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 pagan outlook have made it a cult classic (see FT381:40-41). As the restored film has been enjoying screenings across the UK and is set for a gorgeous 50th anniversary collector’s edition rerelease in September, we present this previously unpublished interview in which Cathi Unsworth sat down with the film’s director, the late Robin Hardy, to talk about the film.
The Wicker Man 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 or as difficult as this has been. But it’s had a happy ending in a way, because in spite of all these difficulties it seems to have gathered its following in a way that many films don’t.
Christopher Lee called the theatrical 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, with 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 IYes, at the beginning of the film–that’s quite correct. I’m not 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.
