ROBIN HARDY
INTERVIEW WITH ROBIN HARDY
by Cathi Unsworth
Since its release in 1973, The Wicker Man has had an enduring fascination for audiences, commanding a devotion that most films can only dream of. Its unsettling imagery, haunting soundtrack and uncompromisingly pagan outlook have made it something of a unique and timeless cinematic artefact whose power is sure to last.
As the British Film Institute prepares to rescreen the film in all its lost glory, we present this 1995 interview with the film's director Robin Hardy. By CATHI UNSWORTH.
THE FILM HAS HAD A PRETTY EXTRAORDINARY AFTERLIFE
It is an extraordinary story, I suppose it seems even more extraordinary now to me because I don't know what happens to other films, but I presume that on the whole it isn't as bad as that, or as difficult as that has been. But it's had a happy ending in a way because in spite at all these difficulties it all seems to have gathered it's following in a way that in many films don't.
CHRISTOPHER LEE HAS CALLED THE CURRENT VERSION "A SHADOW OF THE FILM WE ACTUALLY MADE"
Well, I think that's a little extreme, but I understand why he says that. The trouble is that it's passed through so many hands. The ownership of the negative started with British Lion, then it was bought by EXI, by Cannes, and then finally by Lumiere. Well, during all that chain of title, I think people just take on libraries and say: "We'll put this lot out and that lot out, and these are categorised as horror films, so we'll put them out together, these are comedies so we'll put them out together. It's a marketing thing, they don't really think about it. In some ways why should they? I was talking to Lumiere, who own the American rights yesterday, and explaining that the film that is shown in the United States on video and on television is, in effect, a different version to what they've released here in the UK. And they seemed quite unaware of that. But it is only about five minutes I think, max, that's really missing.
I GATHERED IT ORIGINALLY STARTED WITH A LITTLE MORE BACKGROUND ON EDWARD WOODWARD'S CHARACHER SO HE WAS MORE IN PERSPECTIVE
Yes there was at the beginning of the film that's quite correct there was. I'm not quite sure there was as much, although it's useful to have that as the first night, because it was a two days and two nights story. So the first night we're introduced to the strangeness of the island in a much more comprehensive way because we see Christopher, after that strange scene in the pub where they all sing the strange song and tease him, sing a song about Willow.
He then says "Where's my room?" and he grabs his keys and goes upstairs and we see him upstairs. Well that whole night is missing, it was then used as the second night. And that night, when he gets up there, he is disturbed by the fact that something is going on in the courtyard at the back of the pub, which is Christopher introducing a young man, a teenager, to Willow, to in effect the Goddess of Love on the island. So we see her up at her window and Christopher introducing the boy and he says: "This is our offering to you." Then he goes through the bar and all the people start to sing. We don't see what happens inside the room with Willow, but we see this huge tarot card sun on the ceiling, above which is her room, and next to which of course in Howie's room. So he hears all this going on and that puts us, the audience, more fully into being aware of the strangeness of the island when he starts off on his first day.
Then the next morning, he comes out and that scene is in the version that's shown here, and she's scrubbing off the tables, outside and he says: "Which way to the school?" So that's still in the film, but that whole night is cut out and instead they do Willow's dance which is on the second night. This is the ultimate attempt to tempt him, so that if he succumbs to the temptation his is not worthy of being king for a day and being sacrificed. Although, what we don't explain is where the hell they'll get another king for a day if he succumbs! That of course is why the very opening bit is useful because it's made quite clear that he's a bit of a prig in the opening. When he and the local policemen are shutting up the pubs for the night and his chat with the other policeman shows that he's very puritan. So we know that too up front. And we also see him with his fiancee in church but that scene is done as a flashback, that scene in church where he gets the communion, the bread and the wine, the Christian sacrifice which matches the pagan sacrifice at the end. That is in the version that we see. I don't think it's fair to say that the version they put out in this country doesn't work, I think it does work, though it doesn't work quite as well. That would be my judgement on it.
IS IT TRUE THAT ROD STEWART OFFERED TO BUY THE RIGHTS OF THE FILM TO SPARE BRITT EKLAND'S BLUSHES?
I can't believe that. She locks very nice in that dance. That's ridiculous. Britt was very much a free spirit, I don't know how much of one she is now but she certainly was then.
IT’S INTERESTING HOW HOWIE IS SO BLINDED BY HIS FAITH TO WHAT IS AROUND HIM, HE SEEMS TO LOSE HIS POWER AS A DETECTIVE TO INVESTIGATE EVENTS WITH ANY SUBTLETY, BECAUSE HE IS SO ENRAGED BY WHAT HE SEES.
Well yes he's in culture shock isn't he. But I think he does the logical things, and he has the hare, the girl dug up when he finds her grave, he challenges Summerisle, he was convinced the girl was dead for a long time, after all no one seems to know where she is, her sister goes on about her being a hare running in the fields and what is he supposed to believe about that? And so when he finally finds there is just a hare in the grave, I mean he realises that they've just been fooling with him and that makes him angry too. But once he cottons on, by going into the chemists and actually finding evidence that there might actually have been a ritual sacrifice every year with the harvest, he sees the other girls, I think clearly they fix it up for him. It's not surprising he thinks she's still alive and she's going to be sacrificed. How many detectives are faced with an entire population of an island putting on an elaborate play for somebody? But his form of Christianity I think is not uncommon, when I say his form of Christianity I mean his form of religion, you get plenty of fundamentalist Christians or fundamentalist Muslims, or fundamentalist anything else who have that kind of very rigid attitude. And I was just reading about in Iran today and apparently all the Westernised people have to go to little hidden cafes around the hills am Tehran so the girls can actually talk to the boys, and the religious police come and hound them down. But the religious police are mostly old men so they can't run as fast as them! Or they bribe them or something.
But you think at that regime, living in the 20th century today and actually it's a fairly modern country, it's not that hard to imagine what we've seen in America recently. Fundamentalism in America is very extreme, it's certainly far more extreme than anything we get from Howie. Look at all these right wing Christian groups that came out of the woodwork after the Oklahoma bombing: "The government deserves this for being the Antichrist, this is some kind of divine judgement on them". There are five or six different radio stations in every part of the political mid west pouring out stuff you just wouldn't believe. And they believe it. And it you take Howie's form of Christianity outside the island then it isn't really all that extreme. OK he doesn't believe in sex before marriage that isn't such an extreme, given the context of the rest of Scotland, in other ways he's normal enough really.
IT MUST HAVE BEEN VERY INTERESTING RESEARCHING THE PAGAN RELIGION. I GUESS ITS SOURCE IS FROM THE CELTS?
Yes, Celtic religion exactly, from pre-Christian religion in this country. What we thought was rather fascinating was there are so many words, symbols, superstitions that we have today, which come front that period, for instance, half the symbolism of Christmas, and a lot of the symbolism of Easter is pagan. You know the Easter bunny - the Easter hare - which we've got in the film of course. The tree at Christmas, mistletoe, all those things are Drudical, pre-Christian Celtic symbols, which we adopted for Christmas. Again, the days of the week, the months of the year, they're all the names of the old Gods, they're not Christian gods, Monday - Moon day, Thursday - Thor's day, they're all our ancient pantheon of Gods. And all our superstitions, well many of our superstitions, - black cats, knock on wood - we carry all that baggage with us, forgetting where it all comes from.
Interestingly, the Moroscow dance, which is the dance which they do at the end of the film with the hobby horse and the teaser and Punch the king for a day, that in various forms is celebrated all over Europe and in North Africa. In the UK there are a great number every year. One of the most famous ones, which Tony Shaffer and I went to watch is in Faidetow in Devon, and there they have virtually all of that. They have a hobby horse, and the hobby horses skirts are tarred, the girls leave town first and then they're pursued and the whole thing of if the girl’s skirt is brushed with the tar of the hobby horse then she's supposed to get pregnant in the following year. And they don't like people watching it, there's a whole thing going on there, which they want to keep private.
And of course there's the much simpler variations of it, like the Morris Dance which is the six men and they use handkerchiefs but in the North of England it's done with little wooden swords. Barrel burning is something we didn't put in but it's all part of the same thing. Leaping over the flames, which the nuns is Ireland do for some reason! And we see it every day of the week, it's in front of us and it doesn't mean anything, it doesn't have any particular resonance. But if you put it all together in a film like The Wicker Man, it starts to pop out. What it does all mean, and what it meant to a society which we just recreated, to have as entertainment of course, as a kind of intellectual entertainment, like a kind of game. What do all these things remind you of, what is the likely result of they're all coming together at one time, well, probably a blood sacrifice.
LEE'S CHARACTER DOES SEEM AMBIGUOUS, WHEN HE'S TELLING HOWIE HOW THE ISLAND WAS FOUNDED, HE SAYS HIS GRANDFATHER GAVE THEM BACK THEIR RELIGION TO ENCOURAGE THEM OUT OF PRACTICALITY. HOWEVER, HIS FATHER CONTINUED IT OUT OF LOVE. LEE'S SUMMERISLE SEEMS A MIXTURE OF BOTH
Yes I think he is like that and I think you're right in calling him ambiguous. It's the source of his power and his grandfather clearly was rather like a Huxlian figure, of the Victorian era, who believed in these horticultural experiments which would reverse the normal course of agricultural Scotland. But he actually never got as far as changing the actual life of the natives, as it were, to facilitate that. Maybe because he'd never thought of it. The argument that they were already a deeply religious people, which the Scots have been historically as we all know - well religious people can be turned from one religion to another rather more easily than people who are not particularly interested. But I think it's evident that he doesn't really believe in it himself.
Perhaps not all of the time, but this is the thing, do you remember Elmer Gantry, an American movie about an evangelist who makes people believe he can cure them and he has a girl working for him. And the extraordinary thing was that Elmer Gantry was a complete phoney and he was completely taken in by the end of it because the girl did have some kind of psychic power. So you're suddenly faced with the tact that he's built up this phoney thing and it actually did have some reality in it. Well there's a bit of an element of that in Lord Summerisle, at least I've tried to suggest it in the book, His sort of ambiguity rests on the fact that he sometimes convinces himself that what he's doing is real.
YOU CERTAINLY SENSE HIS INTELLECTUAL ENJOYMENT IN BEING THE PUPPET MASTER OF THE ENTIE ISLAND - LEE MUST HAVE ENJOYED PLAYING THE PART
He obviously enjoyed the plot a lot because he says it's one of his favourite roles and he's made more films than almost anyone, his credit list is endless.
I GATHER IT HAD TO BE FILMED IN SEVERAL DIFERENT LOCATIONS AS WELL
Yes, it was about 25 different locations, up and down the West coast of Scotland. A place called Plockton was the principal location, which is just opposite the Isle of Skye, and then down in Ayreshire, the bit that looks across to Northern lsland, where the Logan Gardens are. These are tropical gardens that are washed by the Gulf Stream, so they have the requisite warm air. To protect them from salt rain, which is one of the problems of gardens by the sea, they build great barriers of trees, but inside the garden it is a sub-tropical, Mediterranean sort of garden. That’s where we shot all that stuff, and Culzean Castle in Ayreshire, and one of the old Kennedy castles which was actually Victorian, in Kirkcudbrightshire, belonging to someone called Lord Stair. There's actually a funny story about that, because Lord Stare was married to a lady who is a niece of the present Queen Mother, therefore a first cousin of the Queen, and she looks exactly like the Queen, I mean, it's doppleganger time. And to make it worse she has corgis! And there were these young girls we got from the Scottish ballet to do the dance, because we built a sort of Stonehenge thing, and their mums were all there very anxious that A they shouldn't get too cold and B that they shouldn't look too naked. We were shooting all this on a very, very long lens, about a quarter of a mile away, and I remember seeing these girls, I mean you could hardly hear them because we were working to playback, and they suddenly all upped and ran screaming to the bushes and hid. And we thought Jesus, what’s going on? And suddenly this figure, because she was tiny, in the distance, followed by about six corgis, came into sight, and the poor girls had obviously thought that they'd been confronted by the monarch herself! It was very funny, she was very apologetic afterwards, she said "I had no idea what was going on.
WASN'T THE SCENE WITH THE WICKER MAN ALSO DISTURBED BY A CARLOAD OF AMERICAN TOURISTS?
I don't remember that. I know that when we burnt the Wicker Man there were all sorts of strange messages from ships passing in the straits, because it was the main sea lane between Scotland and Ireland. To see this man almost as high as a building blazing away must have been quite startling from the sea. We should have shot it from the sea as well I suppose. Never mind.
We had three wicker men, we only burned two, the third one went down to Cannes for the festival. They were about 50 to 60 feet high, prefabricated down in England and brought up. The legs and the arms and the trunk were made separately and had to be joined on, and they had to be very strong. We set them in concrete, because they had goats and sheep and all kinds of animals in them, they had to be able to hold these animals when they were rocking about because the animals obviously panicked when they were put on fire. They weren’t in it when it was set on fire, thank god, that was faked, but of course the RSPCA were very concerned and the local villagers were very concerned that we were actually going to burn the animals. Of course it was very time consuming, because we had to keep getting all the animals down, put them all up again, we built a fire in front of them so there was no danger of them actually being hurt.
HOW LONG DID EDWARD WOODWARD STAY INSIDE THE WICKER MAN BEFORE HE WAS WINCHED OUT?
He was there quite a while. We had an escape hatch at the back so that he could be got out of it extremely fast, and we had somebody at the back who could just pull it open and pull him out, and he went down on a kind of pulley attached to his belt. We had to be very careful because when we were shooting and he was in there it was actually burning. There isn't a society for the prevention of cruelty to actors you know!
WHAT IS IT ABOUT THIS FILM DO YOU THINK THAT HAS SUCH A LASTING APPEAL?
I don't know, it's interesting isn’t it? I think one reason is because it's a horror film without any of the normal horror film cliches, I mean I don't actually think of it as a horror film myself, I think of it as a thriller/fantasy, film fantastique, more than a horror film. When Tony Schieffer and I invented the story, we did it on a long weekend in a house I used to have in an island in the Thames in Maidenhead, what we were trying to do was to do a horror story which had none of the cliches of all the classic horror films at the time, the Hammer horror films. I mean we really admired those films, and obviously Christopher was chosen because he was the quintessential star of the genre. It was another way to mislead the audience to have him there. But the cliches of crosses and garlic against the devil were all actually part at the Christian invention against the old religion. So we felt it would be interesting to go back to were all those things came from - which indeed was the old religion - and then put it into a contemporary setting. I think the strangeness at that and at the same time people do actually recognise all the little touches of it as being vaguely connected to their own lives. It's a little hook with the viewer, it makes them think about it afterwards. Films that you are left thinking about afterwards, even it you're thinking of it afterwards because you think it's scary, and people do think it's scary, even though there isn't any blood and virtually no violence at all, it's all in the viewers head - it's intruiging. I think that's why people remember it, and one of the reasons why it has become a cult classic movie.
I THINK IT WORKS VERY WELL AS A THRILLER, THE FIRST TIME YOU SEE IT YOU DON'T REALISE THAI HE IS GOING TO BE THE SACRIFICE, YOU THINK IT'S GOING TO BE THE GIRL, AND THE WICKER MAN UP ON THE CLIFF LOOKS TRULY HORRIFFIC.
I think that is a big shock, and you don't think that once he's caught that it's possible for them to go through with it. The US cavalry isn't going to come and save him! One of the US distributors, or would-be distributors when we were making it said "Look, honey, you've Just got to have it rain at the end. You Just can't do that, you can't actually go through with it. But we did.
