Some Reviews At Amazon For My E-Book, The Wicker Man: Conversations

In my e-book, The Wicker Man: Conversations with Robin Hardy, Anthony Shaffer & Edward Woodward, the creators and star of The Wicker Man talk candidly about the ideas behind the 1973 film, its production, and how it survived attempts to bury it,  to go on to become one of the greatest cult British films of all time. The book includes an appreciation by Eli Roth.

Buy it here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Wicker-Man-Conversations-Anthony-Woodward-ebook/dp/B008COOH2S

Below are some reviewss posted by readers at Amazon. 

 

Robin Hardy (2 October 1929 – 1 July 2016)

Robin Hardy, director of the classic British thriller The Wicker Man, has died at the age of 86.   

Read my interviews with Hardy, the films writer Anthony Shaffer and star Edward Woodward here:

 https://www.amazon.co.uk/Wicker-Man-Conversations-Anthony-Woodward-ebook/dp/B008COOH2S

Reviews of The Wicker Man: Conversations With Robin Hardy, Anthony Shaffer & Edward Woodward

Reviews for my ebook about the making of the classic British horror film, The Wicker Man, in the words of its director, writer and star.

 

Buy a copy here: http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Wicker-Man-Conversations-Woodward-ebook/dp/B008COOH2S

5.0 out of 5 stars The Wicker Man from Another Angle 29 Mar 2014

By G. Turnbull

Format:Kindle Edition|Verified Purchase

Great to read something new about a film when so much has already been written. Very frank interviews with the principals.

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4.0 out of 5 stars Wicker Man: Conversations. - Reviewed. 6 July 2013

By John Mosby

Format:Kindle Edition

Impact Magazine review of The Wicker Man: Conversations:

The Wicker Man remains one of British cinema's seminal horror outings. Not for this legendary British Lion production, the camper vampiric nature of the more stereotypical output from more familiar counterpoint Hammer, though there's certainly a dark and surreal undercurrent to the tale of mystery, suspense and fundamental clash of religions. It may be a film of its time (especially taking into consideration the ill-advised, much-mocked remake starring Nic Cage several decades later) but with the drama behind the camera being almost equal to that in front of it and much controversy that followed its post-production, there's no denying it still holds an intriguing place in the hearts of many film critics and horror enthusiasts.

Stephen Applebaum's examination of the film doesn't so much set out to unravel the many contradictions, controversies and legends that surround the film, as simply go to some of the key movers and shakers and ask them for their version and opinions. He collects together past interviews he has done and brings them together in one place, printed in full for the first time then leaves the reader to decide on the individual and collected opinions themselves. Though a fuller, longer and more nuanced book might ultimately be more satisfying for the die-hard Wicker enthusiast, the author's work allows key insights into what the key participants were thinking and reasoning during production and such recollections are always interesting. Director Robin Hardy, writer Anthony Shaffer and star Edward Woodward come at the discussions and material from different directions with a more contemporary industry name Eli Roth talking about how the film influenced his work. Read more ›

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5.0 out of 5 stars The Wicker Man Conversations 26 Aug 2012

By R. Luck

Format:Kindle Edition

Think you've read all you need to read about the 'Citizen Kane of horror movies'? Then think again. Stephen Applebaum's essential e-book features interviews with director Robin Hardy, writer Anthony Shaffer and the late great Edward Woodward. A book so good, it'll send you back to the movie with fresh enthusiasm.

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4.0 out of 5 stars A fascinating read 19 July 2012

By N. Wistreich

Format:Kindle Edition|Verified Purchase

One of the best film interviewers around pulls together years of conversations with Hardy, Shaffer and Woodward to create a fascinating insight behind the making and thinking behind The Wicker Man - as well as the distributor's reaction when they finally saw it.

From The Vault: Simon Pegg & Edgar Wright On Hot Fuzz

Geeks bearing gifts

Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright discuss how they followed Shaun of the Dead with a spoof of American action movies in Hot Fuzz

British cinema is littered with failed spin-offs from TV and the crushed egos of comics unable to adapt to film. But with their horror spoof Shaun of the Dead, Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright somehow made the transition from small to big screen look easy. Was the film's international success a fluke? We'll find out soon enough. For Pegg and Wright are determined to prove they're anything but one-hit wonders with their new comedy- action-cop-thriller Hot Fuzz.

Actually, if anyone was likely to succeed it was them. Their sitcom Spaced - co-written by Pegg and Jessica Stevenson, and directed by Wright - was awash with movie tropes and nods to their favourite film-makers, including George Romero, Sam Raimi and John Woo. Self-confessed geeks, they proudly wore their often trashy influences on their sleeves. This was more than just homage, however; they were on a mission.

"We were always hoping to move towards making films," says Pegg. "Edgar was always going to be a film director, and I think it's largely due to him that the transition has been so smooth. His aspirations and abilities were always ready for film."

Despite the cinematic qualities of Spaced, a movie version was apparently never considered; television was its natural home. The show was a critical and popular success, but not so huge that it overshadowed Pegg and Wright's movie debut.

"I think if it had been as big a hit as The Office it would have made it really difficult," he says. "We could have made the same film as Shaun of the Dead but people would have more baggage about the old show." Shaun - an inspired riff on the zombie genre set in suburban London - had the same leftfield sensibility, point of view and sense of humour as the TV sitcom. But it also offered audiences new characters and a new setting.

This has not always been the case. Throughout the 1970s, British cinema was replete with sitcom spin-offs such as On the Buses, Steptoe and Son, Are you Being Served? and the especially awful George and Mildred. Monty Python's first cinema venture, And Now for Something Completely Different, was a collection of sketches from the first and second series of Monty Python's Flying Circus. They eschewed the sketch format with Monty Python and the Holy Grail and Life of Brian, but returned to it in The Meaning of Life.

The worldwide success of1997's Bean, an Americanised version of Rowan Atkinson's British comedy, marked the return of the TV spin-off. This was followed by a chequered roster of flops and minor successes including Rik Mayall and Adrian Edmondson's Guest House Paradiso, Harry Enfield's Kevin and Perry Go Large, Ali G Indahouse and, most disappointing of all, The League of Gentlemen's Apocalypse.

Did the Shaun/Hot Fuzz team learn from other people's mistakes? Wright says it was important for them to break away from Spaced so that "nobody could look at Shaun and say, 'Oh, it's really funny if you've seen the show.'"

Pegg suggests that TV characters can "false-foot" a film. "People think, 'Why pay to see them when you can see them at home for free?'" The forthcoming Simpsons Movie will be interesting, he says.

"We can watch the Simpsons pretty much any time of day. We've got them all on DVD. They're always on the television. It is going to have to be something special to pull everybody into the theatres to see it. I think it probably will, but I think that's a tough deal when you see a character from a comedy show transplanted to the big screen. It doesn't always work." Borat, of course, has shown that it can.

A note of irritation suddenly enters Pegg's voice as he recalls how some people accused Shaun of the Dead of being just an extended episode of Spaced. "I think that was wrong," he says. "It was shot on widescreen, it was very adeptly made. It was a film."

He and Wright had pored over books by screenwriting gurus Robert McKee and Syd Field, studying the "mechanics of screenplay writing, just to see if they really worked or whether they were bullshit". When they decided they did work, they built their screenplay around them.

"Because it was accepted as being a film, and because it did well here, and particularly in the States, it's led to other things and connections with people," says Pegg. "It meant that it's been a very good calling card for Hot Fuzz." All the same, he adds: "People tend not to want you to change position. It's like, 'You can't go there. You live here [television].'"

There isn't a complete disconnect between Spaced, Shaun and Hot Fuzz. There are echoes and reiterations of gags, lines of dialogue and situations from the sitcom in the movies, which, to me, are like the realisations of fantasies of Spaced's Tim (Pegg) and Mike (Nick Frost). It's as if they have become zombie killers in Shaun and action heroes in Hot Fuzz. Pegg laughs when I tell him this. "That's absolutely true," he says, adding that the thought had never struck him until now.

"When we were doing Spaced, we were writing about a group of young people whose aspirations were to break out into those worlds, and now suddenly we have the opportunity to do it for real.

"Those concerns that were present in Spaced - the love of genre films, science fiction, zombies, whatever - they were real concerns of our own, and we wrote about them because we loved them. And now that we're being given the opportunity to make films, we're able to do that on a much grander scale. Each project we've done has been an evolution from the last one."

INDEED, HOT FUZZ IS bigger, more complex and technically more ambitious than Shaun of the Dead. Pegg admits he and Wright felt they had to "step things up a little bit and prove that [Shaun] wasn't just a one-off, and that we could operate in the world of film. So we purposely took on something that was a lot grander, bigger and more sophisticated, certainly in terms of its execution, just to make that passage into being accepted as film-makers definite."

A smart combination of parochial English humour and absurd Jerry Bruckheimer-like pyrotechnics, Hot Fuzz casts Pegg as Nicholas Angel, a London cop so good at his job that he is embarrassing the rest of the force. He is reassigned to sleepy Sandford, in the West Country, where he is teamed up with an unworldly local bobby played by Frost.

They soon find themselves up to their necks in murder, and embroiled in a narrative that becomes deliberately more absurd as it takes its cues from Point Break and Bad Boys 2. Hot Fuzz was the film-makers' way of "creating a tribute to the bad-ass cop films," says Wright. Like the characters in Spaced, they were also living their dreams.

"It's no coincidence that Hot Fuzz is set in the kind of area where I and Simon grew up, because essentially the film is like a boyhood fantasy become real. I grew up in this area [Somerset], and it's a very lovely part of the world but very quiet, and I used to make amateur films as a teenager and invariably they'd be escapist teenage fantasies showing things that didn't happen in my town. With this we really wanted to make a film which on one hand is as British as it could possibly be, whilst on the other hand being as American as it could possibly be."

While the film's conventions are Hollywood-inspired, the casting is British to the core. Like Shaun before it, Hot Fuzz is populated with recognisable faces from almost every recent British comedy series one could think of (see panel), as well as the more serious acting talent of Jim Broadbent, Paddy Considine and Rafe Spall. Iconic old hands such as Edward Woodward, Billie Whitelaw, Anne Reid, Edward Woodward and former James Bond Timothy Dalton play some of the leading local figures, but it is the new generation of comic actors and writers who hold the reins. Does Pegg feel like they are part of a creative movement?

"It's hard not to feel like that because you tend to stay working with the people you enjoy working with and as a result you start to look like you're a troupe," he says. Wright thinks of it as an "expanding rep company", along the lines of the way that Quentin Tarantino and the Coen brothers work. But "Hot Fuzz isn't just a revamp, casting-wise, of Shaun of the Dead, because most people weren't in it. Everyone's welcome," says Pegg.

I wonder if this is true also of the audience, because their films - violent, action-packed and geeky - seem to be aimed so much at young males. Is it a coincidence that Spaced, Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz all begin with Pegg splitting up with a female partner or on the verge of losing one? Spaced had an "enormous female demographic", he claims, "maybe because it's an insight into just how ridiculous men are. Shaun was a kind of little apology to our respective partners for being lazy and wanting to just go to one pub all the time."

His Hot Fuzz character, he reveals, was supposed to have a love interest who worked in a cake shop, but they realised that the "film is really a very sweet romance between two straight guys". So she had to go. No doubt people will talk about the film's playful send-up of the homoerotic tension in buddy cop movies such as Lethal Weapon, but Pegg says this is the easy analysis.

"The thing that fascinates me and Edgar, and also underpins my relationship with Nick, is the situation where you have two straight men who are battling their own instinctive tendency to express their masculinity in order to be affectionate with each other," he explains. "I have no problem with hugging or kissing my male friends because I'm not frightened of it. It doesn't bother me and I know I'm not going to get a boner if I give Nick a big cuddle in his pants. And I don't care if I do. Whereas a lot of men can't do it because they think, 'This isn't right'.

"I love that struggle that goes on. It's the key to world peace in a way," he laughs. "If men could be OK hugging each other, everything would be fine."

This article first appeared in The Scotsman.

Copyright Stephen Applebaum, 2014

From The Vault: Robin Hardy, Neil Labute, And The Wicker Men

The Wicker Man: Caught in the crossfire

Mess with a classic and you'll get burnt, so the director Neil LaBute is ready for the inferno when his 'Wicker Man' remake hits cinemas.

By Stephen Applebaum, The Independent, 2006

Even before the cameras rolled, Neil LaBute saw trouble looming over his Hollywood "re-imagining" of the British cult classic The Wicker Man. The playwright and film-maker had already run into controversy with his adaptation of AS Byatt's Possession by Americanising the leading male character. Now he was risking the wrath of Wicker Man fans by replacing the Scottish pagan community led by Lord Summerisle (an imposing Christopher Lee), of director Robin Hardy and writer Anthony Shaffer's film, with a matriarchal society off the coast of Maine.

"I learnt nothing from Possession," LaBute told me, "because I'm willing to be taken to task again." Asked why, he said it was because he "loved" The Wicker Man. "Yet, I never felt the execution was so great that it couldn't be touched. I thought, whether it's bested or not, it could be done again. It's been 30 years and I think I've got a legitimate idea about it. It's an island of women and Nicolas Cage; that sounds an evenly matched game to me."

Feted or hated, the remake - that's what it is - is unlikely to trouble the reputation of the 1973 original. "The increasing number of university courses devoted to cult film may also have boosted the film's cultural prestige," notes Dr Stephen Harper, senior lecturer in media studies at the University of Portsmouth.

Eli Roth, whose recent gore-fest Hostel paid homage to The Wicker Man, says: "It's a brilliant film that was way ahead of its time. It explored the differences in religion from every angle - from sex to death, and, ultimately, to sacrificing yourself to your god."

That clash of beliefs could hardly be more relevant. However, it was in a spirit of fun that Hardy, a Christian, and Shaffer, a Jew, conceived their story. "Tony and I were great horror-film buffs," he recalls, "and used to see lots of the original Hammers. We wondered why it was that they always centred on pentacles, garlic, stakes in hearts and all those other things to do with black magic. We thought it would be fun to go back to the religion on which all this hokey witchcraft stuff was based - the old religion - and recreate a contemporary society that was pre-Christian."

Shaffer, who died in 2001, suggested they do something on the nature of sacrifice. "I don't think a serious film on the subject had been done before," he told me in 1996. "The subject opened the world of horror and terror, but also had an intellectual content that gave us a chance to do something quite thoughtful and provocative."

In the film, Sgt Howie, a bigoted but "honest Christian copper", played by Edward Woodward, arrives on Summerisle to investigate the disappearance of a local girl. An audacious sleight of hand, typical of the writer of Sleuth and Frenzy, means that all is not as it seems. "He doesn't know it, but he is the sacrifice," Shaffer said. "The islanders waltz him, and us; everything they tell us is untrue."

Hardy spent six months poring over tomes such as The Golden Bough and a Victorian collection of traditional English songs. The latter, some rewritten by Shaffer's brother Peter, provided the basis for many of the songs that give The Wicker Man its texture. The songs fill in details about the islanders' beliefs and poeticise the conflict.

"Peter had a boyfriend, Paul Giovanni, who was a good musician," Shaffer said. "He said, 'Why don't you give Paul a crack at this?' I talked to Paul and I was impressed by his enthusiasm and knowledge. He took the challenge and rose to the occasion."

When Hardy read the remake's script, he says, it cleaved closely to the original but had no obvious musical element. This vital ingredient appears to have been a problem. "Canal+ told me they had a very prestigious Italian composer who had done a lot of really important films," he reveals, "and then I was told they had fired him just a couple of weeks ago and decided to completely re-do the music. But if they were really going to try to capture the spirit of the original, I think they would have had some songs in it. And, as far as I can make out, they haven't."

However good or bad it turns out to be, LaBute's film will at least be released. The Hardy/Shaffer original had to fight to be seen after it was used, Hardy believes, as a pawn in a political battle over the running of British Lion. When the film was eventually released, it played second fiddle to Don't Look Now on a double bill. Not until Hardy took the film to America, and magazines such as Cinefantastique started taking note, did its cult status take root.

Shaffer told me he had written a sequel, which, incredibly, brought back Sgt Howie. "It's difficult to start with a hero who's been burnt to a crisp, of course," he laughed. "Regeneration could be involved, or maybe the cavalry really do arrive and he comes out badly burned. Now you have one vengeful copper, and the gloves are off between him and Summerisle. It's damn difficult to beat the climax of the first one, but I think we've done it."

Hardy has not read The Loathly Worm, as the script was apparently called, but he has heard that all the major characters return 30 years older. "I, personally, didn't like the idea of that," he says, "so I was never involved."

Hardy has now re-entered Wicker Man territory himself with a new novel, Cowboys for Christ, for which he's trying to raise film funds. A cracking read full of sex, suspense, black humour, and, of course, music, the book sticks with The Wicker Man formula by sending two young American evangelists, Beth and Steve, on a mission to Scotland to "save" the locals, only to find themselves being "waltzed", to borrow Shaffer's term, in an increasingly grim dance of death.

"I thought it would be interesting to do a film using a much more contemporary group of Christians, ones who frankly are in the news, our fundamentalist friends, and also to do a number, really, on American innocence," Hardy says. "To fit it into Wicker Man territory seemed a good way of doing that; confronting them with something that is completely strange, but which they don't realise is strange because everything outside the US is strange to them."

In the meantime, his Wicker Man looks set to cast a shadow over LaBute's release. On 3 September, it returns to the big screen at the Curzon in Soho before being re-released the following day as a three-disc DVD package. As Lord Summerisle might say: "Mr LaBute, the Wicker Man awaits."