Director Neil LaBute on what went wrong with the ‘Wicker Man’ remake: “Too many cooks in the kitchen”
Neil LaBute knows you don’t like his movie. It’s been nearly two decades, but he still hears that criticism loud and clear. What started as an enjoyable creative endeavour, romping around in the woods with Nicolas Cage, turned into a nightmare of studio bureaucracy and – much worse, no doubt – eternal damnation from cinephiles the world over. 2006’s The Wicker Man was not a success. From a purely financial standpoint, it was a flop, but not by John Carter standards. It was the critical consensus and an intense backlash from audiences that sealed its fate as one of the most hated movies of the 21st century.
But hear me out; if you watch it, it really doesn’t deserve your unbridled rage. Sure, there is something pretty unhinged about Nicolas Cage running around in a bear suit screaming about bees or brandishing a charred doll and shrieking “How’d-it-get-burned How’d-it-get-burned How’d-it-get-burned?!” But there are countless bad movies made every year that are much, much worse.
The trouble was that LaBute and Cage were treading on hallowed ground. The 1973 original is a cult classic. Directed by Robin Hardy, it follows a police inspector who travels to a remote island off the coast of Scotland to investigate the case of a missing girl. What he finds is an eerie alternate reality in which the locals practice paganism and shun outsiders. The climax, in which he is burned alive in a towering wicker effigy, remains one of the most iconic images in cinematic history.
LaBute saw the film when he was young and loved it, especially the ending. But he wasn’t thinking about writing a remake until someone approached him about it. Crucially, the offer came with Nicolas Cage attached. It was an opportunity he couldn’t refuse, so the only question was how he was going to go about adapting a quintessentially British folk horror classic into something that American audiences in the year 2006 would embrace.
“We didn’t want to do the same thing, you know,” he explains in an interview with Far Out. “We said, ‘Well, there was kind of this huge theme of paganism and Christianity and all that. Do we redo that, which, you know, doesn’t have the same kind of meaning to an American audience?’ […] And I thought, ‘Well, I’ve been mostly working in that world of this battle of the sexes and couples and relationships, and so what if I […] just went from a perspective of like a female-dominated society and put this guy into that mix?'”
LaBute is a Tony-nominated playwright known for creating dramatic works focusing on complex and often dark gender dynamics. In the Company of Men, Your Friends and Neighbors, and The Shape of Things have all been adapted into movies and explore thorny relationships between men and women, but they’re a far cry from the horror genre.
In LaBute’s version of The Wicker Man, the remote community (now situated off the West Coast of the US) is run by women. Ellen Burstyn plays the icy matriarch, and the only men on the island refuse to speak. There are also a bunch of killer bees, a menacing school teacher who might be part of a set of twins, and a bear costume that Cage’s character dons towards the end of the movie to infiltrate a harvest festival.
“I don’t know that everybody feels the same, or was aware,” the director said, “But — we weren’t making an outright comedy. We didn’t think we’re making, you know, Some Like It Hot — but there were elements there that were like, ‘Well, look, he’s gonna be running around in a bear suit, there’s no way that we’re not aware that that’s kind of crazy.'”
Cage has echoed this multiple times over the years. “I don’t think people are aware – or some of the people anyway – the movie was designed to be a bit of a black comedy,” the actor said in 2015. “There seems to be a need by many of the folks on the internet to think that Neil LaBute and myself were completely clueless as to that fact, which was not the case.”
For the director, this became abundantly clear after they finished shooting the film. “It was a difficult road because there were a lot of people, a lot of cooks in that kitchen, more than I thought there might be,” he says. “And some wanted to make just an outright horror movie, and some wanted to make a thriller. And, you know, Nick and I are going, ‘We still want to keep that tongue-in-cheek.’ And so you get, ultimately, a mix of those things.”
Another thing that he only realised in retrospect was how strongly people felt about the original. “I felt like it was not untouchable,” he says. “I’ve since learned that a lot of people would rather there not be another one.”
On the bright side, he’s pretty sure that his movie has altered the legacy of the original. His remake prompted fans of the 1973 film to rise en masse to condemn him. “I gave them something to actually make that one even better,” he says. “Sometimes you don’t know that in the process until afterwards. You can’t see that until an audience has seen it, or on stage that it’s in front of an audience, and you’re like, ‘Oh, something’s not working.'”
