Wow, I just read this interesting article in The Scotsman online regarding Robin Hardy the Director of the original The Wicker Man has asked his lawyers to remove his name from all publicity materials for the Hollywood remake while they are still filming.
The original director of The Wicker Man has called in his lawyers to have his name taken off promotional material for the $40m movie even before lead star Nicolas Cage has finished filming.
“The amazing thing is that all the publicity keeps on saying that I have written the screenplay, which is obviously not true,” says Hardy, who did not even take a writing credit on the original, though he worked closely with writer Anthony Shaffer.
Apparently he’s very disheartened at the remake removing itself from Scotland, which is where the pagan rituals are heavily placed in history, replaced the male pagan lead with a female, removed the virgin aspect of the main character and added killer bees. Oh sweet lord, as one of my old friends would have said, that’s an RFD (recipe For Disaster). What the hell are they thinking in Hollywood?
Read on for some of the quotes of complete idiocy from the new version…
Hardy is highly sceptical about the new Wicker Man. “I don’t quite understand what they’re doing. It appears that not only is the lady involved, but there are also attacks by killer bees, which sounds like a really old-style horror film.”
The original Wicker Man was firmly rooted in Scotland…They freely mixed folklore and music from different parts of Britain, but chose Scotland as the setting because of its history of fundamentalist religious sects and remote communities…
…In the original, Woodward’s character was a virgin, making him ideal for sacrifice. That element has been ditched from the remake, because it was thought that while audiences would accept the idea of an American community that practised human sacrifice, the idea of a grown-up virgin was just too farfetched.
Instead, Cage’s character has acquired a serious allergy to bees and travels with a bee-sting kit, as well as rosary beads and self-help tapes….
…In an attempt to give the story a feminist slant, writer-director Neil LaBute has turned the island into a matriarchal society, headed by Burstyn.
Christopher Lee…”What do I think of it being played by a woman, when it was played by a man in 1972, as part of a Scottish pagan community, and now it’s played by a woman with the same name? What do I think of it? Nothing. There’s nothing to say.”
Some of that just reads like a comedy version. There were real reasons for the movie being based in Scotland, and there was a lot of research carried out for that decision. They just appear to have taken a great formula for a very eerie movie and ripped the heart and broken the threads apart for the plot line. Killer bees for god’s sake?
However, the original Director and Writer team are hard at work on their new movie.
that will revisit the theme of paganism in modern Scotland.
The story was originally called The Riding of the Laddie, is now called May Day, and follows two young American evangelists, who discover the Border ridings are more than just a quaint tourist attraction…
…He has 80% of the £3m budget in place for the film, with much of money ironically coming from Canada, and he hopes to shoot in Scotland and Texas in the spring.
Vanessa Redgrave and Sean Astin, from The Lord of the Rings, are committed to the film.
Interestingly IMDB is saying that it is a “reimagining of his eerie 1973 film, The Wicker Man” and have Christopher Lee in the cast, which it is apparently not the case in either statement. It’s revisiting the themes of paganism in Scotland and Lee is not involved (as yet), it’s not another remake, reimagining, reconceptualisation, reanything.
If you can’t tell I’m pretty hacked off about this remake and destroy policy of Hollywood of late, and it’s getting worse. What do you think though? Are you appalled at the plans for this remake? Are you hacked off at the continuing remake and rewrite policy of Hollywood?
