Wicker Man – Interview 1 of 2

Staci Layne Wilson / Horror.com: The Wicker Man is a cult classic but maybe not everybody knows about the movie. You guys both love it, so what did you bring from the original to the remake?

Nic: Well, I'll start with my friend who is no longer with us, Johnny Ramone was a passionate horror buff and he showed me the movie. And it left me with a profound feeling that lasted for several weeks. I've never seen a movie end like that before. So I thought well how can you recreate this and contemporize it? Reintroduce it to people? I knew that I didn't want to repeat everything from the original, we had to reinvent it on some level. Neil and I are both fans of the original. He came in to meet on and discuss an idea he had to bring some life into it. I'll let him discuss that.

Neil: I certainly came to it you know as a younger person I came to it as just a viewer and just loved it because it was so singular. It was an experience unlike any I'd had, even as many horror films as I'd gone to. It had it's own unique sensibility and it's own completely unique, so that I admired in the original. That's something that we tried to keep here is keep that for the person who comes to it they go "Wow that is unlike anything I've ever seen. That's just a world not repeating images that I've seen before." Very few of the things that you see in this one were taken from the original. The spirit is there but we tried to create our own little society.

But I came into it knowing both that I had some idea about how I wanted to re-envision that story but also the chance that I get to work with the kind of people that I did. That Nic was involved both as an actor and as a producer. I had two experiences before that working with actors as producers and they were both good because I find that those situations the actor is able to dictate a lot for us in terms of how much time this is given over to acting, how much time we get to spend really creating in the root of this. He said this a couple of times today and what really makes a film successful in this genre, in any genre, but in this genre people don't often think of it is how good the actor is. When you go on the journey through this man's eyes, he's in virtually every scene of the movie, you have to be invested and you have to believe every moment. Then the horror comes from watching somebody that you both like and begin to trust as they're becoming the victims of what's around them.

Nic: If you look at any of the great horror films in history what separates them from all the others is the believability of the performers. Ellen Burstyn who comes back with The Wicker Man made The Exorcist work by virtue of how believable she was in that film. She made it real for us.

Neil: Same with Rosemary's Baby or the Repulsion, those kinds of movies. You invest in a central figure and feel the same kind of fright they feel but feel bad for them as well that they're going through this. That's hugely important to me as well the people who are around him on this island community, all those actors are really of a certain quality and able to unnerve you more than just ...you know, we're not just banging pots in the dark. It's people who actually kind of chill you in the middle of the day. When Ellen Burstyn, when you finally get to see Summersisle and she just smiles at him and says something about it's too bad the bees didn't kill you, and says that without batting an eye, that's unnerving.

Nic: We want to scare you on the deepest level, really spooky at the core, the ambience of the film. We want you to think about the movie three weeks after you've it, lose sleep over it. We're not going for the cheap gag here.

Q: I shouldn't have probably loved this, but I did kind of love the part where you were kind of kicking and hitting women like Ike Turner on a bender [laughter from Neil] ...

Nic: [not going with the joke] It was at that point in the movie where everything starts to go downhill. It's pretty murderous from then on. I think Edward he's really trying to stay alive, he's trying to find a young girl who's missing and he's running out of time and it's about survival. It's not about boy meets girl in any way. These people want to kill him so he has to do what he can to save this little girl in time.

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