Comments/notes[]
BBC Four
Kirsty Wark
Gary Carpenter
Seamus Flannery
Robin Hardy
Christopher Lee
Ingrid Pitt
Edward Woodward
Some nice stills. Hardy and Lee, looking into the Wicker Man with the cameraman (a close-up of the same shot in yesterday’s movie, Gary Carpenter, Ingrid in the library…., constructing the wicker man with a crane, the tree in the background,
Hardy: They ‘ploughed through all 12 volumes of The Golden Bough.’ Commendable rather than just picking out a few things here and there.
Ingrid: Britt wasn’t happy during the filming.
Gary Carpenter: Britt wasn’t quite as rhythmic they would have perhaps liked. Tells of how involved he was in Britt’s dance scene. Lots of talk about that… (found a double in a strip club in Glasgow, she stayed for 3 weeks…)
Visit some locations. (Church, school, maypole site) Hardy describes Barbara Rafferty wrong, it’s left hand for the egg, right hand has the child.
Hardy at Wicker Man site with legs about as tall as he is. Woodward had an escape wire on his back!
Nice c/u detail of the Wicker Man design. Constructed of wicker sheets that were usually used as windbreaks for sheep.
The crowd who sang as the Wicker Man burned had been “dragged out of the pub” and didn’t know the words.
They describe the last shot, “the sun going down like ice cream melting on the horizon.” (Hardy)
(35:47 Hardy says they turned the missing pieces, as much as they could afford, into the longer cut. So, there were pieces extant that were not copied over? No, they did their best with what they could afford to do.) Used Corman’s negative…
Talks about follow-up, May Day (turned into Cowboys for Christ/The Wicker Tree), and we see a poster. W/ Vanessa Redgrave,