 |
|
The Wicker Man
|
|
|
|||
 The Wicker Man Production NotesTagline: Some sacrifices must be made.
A reclusive lawman (Nicolas Cage) travels to a secluded island to search for a girl who has gone missing. Once there, he discovers sinister forces at work among the island's secretive residents, including strange sexual rituals, a harvest festival and possible human sacrifice. Neil LaBute directs this remake of the 1973 British horror classic.
Out patrolling a California highway, police officer Edward Malus (Nicolas Cage) stops a station wagon to return a little girl's lost doll. Moments later, a runaway truck slams into the station wagon, igniting it into a fiery wreck with the mother and child trapped inside. Edward fails to save them before the car explodes ... and then spends months of his life choking down pills to get the image of their faces out of his head. But Edward is about to get a second chance.
A desperate letter from his former fiancée, Willow (Kate Beahan), arrives at his home with no postmark. Willow came into his life and left just as unexpectedly years before. But now, her daughter Rowan has gone missing, and Edward is the only person she trusts to help locate her. She asks him to come to her home on a private island- Summersisle-a place with its own traditions where people observe a forgotten way of life. Edward seizes the opportunity to make his life right again, and soon finds himself on a seaplane bound for the islands of the Pacific Northwest.
But nothing is what it seems on isolated Summersisle, where a culture, dominated by its matriarch Sister Summersisle (Ellen Burstyn), is bound together by arcane traditions and a pagan festival known as "the Day of Death and Rebirth." The secretive people of Summersisle only ridicule his investigation, insisting that a child named Rowan never existed there...or if she ever did was no longer alive.
But what Edward doesn't know is that Willow's plea for help has invited more into his life than a chance for redemption. In unraveling Summersisle's closely held secrets, Edward is drawn into a web of ancient traditions and murderous deceit, and each step he takes closer to the lost child brings him one step closer to the unspeakable. And one step closer to The Wicker Man.
About the Production
Academy Award winner Nicolas Cage and acclaimed director Neil LaBute both share an enduring fascination with the British film "The Wicker Man." The 1973 U.K. production starred Edward Woodward, Christopher Lee and Britt Ekland and was directed by Robin Hardy. Though not widely known at the time, the film captivated an increasing cult following in the ensuing years.
Cage's first exposure to it was at the home of legendary punk rock star and movie buff, the late Johnny Ramone. Cage recalls, "It wasn't like any movie that I had experienced before. It was very disturbing. Any movie that can make me feel like that has something very powerful about it."
Adds producer Norm Golightly, Cage's partner at Saturn Films, "A lot of people may know the title but have never seen the film. However, within a small community, a lot of people know `The Wicker Man' and worship it."
"It had this spooky, eerie feeling that just hasn't been matched, in my opinion," adds producer Boaz Davidson.
In 1980, writer/director Neil LaBute was working in an art house cinema when he saw the trailer and poster for the original, which opened in the U.S. several years after its U.K. release. "It was one of those films that people either knew intimately or didn't know anything about," he remembers. "I loved the story, loved how it ended.
A filmmaker who has also distinguished himself in theater, LaBute's sensibilities were ideal for a contemporary reimagining of the story of "The Wicker Man." "Neil is renowned as a writer in the theatre world and with more artistic films," says producer Randall Emmett, "I thought, `Wow, we can have a genre movie with a real artistic integrity.'"
"Neil loves actors," adds Cage. "He loves the dynamic of what happens between directing and acting and writing. He's very hands-on and loves the creative process. It's been a great joy to work with him on this film.
LaBute, who has garnered acclaim for his searing portrayals of relationships between the sexes in films like "In the Company of Men" and "Your Friends and Neighbors," relished the opportunity to further explore the gray areas in-between, albeit in an unconventional way. "With this film, I went into a world that was probably closer to the kinds of works that I've done previously, in investigating how men and women relate to each other and the kind of power differential that exists between them," he says.
In remaking "The Wicker Man" more than three decades after the original film, LaBute incorporated a role reversal between the sexes that perhaps would be more readily accepted by today's audiences: Instead of the men being in charge, it is the women who are very much in control of the society on the mysterious island called Summersisle.
Although LaBute had not previously written specific characters for the actors that play them, he was delighted with the facility with which Cage inhabited the role of Edward Malus. "Coming out of his mouth, the dialog sounded absolutely right and like it was tailored for him, but I never really thought of it that way," he says. "I tended to just think of the character because I know Nic's strengths and his chameleon-like ability to become whoever. Nicolas Cage makes Edward a very human character."
Cage stars as Edward Malus, a highway cop content to patrol a lonely stretch of road in the California countryside. "He's the kind of man who is very happy doing what he does," says Cage. "He has his beliefs and what he believes in is the law."
Edward's life is interrupted by a devastating event in which he blames himself for the fiery deaths of a young mother and her daughter. "The accident puts him into a more fractured state of mind," explains Cage. "He's fragile; he's having some difficulty with anxiety, panic and his precise memory of what happened that day, and he's taking medication to cope with these problems he's having."
Everything changes when, out of the blue, a letter arrives from his former fiancée whose daughter, Rowan, has gone missing. "Willow is that elusive love of his life," says Cage. "He could never comprehend why she left him. She just up and left, and so she has always lingered in his mind. She's the one that got away that he never got over, so there's a very soft spot in his heart for her."
Anxious to see Willow again and energized by the prospect of turning his life around, Edward sets out to find a way to get to the mysterious island called Summersisle. "The mother of this child is someone he has known, someone from his past who fell out of his life very suddenly," says LaBute. "He's very interested in seeing her again and finding out what happened to them, because they were engaged at one point."
Edward finds his way across the Puget Sound from the Washington Coast to the remote private island of Summersisle, which is not reachable through standard means. The island seems to be inhabited by a pastoral, old-fashioned agrarian society that sustains itself by harvesting honey and is led by a matriarchal figure, Sister Summersisle, played by Oscar winner Ellen Burstyn. "They have been living on this island for many, many years, far away from civilization," Davidson describes. "They don't drive cars; they don't have televisions; they don't have any means of communication. They live here in isolation and they believe in their own religion, which is this strange, vaguely pagan belief system."
Into this environment comes a pretty standard American cop. "Edward is somebody who comes from a traditional society, where he is a man and a policeman," says LaBute. "But his gun and all the things that have come to symbolize power in the outside world mean relatively little to these people. So, even his quest, which is like a ticking clock, is of no interest to them. Time stands still in this place, and it becomes very frustrating to him to get nowhere with them. While he feels like he's in power, he really has no way off the island once he's there, so his options continue to get more limited as the film goes on."
At the heart of the mystery is the child's mother and former love of Edward's life, Willow Woodward, played by Kate Beahan. "There's something about Kate Beahan that is very enigmatic," says Cage. "You don't know what she's thinking. She's very mysterious on camera. Her character, Willow, is very unpredictable, and Kate's a natural for embodying that."
"They haven't seen each other for a long time, so it's quite a grand and significant gesture that Edward does respond," says Beahan. "And it becomes evident that they do still have very strong feelings for one another, in that he has traveled this far in order to help her and will therefore have to trust and believe everything she tells him."
|
|||||
Kate Beahan as Sister Willow and Nicolas Cage as Edward Malus in The Wicker Man.
Sitemaps, RSS Feeds & Social Networks
|
|||||||
 |
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
Movies Central
Movies Central website is created and designed by Atlantis, 2000 - 2010
All film stills, posters, and trademarks are the property of their respective owners and may not be reproduced for any reason whatsoever. If proper notation of owned material is not given please notify us so we can make adjustments. Copyright © 2009 HTML Sitemap
