The Wicker Man (2006)

[MacGuffin]

Trailer here.

Release Date: September 1st, 2006

Starring: Nicolas Cage, Leelee Sobieski, Ellen Burstyn, Molly Parker, Kate Beahan, Christa Campbell

Directed by: Neil LaBute 

Premise: A man investigates the disappearance of a young girl on a remote island, only to discover that the islanders are part of a sinister cult.

[Pubrick]

Kate Beahan

wow, it sounds like i gush over any australian actress that gets mentioned in upcoming movies, but you have no idea.. every single underrated tv/independent movie starlet is getting swept up in this aussie revival, and they're always MY favourites.. is someone watching my tv to see which faces are the only ones keeping me glued to the screen/interested in australian cinema?

uh.. i didn't see flightplan, so her discovery is news to me. gee Chopper really went a long way with US casting agents huh.

[Gold Trumpet]

Neil Labute is a sore subject for me. In The Company of Men and Your Friends and Neighbors were the best films of their respective years for me (1997 and 1998, I believe). Then he did Nurse Betty and I was almost inclined to fall in line with the apologists and say that he needed to do different and lighter subjects to progress past the dark themes of his first films. I'm sorry, but he wasn't progressing. Doing comedy isn't going a step down. Its just another level of drama. And the fact remains that Nurse Betty had neither the insight nor the intelligence of his first two films. I know Nurse Betty wasn't written by him but it is still to be placed on the mantle piece of all his work for his decision to take it on. The films he made after Nurse Betty was another light distraction like Nurse Betty and then a poor imitation of his former self.

I have hope for Wicker Man because it is Neil Labute, but it is yet another new subject and new territory for him. Will he encompass this subject or will he be playing catch up again to just adaquately adapt it?

[Ghostboy]

I've always loved LaBute - I even liked Posession to a certain extent - and I've been hoping for the best with this remake, which seemed ill-advised from the start. But that trailer is great - it actually looks scary.

Does anyone here like the original film? It has its problems, but it has a really disturbing quality to it that's difficult to shake.

[pete]

it seems way more out and out scary than the original.

[children with angels]

I just hope Labute has the guts to stick with the original ending... If he did, in today's context it would be absolutely shocking.

[modage]

i'm not a huge fan of the original but i still think its likely better than this one will be.

[MacGuffin]

The Wicker Man 2
Talking to Bloody Disgusting, Neil LaBute, helmer of the upcoming "Wicker Man" remake, mentioned the possibility of a sequel. "There are certain things that I've done to the movie that allow for the possibility of, you can always go back to that island outside... everyone's still there so you could revisit the thing. But it's something that plays really well one time because it's built so much around this uniform trick that everyone has been working against him. When you know that, you've got to create a very different film for a second film...I don't know that I'd want to revisit it myself because it works in a great sense of one of these short stories like 'The Lottery' and it feels like the story is told to me."

[bonanzataz]

i'm really annoyed by this remake. i just watched the original and kinda loved it. it had this eerie charm that was so original and so different. this really great sense of of impending doom combined with a really whimsical, fun feel. it was so awkward to watch but it was very enjoyable and had really great imagery, which, from the trailer, it looks like the new movie is actively trying to pervert by adding bullshit horror cliches, such as...

...VERY VERY MINOR SPOILERS IF YOU WANT TO GO INTO THE ORIGINAL MOVIE FRESH, BUT STILL...

...there is one scene in the original film where the detective goes into the schoolhouse to look for rowan, the missing girl. everybody in the school says they've never seen or heard of the girl, but there is an empty desk in the middle of the room. he looks at the role call and sees that rowan is in fact a student at that school and should be sitting at that desk. why is everybody lying to him? he goes to the desk to look inside and there he sees a roach wearing a leash made of string that is tied to a nail that is hammered into the desk. the roach goes round in circles. it is a brilliant piece of imagery and really embodies the uniqueness of this film.

END "SPOILERS," NOW I WILL JUST REITERATE THE TRAILER...

now, in the trailer, nicholas cage goes to the schoolhouse and the same scene ensues, only this time, when he opens up the desk, a large crow flies out and it is accompanied by a "sting" effect on the soundtrack. OH MY GOD! SCARY, YOU GUYS! it's incredibly cheap to have animals come out at the protagonist. that's just the lowest scare ever. i thought neil labute does movies where people talk a lot. what the hell is he doing trying to make a horror movie with these kinds of scares? everything in the trailer leads me to believe that everything in this movie is just incredibly blatant which is so not what i took away from the original. this looks more like a better adaptation of silent hill than anything else, which isn't saying much. granted, all i have seen is the trailer, but what i've seen just proves that this movie will be nothing more than cheap thrills and the bastardization of another brilliant film. sigh. if nothing else, it'll give the original movie a bigger following.



i can't believe i used the words bastardize and pervert. i sound like a christian.

[MacGuffin]

Exclusive: Wicker Man Director Neil LaBute

When Neil LaBute debuted his controversial play "In the Company of Men" thirteen years ago, he quickly became one of the most respected modern playwrights, which has translated into an equally respectable career as a filmmaker, first with the movie based on "In the Company of Men," followed by popular indies like Your Friends & Neighbors, the 2000 comedy Nurse Betty with Renée Zellweger and Morgan Freeman, and his adaptation of Possession, starring Gwyneth Paltrow and Aaron Eckhart

Regardless of the lack of box office success, LaBute has become someone that many actors want to work with, which may be why Nicolas Cage brought LaBute on board to adapt a high profile remake of the 1973 horror classic The Wicker Man, which opens over Labor Day weekend.

Neil LaBute seemed to be recovering from his "fish out of water" status at Comic-Con in San Diego when Comingsoon.net spoke to him about the film.

ComingSoon.net: How hard is it getting a studio to agree to remake a movie like "The Wicker Man"?
Neil LaBute: What helps most of all is the person in front of the camera, because that actor is the face that goes out to an audience. Nic [aka Nicolas Cage] has that ability to go and do various kinds of movies, very studio-driven fare and more independent stuff, and this probably falls somewhere in between. It's a movie that's coming out through Warner Bros, but ultimately, it was made on its own and then distributed through them. You're always convincing someone like a financier, but this was originally generated by Nic, so it always had the push of him behind it. There's no way to say that that doesn't make it easier, because it certainly did, in terms of me writing it, knowing who I was writing for, but also in terms of knowing the thing that is him, the star power, the Oscar winner, the producer. He's all these different things and they're all there pushing the movie from the very beginning. It was easier than some projects to get made, and also the fact that it fits somewhere into a genre, rather than "Well, I can't really describe it in words." Sometimes, it's really hard to explain what a movie is going to be like. The first movie is hard to explain what it's like. It's not like anything else really, so the fact that it at least fits, rightly or wrongly, people lump it into horror, so therefore people can latch onto it and go, "Nic Cage... horror movie... okay, this sounds good."

CS: The central premise for "The Wicker Man" is its location of Summerisle, so what is this place like?
LaBute: It's a place worth visiting, but probably not living there. We tried to create something for even people who watch a lot of horror films, a world that seem like that's where people want to go. Unless you go to a documentary, you go to movies to escape. You go into a place... take me somewhere I haven't been before. Even if it's in a romantic comedy, it's like "show me an incident I haven't seen before." So here, we're trying to take you to an island that is unlike anything you've seen before. It's a very isolated, what we would think of as a backwards community, that obviously seems to be very happy functioning the way it does. Where men and woman are kind of hierarchy between them and they have an old belief system, almost a paganistic belief in multiple gods and that they can dictate the way the harvest is by having sacrifice.

CS: This being a remake, how closely does this story follow the original movie?
LaBute: You absolutely can watch both of them and see a similar journey there. The screenplay that Anthony Shaffer wrote was very strong and very sound. That's one of the things that drew us to it. I didn't want to be involved in something that I was just remaking. When I came onto this, Nic was already involved through his production company, and he wanted to reimagine, to take it a different way. While the results are the same and you recognize the journey, it's a very different road that we travel than the original one.

CS: Have you deliberately tried to modernize the story or did you try to keep it timeless in that it can take place in any period?
LaBute: The effort is not so much to get away from the original, as to be true to the world you set up. I have 30 odd years of life to deal with, not my own, but in terms of life that we all know. That movie didn't have to deal with cellphones and that sort of thing. Is this guy going to carry a celphone out there so he would have contact with the outside world in a way, which would be different from that one? And the answer is "yes." It's the sort of thing that you can make impotent very quickly, because as soon as he gets there, he can't get any cellphone coverage. That instrument that has been so powerful for him before means nothing out there. It's just a curiosity. I think people as an audience will feel that characters will be that much more knowledgable, that much more liberated. All those kinds of things have happened in thirty years, so how do you deal with them? How do you deal with a community that tries to be its own world, separated from the world as the world keeps expanding? Is it harder to believe that this island exists off the coast of Washington today than off the coast of Scotland thirty years ago? Maybe so. I think we do a pretty good job of making people very gradually forget the world and look up and go, "What a weird thing this is." As long as you lay down the mechanics of how do they get their supplies and how does this work, why do they not have phones or any of those things? Once you start to fill in those fundamental questions, people fill in the rest. There's a point where they tip over and believe what you're doing. I think we hit that. While there's some very real concerns that we had to think about, does the story hold up thirty years later? In my opinion, it absolutely does.

CS: The original movie was more psychological, so was there any thought on adding more gore to appeal to modern audiences, or did you try to keep a lot of that stuff off-screen?
LaBute: I did. I was far more interested in the psychology of what was going on with his character, because so much of it is about the human effect. Once we realize that everybody is maligned and the build-up is to this really horrific event, you kind of know that all of your power is lying in the last third of the movie, and you're slowly ratcheting up the tension along the way. You have to be very patient and say that I'm making a movie that people can watch and enjoy, but it's not something that's going to keep rattling the cage every few minutes. It's just something that's constantly twisting, twisting itself so that you're very caught up in it. It's knowing the genre, knowing how you want to approach that and how you want to surprise with it. You set up situations that look like very familiar ones where audiences are like, "I know what's going to happen." You're going to get close to that girl and then her eyes are going to open to try to spook me, and when that doesn't happen, you go, "Now, why did they do that?" Because you're always trying to reward expectations and reward the audience a bit later with something. I tried to know that genre well, and then play against it a bit as well.

CS: I was pretty excited to hear that you have Ellen Burstyn playing the Christopher Lee role, returning her to the horror genre much like Mia Farrow in "The Omen" earlier this year. Can you talk about getting her involved?
LaBute: She was just one of those people that came immediately to mind because having someone like that goes a long way in selling an island like this working. I can believe that she can make these people follow her and day-to-day make this place work. She's such a good film actress. She's so in control and so precise in what she does. It was also somebody that Nic wanted to work with. He loved the connection of her to the "The Exorcist" and all these great films from the '70s. It's just one of those things that when you heard the idea, you go, "perfect!"

CS: A lot of actors I've spoken to who've worked with you in the past have said they'd do anything to work with you again. Is that the same case when you're doing a genre film like this?
LaBute: I think so, because they know I'm very careful with actors even when we're doing stunts or action scenes. For me, it's rooted in the characters. I want to watch what happens to these characters. I want to see how they react to these things, so it's not subservient what the next scare we're going to throw at these people, so I think that if you ask people who worked on this would have that same sense of "I can feel that he cares about what I do, that he likes actors, and that he's careful about creating a world in which they're comfortable to work." That's my big task and that's what I tend to be interested in

[gob]

I love the original, it's fantastic and one of the creepiest, strangest films ever.
Neil LaBute is a superb writer and one of my favourite playwrights ever.
Nicholas Cage is a underrated actor with some crap films under his belt and gave one of my favourite performances ever in "Leaving Las Vegas".
Despite all this I won't be seeing this remake, not spending £7.50 at the cinema for it at least.

The trailer does indeed make it look like the film has been made into a much more blatant 'shocker' type film which is annoying. This may just be the marketing campaign but I doubt it.

I know it is a sentiment apparent amongst many xixaxers but I'll throw my hat into the mix, Dear Mr. Hollywood, STOP MAKING REMAKES!!
Or if you have to remake films that weren't so intensely original and well made in the first place!

[Chest Rockwell]

I was really meh about this until I learnt it was Neil LaBute. I liked his earlier stuff a lot and I still think The Shape of Things is pretty good too. Interesting turn of direction though...

[MacGuffin]

Nicolas Cage Likens 'Wicker Man' Remake To A Great Cover Song
'Let me see what I can do using my instrument and other people's instruments to reinterpret,' he says.
Source: MTV

BEVERLY HILLS, California — Tim Burton's done it. So has Gus Van Sant. Steven Soderbergh enjoyed his biggest commercial success doing it, then essentially doing it again. Steven Spielberg? He did it. Twice.

These filmmakers have all produced big-budget remakes, and director Neil LaBute is joining their ranks. "The Wicker Man," a reinterpretation of the 1973 original, stars Nicolas Cage as police officer Edward Malus, whose investigation into the unexplained disappearance of a young girl uncovers shocking secrets about an isolated community far off the coast of Washington state.

LaBute, who has previously adapted his own theatrical material for film, sees "The Wicker Man" remake, which hits theaters Friday, as a natural extension of his artistic voice, despite the fact that the story itself has already been told.

"In a lot of other mediums we are very used to interpretations of something that already exists," he said. "It's only in movies that we often wonder, 'Now why are you redoing that, going back to that particular source?' "

To LaBute, the process of remaking a film is no different than performing a classic play, where each performance is judged not by the standard of every other hypothetical version but by the interpretations and inspirations brought to the text by the artists.

"When we were up shooting the film, we talked about a stage version of 'Dracula,' " he remarked. "We all can practically say verbatim some of the speeches. If Nic did that or he did 'Hamlet,' people wouldn't think twice about it. Like, 'Oh, thousands of people have done "Hamlet" before you and this is going to be your interpretation of that text.' "

LaBute's extreme makeover included moving the location from Scotland to the United States, downplaying the protagonist's religious convictions and changing the cult structure to one of matriarchal domination.

Perhaps the biggest difference between the current "Wicker Man" incarnation and its predecessor is the lack of indigenous music in the newer version. The earlier "Wicker Man" contains several choreographed song-and-dance numbers throughout the film, a touch noticeably absent from LaBute's interpretation.
 
Cage credits these changes with updating the story for a contemporary audience. "Neil really re-created much of the story," he said. "It's a new slant. We weren't interested in redoing it just shot by shot; we wanted to extrapolate from the original and find new ways of expressing it, which is what Neil provided."

Known as much for his interesting and offbeat choices as he is for his prodigious skill as an actor, Cage, a veteran of three previous movie remakes, ("Kiss of Death," "Gone in 60 Seconds" and "City of Angels") likened the experience of performing in a remake to that of a musician who's allowed to improvise on a familiar melody.

"Let me see what I can do using my instrument and other people's instruments to reinterpret," Cage observed, drawing a comparison any local tribute band could appreciate. "I'm a musician doing a cover on an old song ... trying to find new ways of being inspired by it and lending my own abilities to it."

Although Cage praised the original "Wicker Man" as being "excellent" with a "great script by Anthony Shaffer," he believes the cult hit lent itself particularly well to an update because the flick isn't well-known outside of genre enthusiasts.

"It occurred to me that not a lot of people know about it," Cage remarked. "There's only a core base of cult followers who love the movie dearly in England. Many people here in the United States aren't aware of it. It's not so famous a film that everyone's going to just say, 'Well, I've already seen that.' 'Wicker Man,' I felt, needed to be reintroduced to people."

In addition to a script that he said left him feeling "inspired," Cage opted to do "The Wicker Man" because it afforded him the opportunity to take risks by dabbling in a type of film he isn't generally known for, with the added bonus that he believes it played directly to his strengths as an actor.

"It's gothic, it's scary, it enabled me to work in the horror genre in a way that didn't rely on pop-ups and the cheap thrills, blood and guts that so many of these horror films do," Cage said. "It was about performance and making it real."

To LaBute, "making it real" meant not straying too far from public perceptions, including enough cultish eccentricity to make "The Wicker Man" believable.

"You can look at places like that and say there are fanatical little enclaves of people who sometimes get into a spirit that either leads to their own death or the deaths of other people," LaBute commented on the films' charismatic cult leaders — Christopher Lee in the original and Ellen Burstyn in the remake. "It's not crazy, it's not science fiction we're talking about. It's fiction, but it's something that you can kind of go with, because it's close enough to reality that you can imagine it happening."

Co-star Kate Beahan ("Flightplan"), who plays the alluring Sister Willow, says the film's authenticity is what makes it so contemporary, particularly after post-1973 cult tragedies, including the Jonestown and Waco massacres.

"It's more relevant today," Beahan insisted. "It's an isolated civilization that's opted out of the modern world, with their own set of beliefs. I think all those cult elements are [what make 'The Wicker Man'] interesting."

According to Cage, the process of interpretation is an open-ended activity. In fact, he hopes future generations revisit "The Wicker Man."

"The biggest compliment would be if in 20 years, somebody remakes it again," he said. "In a sense, we are trying to get the ball rolling here. It is by some definition a lost classic. So we're bringing it back to you with a new interpretation — and then maybe it'll happen again."

[Gold Trumpet]

Spoilers
This film isn't very good, but it is atleast much better than the original. I just watched the original and I have no idea why anyone even remotely likes the film. The filmmaking is generic 70s filmmaking with a generic 70s soundtrack. At first I thought that was for a greater purpose. Inundate the film with happy hippie stylings everywhere for the greater shock later. I was wrong. When the climax hits and Edwin tries to rescue Rowan, the soundtrack goes to even cheesier rock music. Surely the filmmakers realized by this time they had to ditch the trendy effects and try to really heighten the scene but they didn't. The film was done to cheesy effects for absolutely no purpose then to play according to pop tastes.

When you watch the film now it has an effect of feeling creepy because the subject and filmmaking collide against each other in so many ways. I believe the responce was accidental on part of the filmmakers. I don't think they had any clue how to handle this story. Time has just been nice to them. An accidental success.

Neil Labute does a standard job with the filmmaking. No excellence really is anywhere. The flashbacks are way too long each time and the filmmaking follows horror code. The best thing he does is bring an arch to the story to actually get you involved with Edwin. The original featured a strict Christian who said very Christian things and was outraged at everything the island did. There was no character. There was nothing redeeming about him to justify feelings for him. If there was any greater thought it was that the film aligned trademarks of the popular counter culture movement of the time (hippies) to destroy the moral background that stood tall before them (Christianity). It was a cultural marker for the 70s. Now its just a dated topic that has worn its worth. Labute abandons that topic to tell a personal story that digs at everyone's personal identification to family. The shock at the end truly felt like a shock and was even tough for me to watch.

The major problem with the story is that Labute doesn't do enough to write beyond the original scenario. In place of an ultra Christian is an ultra chauvinist who reminded me of Bogart's Sam Spade the entire time. There is little depth to this character and too many scenes are awkwardly funny. The identification with him at the end has more to do with his scenario than him as a character. Labute also follows the plot points of the original too well. He doesn't look for a new story to get past all the limitations of the original. He tries to extend Edwin's slim character as far as possible to meet all the actions that the original Edwin did. Its too formulaic for a remake that really needed to abandon the original to be good.

I'm also doing an extended review of this film for Alternate Takes. I'll focus on Neil Labute in his career and the original/remake contrast in greater detail. I'll link when I'm done and its posted.

[Sal]

I really dont think theres much to say here because its evident that Nicolas Cage and Neil La bute are taking the piss.  You cant tell me the hilarious voice over at the end ("owww!! my legs!") and the 'nightmare' with the little girl aren't digs at the audience.  They are winking here.