Interview with Robin Hardy, director of The Wicker Man: The Times, April 2006
The tiny Galloway Inn is heaving. A television blares. Ask if they do food and they'll pass you a fag packet to chew on. Robin Hardy enters in a cravat and red corduroy trousers. He's awfully posh; he says 'orf' when he means 'off'. You're not from round here, are you Mister? Actually he was once, for a short time.
Hardy made the south-west of Scotland his base in 1972 when directing The Wicker Man, a film which burns today brighter than ever before, with a hale literary sub-industry in support. He is revisiting Wigtown, Scotland's 'National Book Town', where they form mazes from old books on the town gardens and purchasers are asked to drop coins into an honesty box.
''Wigtown has changed such a lot,'' he says. ''The houses used
to look like they needed a coat of paint. It's quite nice now isn't it?''
Maybe he sees it with the dissecting eye of a director - later, as we walk
along a coastal path, he rhapsodises about the roof of the County Buildings
forming a sandstone triangle over a meadow. Close up, here in the Galloway
Inn, it has that unsettling, vaguely menacing air so wonderfully evoked in
the film. We don't stay long.
It is not a 'nice' place. It is odd. Passing through the landscape, there is a patchwork of loamy estuary scenery, thrown-up pebble-dashed prefab houses, the sunburst yellow of gorse, kids in tracksuits, people staring. And they stare like the extras in The Wicker Man - as if they know who's who and who is what not.
Hardy has chosen Wigtown's spring book festival to launch his
new book, Cowboys for Christ which he also plans to make into a film.
Allan Brown, author of Inside the Wicker Man and a renowned expert,
has dubbed it an 'anagram' of The Wicker Man. Basically, it's the same
story - virgins, heathens, lairds, meddling policemen and a lascivious female.
In short, top quality hokum.
Published simultaneously is The Quest for the Wicker Man, where academics
take a dangerously forensic look at the phenomenon. Typical is the contribution
from the learned professor, Anthony J Harper, who ponders (deep breath…)
'The Wicker Man - Cult film or anti-cult film? Parallels and paradoxes
in the representation of Paganism, Christianity and the Law.'
Interest in the film will peak this winter when the re-make, starring Nicholas Cage, is released. The signs are ominous. It has, according to Hardy, a budget of $40 million, eight executive producers and seven producers, and the action is relocated to Maine in the north-east of the United States. ''It will probably be Hollywood rubbish,'' sighs Allan Brown. Intriguingly, the new film is directed by Neil LaBute, reportedly a lapsed Mormon, which should at least hike up the Christianity v Paganism dynamic.
As a more homespun alternative, Hardy, who has previously concocted a 'play with music' to the life of Winston Churchill, is considering a musical. This may not be as outlandish as it first appears for the original soundtrack is a memorable score. If soil and bedsprings could summon melody, this would be their song; the framing, stage or screen, is surely incidental.
Since the death of the film's writer, Anthony Shaffer in 2001, Hardy, now aged 76, has found himself its ipso facto curator. He is happy in the role. ''The British think of themselves as country people. They like that the film is set in places like a village pub and orchards. They have that sense of revisiting their past,'' he says.
The enduring appeal of the film suggests its appeal is much, much broader. The dead-weight scepticism about the re-make is because the original is so quintessentially British, both in content and in its plucky fight to live and breathe as a piece of work. It was the great underdog of cinema, a runt. ''When we delivered it, the studio bosses were saying, 'What's all this dancing and singing and jokes and sex?','' said Hardy. It was given a low-key release but developed an authentic word-of-mouth catch-fire from, firstly, critics, and then the public. They liked its playfulness and its ambition, precisely because it was too restless to snug-fit a genre. These people were gluing blossom on trees to make mid-winter Scotland seem like May. The Gods, ultimately, smile down on such spirit.
Hardy acknowledges that the DVD market has seen the film burgeon in popularity. It has enabled him to return scenes that were omitted or thought to be lost. For the rest of us, it allows regular access to a film many of us saw as children and regard as the equivalent of an annual visit from our favourite weird cousin. There is also the sheer eroticism. The Carry On films and the Hammer Horror were titillating but silly. Britt Ekland and those lips, Ingrid Pitt lathered up in a bath tub: this was a refined version of a sex-yet-to-be for any 13-year-old - wholesome, sophisticated and undertaken on freshly cut grass, wood smoke in the air.
Finally, and most crucially, the film cannot be severed from
its literary antecedence. It was originally a rough amalgamation of two books.
The plot was lifted from a novel called Ritual, written by the respected
playwright David Pinner, published in 1967, while the rag-bag of mystical
references are largely a homage to James Frazer's definitive study of folklore,
The Golden Bough. Peter Shaffer was himself a top-table writer, having
worked previously with Alfred Hitchcock. He was determined the writing in
The Wicker Man should have a powerful lyrical quality. Only a master
craftsman could conjure a line so clever and painfully dry as that spoken
by the pompous Lord Summerisle as he gazes forlornly at the naked nymphs leaping
over a small fire on the lawn outside his castle:
''The children do enjoy their divinity lessons.''