‘An unkind film’: letters reveal rift between director and writer of The Wicker Man

A screenplay by one of the UK’s foremost writers, Anthony Shaffer, and a cast headed by Christopher Lee and Edward Woodward should have been the stuff of dreams for the director Robin Hardy in filming The Wicker Man more than half a century ago.

Although it is today revered as a cult horror masterpiece, the extent of the misery that it brought the film-makers has now been revealed in previously unpublished letters and script drafts.

The 1973 film is about a puritan police officer, played by Woodward, who arrives on a remote Scottish island in search of a missing girl, only to encounter sinister local pagans who deny she ever existed. Britt Ekland was cast as an innkeeper’s sexually liberated daughter, who seduces the God-fearing officer, with Lee as Lord Summerisle, a pagan aristocrat.

But the creative atmosphere was frayed and fractious, the documents show. In a letter to Shaffer, Hardy wrote: “How dare you treat me like this?”

Shaffer had already made his name with masterpieces such as Sleuth, but his typed draft of The Wicker Man reveals Hardy’s brutal cuts to his work.

Extensive crossings-out include Summerisle’s lines in the final scene, which would have begun: “The child was but the tip of the iceberg – the part that showed. Do not reproach yourself, there was no way you could have known.”

Tensions boiled over beyond the writer and director. One of the producers wrote: “Shaffer’s talent has been offset by a self-indulgence that impels him to prove himself too clever by half.”

In a letter to the producers, Hardy complained about the film’s editor, Eric Boyd-Perkins: “I don’t think he likes the subject or style of the picture … and feels that he has had enough of it.”

In one letter, Lee described the film as “alluring and mysterious”, despite “having to cope with a garrulous producer, an underpaid and harassed writer and an overpaid and hostile director”.

An extensive correspondence relating to the film was among six sack-loads of documents forgotten in the attic of the former home of Hardy’s third wife, Caroline. There were also previously unseen scripts, storyboards, on-set photographs and financial accounts, many of which reflect the struggles faced by the film-makers.

Hardy’s sons Justin and Dominic, now 60 and 63 respectively, have drawn on the material for a forthcoming book, titled Children of The Wicker Man. It reveals the extreme pressures faced by Hardy during the making of the film – from his heart attack to bankruptcy.

Initially, the film iwas a box office flop and, in the aftermath of its failure, Hardy abandoned his wife and their children, Justin and Bella, for a new life in the US. Legal letters reveal Caroline as the film’s uncredited executive producer and that Hardy owed her up to £1m in today’s money. She was forced to sell the family home and died in 1984, aged 51, suffering from alcoholism, never knowing that her film eventually became a global hit.

Justin, a Bafta-nominated historian film-maker, described The Wicker Man as “the film that messed up my family”.

When he was contacted by a woman who had moved into his mother’s old house, asking whether he wanted to collect the sacks of papers, his initial reaction was to suggest burning “the bloody things”.

But then he and his stepbrother Dominic opened up the sacks and realised the significance of their contents.

Dominic, an art historian, said: “All the big players are in there. We discovered an original script by Shaffer, but with dad’s annotations as director, ‘containing’ Shaffer’s overexuberance. Because he was formerly a barrister, Shaffer did a lot of overexplaining and dad just went ‘cut, cut, cut’. They sort of loved each other and hated each other.”

Writing the book has brought some “closure”, Justin said.

His family never benefited financially from the film, he added: “The bloody film has gone on to make so much money for other people. It’s beyond a joke. Dad agreed to take five grand. So he never received any of the upside. Christopher Lee never received any money from it either, despite the fact that he did the film for zero, to get out of Hammer [Horror films]. So, in many ways, it’s been a very unkind film.”

Children of The Wicker Man is published by The History Press on 23 October.