay is complete; I’ve been through about five versions of the screenplay. Once again, as with The Wicker Man, distributors say, ‘What’s all this dancing and singing and jokes and sex? What is this? Just tell us how we’re supposed to distribute this thing!’ And fortunately, some people are prepared to do just that.

What comforts me is that actors absolutely love it, and this is one of the strange things; you get actors saying, ‘My God! I want to play that part’, even if it’s a small part. Then you know you must have got something right, if they want to play the parts. But distributors think in terms of niches. As I said, it’s just an accident that they’re not selling rooms in a motel, or they’re not selling light bulbs. That’s where their mindset is. It’s not difficult to write a film that they’ll love; try and write it as much like something that has already worked. Please don’t do anything original.

Audience member: This is a somewhat sensitive issue, and I think it would be nice for you to set the record straight, if you felt willing to talk about it. For such a collaborative process between you and Tony Shaffer as The Wicker Man represented, various journalistic accounts have subsequently talked about a falling out between you, or a parting of the ways. Sadly, Tony Shaffer is no longer with us,³⁰ but I wondered if you wanted to comment at all on that, in the light of the truth.

RH: In the light of the truth. . . well, I think the answer to that is, of course, many more things go on in peoples’ lives other than their work. And those other things that go on can divide people, and they can have to do with all sorts of different things that happen in our lives. In this case, I could write a real drama about that, but I’m not going to.

JM: On the other hand, your relationship with Christopher Lee must be a good one. I was amazed to find out just how much time both he and you took to promote the movie in America. It’s almost like an act of love.

RH: Well, it’s like this with the new film: he calls me every other day, whether he’s in New Zealand or wherever. Christopher is one of my favourite people, and he’s very funny and a wonderful companion. The secret of his success and why he has made more films than any other living actor, I believe, is his extraordinary ‘screen presence’. Try looking at another actor when Christopher is on the screen. That and his wonderful voice – which he can use to great effect in half a dozen languages.

Audience member: Do you have any ideas as to why The Wicker Man has been so well received in France?

RH: Well, I think it’s been well received all over. Just last year, we went to two film festivals in Italy, which has a similar taste in movies, and the film was honoured with prizes and all sorts of things. In France, I think they recognised it as a film fantastique,³¹ which is a genre which is very much their own. I think that the surprise of having Anglo-Saxons produce something like that was a shock, but a nice shock.

JM: You talk about the corporate mindset of distributors and this idea of churning things off assembly line-style. How do you feel about the prospect of a Wicker Man re-make?³² Have you been consulted?

RH: I haven’t been consulted at all. As I described, Deeley sold British Lion to EMI, then something like fourteen companies later, Lion was sold to Canon; finally it came down to a French company called Lumiere, which was bought by GTC, which was then part of Canal+. Canal+ is part of Vivendi. Vivendi also owns – at least they did last week, I don’t know whether they do this week – Universal. So the rights to The Wicker Man were sold within the company because what’s-his-name wanted to play Howie.

JM: Nicolas Cage?

RH: Yes. Whether they will ever do it, these things are bought all the time, for actors, stars say, ‘I’d quite like to do this’, but they already have a slate of three films to do, and the studio say, ‘Oh sure’, because they want to keep stars happy, so they pay out a million dollars to buy the thing, and pay Canal+. That’s what happened.

Personally, I think it’s a very difficult film to re-make. It’s got a poisoned pill in it, almost. I wouldn’t want to try and re-make it, and I’m not against re-makes – I think some re-makes are terrific and well worth seeing.

JM: Could you say something briefly about how Edward Woodward was cast, because I think Woodward was fantastic, and you regret that there weren’t more quality movies coming out of Britain at the time, so you could see him in more.

RH: Well, Woodward wasn’t our first choice. I’d been living in America; half the time I was away filming other things, and I had never seen Callan, which was a big television hit in England.³³ I’d never seen it, never seen his work. We tried Michael York for the part of Howie. We also tried David Hemmings and he wanted to do it, but he was then doing something else. So someone showed me some of the Callan stuff and I thought Woodward was terrific, and I thought he would be very good.³⁴ He meant nothing in the United States at the time (although, of course, he did later)³⁵ but he was a good name for the UK and so he did it. And I’m glad he did, he was wonderful.

JM: It would have been very different with Michael York. . .

RH: You’d have played up innocence in the character of Michael York, more than that rectitude in Woodward. It could have worked with Michael York. I think Michael made a great mistake by not doing it, at the moment when his career really needed something which would have been special. But he was married to a lady who kind of saw him as a matinee idol, and she didn’t like how he was treated in the script, didn’t like his being burnt at the end, which I can understand.

JM: It only remains for me to thank you for your participation. We’ve thoroughly enjoyed it, and more specifically, Robin, I think it’s great that you’ve come. . .

RH: Well, I’ve enjoyed it, too.

JM: May I say that we’ve appreciated both your film and your presence today.

RH: Thank you.

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Byron, S., ‘Something Wicker This Way Comes’, Film Comment 13.6, Nov/Dec 1977, pp. 29-31.

_____, ‘Back Talk’, Film Comment 14.2, Mar/Apr (1978), p. 78.

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¹ Deeley’s words, as recounted by Christopher Lee in his autobiography Tall, Dark and Gruesome (1977; reprinted 1997 and 1998), were: ‘It’s one of the ten worst films I’ve seen.’ The relevant extract from Lee’s book is reproduced as an appendix in Brown, Inside ‘The Wicker Man’, pp. 202-04. However, while Brown’s text is easily the most substantial overview of archival and original interview source material relevant to The Wicker Man, readers should be aware that it has attracted some censure as regards its occasional factual inaccuracies and a perceived lack of analytical rigour: see Petley, ‘Review: Inside The Wicker Man’.

² See Brown, Inside ‘The Wicker Man’, pp. 105-06, pp. 118-19.

³ See Brown, Inside ‘The Wicker Man’, pp. 103-04. Bartholomew, ‘The Wicker Man’, pp. 38-40 details the boardroom machinations at British Lion that formed the uneasy backdrop for the film’s botched UK theatrical release.

⁴ See Brown, Inside ‘The Wicker Man’, pp. 106-08; Bartholomew, ‘The Wicker Man’, p. 42.

⁵ See Brown, Inside ‘The Wicker Man’, pp. 127-28.

⁶ In other words: a legal loophole in US fiscal laws meant that an investment in film distribution allowed the concerned parties exemption on a portion of their taxable income, to an amount potentially larger than the original sum committed to distribute the film in question.

⁷ For the quixotic history of The Wicker Man’s US distribution, see Brown, Inside ‘The Wicker Man’, pp. 127-47; Dobuler, ‘Wicker Man gets proper release’; Byron, ‘Something Wicker This Way Comes; Byron, ‘Back Talk’.

⁸ Substantial critical accounts of the 1970s, commonly asserted to be – as Hardy argues here – an industrial and creative nadir for British cinema, remain comparatively few: for general contextual background on British film culture at the time of The Wicker Man, see Walker, National Heroes; Walker, The Once and Future Film.

⁹ The actual quotation, ‘The film business, or what there is left of it in England – it scarcely exists – is run by people who like to play safe’, is from Bartholomew, ‘The Wicker Man’, p. 16.

¹⁰ For the UK, see McGillivary, ‘Review: The Wicker Man’; Andrews, ‘Review: The Wicker Man’; for the US, see Safran, ‘Movie Review: The Wicker Man’.

¹¹ Brown, Inside ‘The Wicker Man’, pp. 205-16.

¹² See Brown, Inside ‘The Wicker Man’, p. 104.

¹³ There are currently three extant versions of The Wicker Man in circulation: different final cuts of 84, 96 and 102 minutes duration (the last of which is the ‘director’s cut’ referred to by the questioner above). For further details, see Brown, Inside ‘The Wicker Man’, pp. ix-xx; Kermode, ‘A very nasty piece of work’. An April 2002 two-disc DVD release of the film by Warner Home Video contains both the shortest and longest cuts, along with a wide range of other related footage.

¹⁴ Hardy is referring here to Bartholomew, ‘The Wicker Man’.

¹⁵ Hardy here appears to be referring to Ron Weinberg, vice-president of Abraxas Films.

¹⁶ See Brown, Inside ‘The Wicker Man’, pp. 133-35; Bartholomew, ‘The Wicker Man’, p. 46; Byron, ‘Something Wicker This Way Comes’, pp. 30-31; Catterall and Wells, ‘Three great horror movies were made in 1973’.

¹⁷ The Carmina Burana referred to here is the (in)famous 1937 work of German composer Carl Orff (1895-1982), a musical adaptation of material from the identically-named manuscript collection of c. early 13th century Germanic poetry and song, largely comprised of satirical criticism of the contemporary Catholic Church. For further detail, see Werner, Carl Orff; Jones, The Carmina Burana.

¹⁸ Anthony Shaffer’s twin brother Peter (1926-) is himself an acclaimed playwright; many of his theatrical works have subsequently been adapted for the cinema screen, including Equus (1973 play, 1977 film) and Amadeus (1979 play, 1984 film).

¹⁹ See Shaffer, ‘The Wicker Man and others’.

²⁰ Giovanni’s creative contribution to The Wicker Man, with accompanying commentary from the composer himself, is detailed extensively in Bartholomew, ‘The Wicker Man’, pp. 34-36. A restored stereo version of Giovanni’s original score for the film was eventually released on compact disc by Silva Screen in September 2002 (FILMCD330); for further details, see Collis, ‘Up in smoke’. For critical response to this release, see Anon, ‘Review: The Wicker Man’, in Music From The Movies; Anon, ‘Review: The Wicker Man’, in Film Score Monthly.

²¹ Plockton is a small coastal village on the north western seaboard of Scotland.

²² The different locations in south west Scotland utilised during The Wicker Man shoot are discussed in Brown, Inside ‘The Wicker Man’, pp. 31-37; see also Bartholomew, ‘The Wicker Man’, pp. 16-17.

²³ Within this volume contributors including Harper, Higginbottom, Koven and Sermon note the importance of Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough as a source of material for the creators of The Wicker Man. For additional information, see Ackerman and Frazer, J. G. Frazer and Hardy’s comments in Bartholomew, ‘The Wicker Man’, pp. 10-11.

²⁴ Key publications by the folk song collector Cecil Sharp (1854-1921) include English Folk-Song: Some conclusions (1907 and subsequent eds.) and The Morris Book: A history of Morris dancing (1907 and subsequent eds.). See Karpeles, Cecil Sharp; Harker, Fakesong.

²⁵ Hardy here refers to the studio whose prolific feature output between The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) and To the Devil a Daughter (1976) became, and to a significant extent still remains, synonymous with the idea of a distinctively ‘British’ or, perhaps more properly, ‘English’ horror cinema. For further details, see Hutchings, Hammer and Beyond; Meikle, A History of Horrors; Chibnall and Petley, British Horror Cinema. Anthony Shaffer’s marked contemporary hostility to the classification of The Wicker Man as a ‘horror film’, and even worse, an identifiably British horror film, can be gauged from his comments contained in Bartholomew, ‘The Wicker Man’, p. 14.

²⁶ At the time of speaking in July 2003, Hardy was in the process of assembling production finance for a new feature project with the provisional title May Day. It is now to called Cowboys for Christ, and is due to start filming in March 2006. For further details, see The Internet Movie Database, ‘Cowboys for Christ’; Bing, ‘Inside Move: Wicker pair scotches notion of pic as remake’.

²⁷ Shaffer’s 1970 play, later adapted as a film starring Laurence Olivier and Michael Caine – Sleuth (1972).

²⁸ Originally produced on stage in 1964, Shaffer’s play was adapted as a film starring Christopher Plummer and Robert Shaw – The Royal Hunt of the Sun (1969).

²⁹ The novelisation of The Wicker Man, co-authored by Hardy and Shaffer, was first published by in the US by Crown in 1978 and most recently reprinted in the UK by Pan in 2000.

³⁰ Shaffer died in 2001; see Brown, Inside ‘The Wicker Man’, pp. 59-60 for a brief discussion of the estrangement between Hardy and Shaffer.

³¹ ‘Fantastique’, in the sense that Hardy uses the term here, refers to a French literary and film generic classification designating a loose narrative mode that variously incorporates elements of science fiction, fantasy and horror, and that juxtaposes the real with the supernatural. While not exclusively – or even predominantly – French, the film fantastique has, as Hardy notes, a particularly strong popular association with the cinema of that country. For further details, see Donald, Fantasy and the Cinema; Powrie and Reader, French Cinema, pp. 1-53.

³² International film trade journal Variety carried a number of articles in spring 2002 detailing plans for an American studio remake of The Wicker Man, starring Nicolas Cage and directed by Neil La Bute, writer/director of In The Company of Men (1997) and Your Friends and Neighbors (1998). This proposed project has never yet come to fruition. See Bing, ‘Wicker Horror War Erupts’; Bing, ‘Inside Move: Whither Wicker?’

³³ Callan (1967-72) was an immensely successful thriller series broadcast on British commercial television network ITV, with Woodward playing the eponymous central character, a government assassin. A spin-off feature film – Callan (1974) – was produced the year after The Wicker Man.

³⁴ Hardy comments further on the reasoning behind the eventual casting of Howie in Brown, Inside ‘The Wicker Man’, p. 40.

³⁵ Hardy here refers to Woodward’s remarkable transatlantic success in the role of Robert McCall, central character of The Equalizer (1985-89), an American crime series featuring the exploits of a former spy turned benign vigilante in New York City.