When making a film about a lonely woman who falls in love with a man made of straw, “Wicker” directors Alex Huston Fischer and Eleanor Wilson did not want that fantasy husband to be made from CGI. So, they had a suit made to turn Alexander Skarsgård into the world’s sexiest strawman.
The pair discussed their work with TheWrap’s executive editor Adam Chitwood ahead of the premiere of “Wicker” at the Sundance Film Festival alongside stars Olivia Colman, Peter Dinklage and Elizabeth Debicki, unpacking how their unique film came to be.
The film stars Colman as a lonely outcast and Dinklage as a basket weaver who makes her a husband out of straw, with Skarsgård playing the man woven out of that arrangement.
“It would be weird to have a love story with just Olivia Coleman and a CG guy with tennis balls. No matter how good it looked, it wouldn’t be real. We knew it had to be real the whole time,” Fischer said.
The pair worked with Weta Workshop to design the suit and makeup for Skarsgård to wear, tailoring it to the actor’s facial expressions right down to a furrowed brow that he demonstrated during rehearsals. It culminated in a private, 10-minute rehearsal between Fischer, Wilson and Skarsgård after he first put on the wicker man outfit.
“We sort of cleared everyone out of the room during this test shoot, and we had just 10 minutes, just the three of us. We had him read some poems, just to, you know, do some stuff. There’s no footage of that little private thing, but it was wonderful,” Wilson said.
And it worked for Colman, helping her to get into her role quite easily.
“When you’re face to face with the most beautiful creature made of wicker, it’s very easy to swoon,” she joked.
Debicki said she was drawn to “Wicker” through the way it uses a darkly humorous fairy tale to explore “patriarchy’s effect on women,” as Colman’s character soon finds herself the target of villagers jealous of her happy life with a man literally made just for her. But beyond its themes, she realized that the film was an opportunity to get back in touch with her childhood love of fairy tales.
“My grandmother had these…I don’t know how old they were, but they felt very old to me…probably like 100-year-old books of Grimms’ fairy tales, Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales. I loved them,” she said. “And I think as an actor, sometimes people ask what you want to do and I never know, but maybe there was a little part of my brain that was just really waiting to do a fairy tale.”
When asked about what it was like to attend the last Sundance in Park City, Dinklage reflected on the current state of the film industry and expressed his desire to focus as much on the art as possible. He said he had concern that there was so much focus on the growing issues facing the industry that it might discourage future filmmakers.
“Everybody’s saying it’s really hard out there right now. If we keep saying that, nothing’s gonna be done and then all these great filmmakers are gonna shrink back into their offices,” he said. “They’re saying artists like Kubrick wouldn’t be able to survive today’s climate. Yeah, they would have. They would have adapted, because they’re geniuses. They would have changed their whole thing and survived. People still want to be entertained!”
