Special Report: Wicker (2026)

0:04 Hold your ears folks it's showtime people pay good money to see this movie when they go out to a theater they want cold sodas hot popcorn and no monsters in the projection.

0:16 Booth everyone pretend podcasting isn't boring.

0:20 Turn it off.

0:25 Turn it off turn.

0:31 It off.

0:39 Denise, catch! Tanch!

0:40 If you need any yell, we can smell you're coming.

0:44 Lick my worm! So then, fisherwoman, you caught yourself a lover yet? Love seems more a burden than a prize. Sorry. It was my mom's.

0:56 There's absolutely no shame in living out your remaining days alone. I'll marry you.

1:07 Oh.

1:08 I want you to make me a husband. Be at the chapel in a month.

1:13 Good.

1:16 My gift is my craft.

1:19 A man's work is greater than the man himself.

1:23 Especially this.

1:26 I am here to marry you.

1:36 Ha! It's against the gods, isn't it, to marry a tree?

1:41 Does he have all the bits to him?

1:43 I heard that he's strong as a tree and just as hard.

1:46 He's Wicca.

1:46 Oh!

1:54 You've got some sort of scheme going with the natural world here.

1:57 Mother Nature provides, but merely augment. The bird is broken. I will fix it. You know, you've made quite an impression. The wives, they're all a flutter.

2:12 I don't blame her. I climb that.

2:14 Cousin.

2:14 I'm not sure that the fisherwoman and her companion is good for the village.

2:21 You are the reason I live and breathe.

2:24 It's not natural.

2:25 Men are not like that.

2:27 Fuck off.

2:27 Fuck off.

2:28 Yeah, fuck off.

2:29 Is someone being murdered? This whole village has become thoroughly debauched.

2:38 The devil's all of them.

2:39 You've been bit by a chicken. Let's dig in.

2:44 Fuck my wife!

2:46 Pardon my arse?

2:49 I think you'll be pleased, fisherwoman.

2:50 Pleased indeed.

2:55 My timber knight. My wavy ox.

2:57 My soft-bodied female animal.

3:09 Hey folks, welcome to a special episode of The Projection Booth. I'm your host, Mike White. On this episode, I am talking with co-directors Alex Houston Fisher and Eleanor Wilson all about their new film, Wicker. It's all about a wicker man. Wait, uh, uh, no, not the wicker man. A wicker man. Yeah, there's a lot of wicker in this. It's just a really, really nice little movie with Richard E. Grant, Alexander Skarsgård, Peter Dinklage, and of course the star of the show is Olivia Colman.

3:39 Thank you so much for listening, and I hope you enjoy this interview. I remember seeing your film, what, six years ago, Save Yourselves, which was delightful.

3:51 Oh, thank you.

3:52 Thank you.

3:53 Was that the first time that you had worked together?

3:56 As co-directors, yes, that was the first time we'd worked together. Prior to that, we were hustling indie filmmakers. And hiring each other on jobs and things like that.

4:06 Yeah.

4:06 So we knew that we could work professionally together in a professional capacity, but it was the first time we'd written anything together. And the first time we directed together.

4:14 Yeah.

4:14 It worked out.

4:16 How'd you guys meet?

4:18 On Tinder.

4:19 It's a dating app.

4:20 New York city, 2015 Tinder.

4:21 Okay.

4:23 I just spoke to a co-directing couple, and I can never just assume that they are together together.

4:28 I know. Who's that? You don't want to miss him.

4:32 How are we going to know all the co-directing couples? We know a few of them.

4:36 That's true. There are more of us coming every day.

4:38 How is it working together, especially writing a film like Wicker together?

4:44 We like it.

4:45 Yeah, this is our second film together, and we found that the We've written more than just two films together and we find the writing process is really fun. And the directing process is very hard, but I don't think that's anything to do with us being a couple.

5:00 That's just the job.

5:01 It's actually, if anything, slightly easier.

5:03 Yeah, exactly.

5:04 When you have a buddy to go through it all. Exactly. Yeah.

5:07 But yeah, it was certainly fun to get into it about relationships and marriage. And we got married two months before we started writing the first draft.

5:17 So all that stuff was definitely on our minds and informing the script, I'm sure. It was sent to us by one of our producers, Justin Lothrop, who was a fan of Ursula's writing and had come across this short story, which was unpublished, but he'd sent it to us and we just loved it.

5:36 We just thought it was... We thought it would make for a good movie.

5:41 Yeah. Obviously, but it was so.

5:45 beautifully structured as a fable and so lifting that structure and adapting it to a screenplay was a real gift to the process also it just seemed like there might be something that we could add in making it a visual medium given that there's a wicker husband at the center of it so we wanted to know what he would look like that's right.

6:09 Were you familiar with wicker before this do you shop at ikea or pure one imports anything like that.

6:17 So funny i met someone the other day who watched the movie and afterward they're like i want to tell you i love the film but i have a real aversion to wicker i still play the sound and his like right i was like how did you do with the movie and he's like i got through it it was like well we.

6:33 Enjoyed it why would you choose to go to film.

6:35 I thought that was pretty cool you know it's like batman's facing his fears yeah.

6:40 We do have some Wicker furniture in our home.

6:42 We have a lot of baskets.

6:43 We also, Alex.

6:44 We've got IKEA light that kind of looks like Wicker. Yeah, yeah, that's true, yeah.

6:47 Well, Alex comes from a family of artists, and his grandmother was a weaver. We have a lot of weavings in our house from her, and yeah.

6:55 Yeah, yep.

6:56 Yeah, the look of, I hate to say, the Wicker Man, because I was going to call up the other movie, but the look of the Wicker Man... It's fantastic. Can you tell me a little bit about your production designer and how the design of him came through?

7:12 Oh, yeah. So, what a workshop out of New Zealand. You would know them from Lord of the Rings and Avatar, and then they decided to do our small indie film. We spent 18 months working together. They had a team of weavers, artisans, and practical effects artists who... just worked so hard for 18 months.

7:38 And yeah they started with us on concept art and then it was sort of materials development going back to design and then the design informing the practical manufacturer and vice versa back and forth for a long time and then of course alexander came on board about six months or so before we shot yeah and once we had his skin, then it was all about just making it exactly as best.

8:03 We could in his likeness.

8:04 Yeah.

8:05 So we all studied his face. A lot. And yeah. What are the elements of Alexander Skarsgård' s face that make him Alexander Skarsgård? And then try to choose how to, you choose the weave pattern that could best show that, whatever it is, cheekbones, forehead.

8:24 But it was an incredibly complicated process.

8:26 And you find the points where you're like, where is the most facial movement coming from? And then how at those points you figure out the weave pattern that will best work for that area of the face. And then you try to hide seams because it's all designed to, as if it were real basketry. So there are always people at what a workshop who are really testing with real materials and putting weave patterns together to make sure that it could all be real. Then it was 3D printed and it was like a modular 3D printed prosthetic.

8:57 So there's 10 pieces that make up the facial prosthetic. Yeah. Incredible work that really paid off.

9:05 And then was he in makeup fully every single time he was on screen? Absolutely.

9:10 Yeah.

9:10 He's totally practical. He'd never had dots on his face or anything. We never worked with, we never saw Alex's real face. We had a couple of meals together and that was it. But on set, he was the wicker husband through and through, just like you see him in the movie.

9:24 Yeah.

9:25 It was really cool. That was fantastic.

9:27 How we wanted to make the movie, but it was also seemed essential for the relationship to work that it was otherwise a kind of a grounded movie and about these two people and we wanted them to be able to play off each.

9:41 Other in that way.

9:42 And there's obviously like VFX involved in the film, but it's like kind of cleanup and making him hollow, those kinds of things. It was fun though, because we realized early on they used to do get extra VFX capture of lighting reference and things like this just as kind of backup but one of the things they realized early on was that there was no need to put tracking markers on.

10:08 His face because his whole face was just full of tracking markers. So we never would have had to do that anyway.

10:15 But it was amazing. We talked to some practical effects companies and some VFX companies. And we did a lot of research before we started on this process. And everybody said, yeah, but you'll want to get a three-dimensional CG build because you'll have to replace it at some point. I'm like, no, we will not. We just were like, I don't think we will. And the more we worked on it, the more confident we felt in the process. And then even by the time we got to post, we had all this extra money saved for redoing which we never thought we would need. And then we got to contingency money.

10:49 So then we, then we got to put that money into other fun details, like more hollowness for through his suit. And you can see it's a very subtle and like very tactile, but we just stuck to our guns and trusted Joe Dunkley. It went up.

11:08 I can't imagine what it was like for him to try to act through that and just be in that impression for so many hours of the day.

11:15 It's pretty intense.

11:18 It was certainly a really interesting acting challenge, I think, Alexander, because obviously you want a beautiful, subtle, nuanced performance, but in order to do that in that prosthetic, you have to really mug underneath it.

11:31 To get a slight smile, he had to get a big, stupid grin.

11:37 And I mean, the entire cast is fantastic. I love Olivia Colman. I love Peter Dinklage. the population of the village is so wonderful and just so many great faces in there too.

11:49 Absolutely. Yeah.

11:51 We worked with a casting director, Carmel Cochran out of the UK. And obviously like we knew Elizabeth and Peter and we cast them early.

12:01 But it was amazing.

12:03 But casting the village was such a fun part of the process with her because it was a lot.

12:08 Of comedy actors, like comedians that we, And writers. Didn't know before.

12:13 Yeah.

12:14 Most of them are.

12:15 They're also writers. Yeah.

12:17 But it was really just like putting this village together and it was so fun to, you're not just thinking about the way everyone looks, but you're thinking about the comic sensibility has to align for everyone because there's comedy and then there's comedy. It's, you know, this is so many different versions of what that can mean.

12:33 And it's like, they have to have the same sense of humor as the screenplay.

12:36 Right.

12:37 Exactly. Yeah.

12:38 And, They're all just so incredible and so fun to work with and just really brought their characters so fully to each day of shooting.

12:46 It was really fun.

12:48 How did you find that balance? Because when I saw the trailer for it, I think a week, two weeks ago, I was wondering what the tone of the movie was. Was it going to be horror? Was it going to be comedy? Was it going to be more of a fairy tale? What was it? So I was unsure when I was watching this with my wife the other night because she's not a horror person. But then she was just like, that was delightful. That was so nice. There are fantasy elements, of course, who have a man made out of wicker, but how do you find that balance between comedy and the more serious pathos of the story?

13:20 You just gotta trust the actors to truthfully humanize both. The best jokes are because they come from a real place, and then the romance or the drama also comes from a human place. It's all them, basically.

13:36 It's I guess going back to the screenplay, though, it's even in there because we just try to follow the thread of the truth of the thing and not judge it too much. And naturally, some things come out funny and naturally some things come out more dramatic. We try to just not judge it and let it happen, let it be what it wants to be. And then it's just the edit, really. The edit is.

13:59 That's when you're like, you can dial it up depending on how you're feeling at that point in the movie. Is this too much ham? Or is it not enough ham?

14:08 Yeah.

14:11 Who was your editor on this one?

14:13 Sophie Marshall, who edited our first film as well.

14:15 Yeah. Very nice.

14:17 I always hear that relationship with an editor is very crucial, and it almost, speaking of a married couple, it almost feels like a marriage.

14:24 Yeah, she's our marriage counselor. Yeah.

14:29 Yeah.

14:30 So you write, just the two of us writing, and then you bring in, like, over 100 people and then it becomes this giant feast and then you go back to just two or three people yeah and then and then the pressure's on i felt like um i felt most stressed in post because i felt like we had gone out and like found the gold we like got the gold you have to get on how to get it home i got anxious about getting it home yeah.

14:52 Especially in those the last week of the before you pick schlock that's just like the most panic because you're.

14:59 Just like but sophie's.

15:00 Have we turned over every stone.

15:02 She's such a steady hand she really is she's so logical yeah and not emotional.

15:07 She's very great at working with us.

15:09 In particular she's like a vulcan yeah when.

15:13 Did you first get to see this with an audience pretty.

15:16 Early on actually oh no i mean well you mean like test screening or you mean the final thing.

15:21 We love testing the very first time we saw it was like an early cut and we were, I think, really nervous about showing it at all, yeah. And we shoot, it was like friends and family and Karen.

15:34 Yeah, yeah, you don't need to say it for me.

15:37 But it was like, there were some people in there that we were like, coaching this movie.

15:40 There were some really good filmmakers in the room that were like, this is our director's cut.

15:45 Yeah. That one was like, kind of tough. But then when we did, once we got it to a proper, the proper stage of showing a rough cut, then it was really fun because we, it was just like, 200 people who decided to show nobody we knew and we like to sit in the middle so we could hear how people are reacting and listen to their breathing.

16:05 But even in that first screening when it was like the earliest rough cut there was so much that we got out of that oh yeah the discussion it was a lot i always remember when there was some someone in the room said something disparaging about the tailor's wife and then all these three women just turned around and turned on this person defending her.

16:24 And I was like, brilliant. It's working. She's a really complex character and there's a lot to dig into.

16:29 But if people are fighting about her, then it's good.

16:32 Yeah. Yeah. We were always celebrating the Taylor's wife. That's true. Until, and then we're like, Oh, I feel like we can, we turned up some things. We put some lines back in some lines of dialogue back in it. We finally found what was right.

16:43 Yeah.

16:43 Yeah.

16:44 Just because it is so complicated and you want people to have just enough sympathy for her, but not so much that it's over.

16:51 Powering the whole movie.

16:52 An underwritten villain is deadly to a movie. Yeah.

16:56 I'm so excited for you both because I remember with Save Yourselves, it came out, what, October 2020? Not a lot of people going to movies at that time. And now, having a movie opening wide, it's got to be such a different experience for you.

17:11 This year in particular is a crazy year.

17:12 Oh, it's such a good year. For going into silver. There's so many good movies. I feel like people are sort of rediscovering it. Yeah, it's so exciting. Finally calling out of the COVID hole. Yeah, absolutely.

17:21 I mean, it feels like an honor to have a movie out in 2026.

17:23 Yeah.

17:25 It's very lucky.

17:26 A lot of good movies.

17:27 Yeah.

17:27 Right.

17:50 And the fate is.

17:51 Moving and the finger points to.

17:53 You He knocks you to your feet and so what are you gonna do? You have time when it's frozen, now you've got something to say The piper at the gates of dawn is calling you his way You watch the world exploding every single night Dancing in the sun, a newborn in the light. Say goodbye to gravity.

18:20 And say goodbye to death.

18:23 Have a good winter. A fairy man wants his money, you ain't gonna give it back.

18:51 He can't push his own load as.

18:54 You set off on the track. Nothing you can contemplate will ever be the same. Every second is a.

19:02 New spark that's the universe afraid.

19:05 You watch the world explode in every single night. Dancing in the sun, a new boy in the light. Your time will come Your time will come Your time will come Your time will Your time will come Your time will come Whoa-oh-oh-oh-oh Whoa-oh-oh-oh-oh Whoa-oh-oh-oh-oh Whoa-oh-oh-oh-oh