“Wicker” is a hilariously bawdy fairy tale about a fisherwoman (Olivia Colman) who asks the local basket weaver (Peter Dinklage) to make her a wicker husband (Alexander Skarsgård), which makes her very happy but upends her village’s social hierarchy. It is sharply clever, but it also says something about how we see ourselves and others, and the poignancy of mortality.
In an interview with RogerEbert.com, the couple who wrote and directed the film, Eleanor Wilson and Alex Huston Fischer, talked about the importance of getting the squeaky crunch sound of the wicker just right, the multicultural crew that made the setting universal, and what they did instead of rehearsal to create the chemistry of the romantic relationship.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
The sound design in this movie really brings the wicker husband’s movements to life.
Eleanor Wilson: Our sound designer, Andy Neil, is actually someone that I’ve worked with for a really long time. He’s Australian too, and we met when I was just an up-and-comer, more than twenty years ago, I think. He’s mixed all my short films, and we’re on parallel paths. He did “The Brutalist” right before we did our movie, so it’s always nice when it’s like, “I want to hire my friend,” and people look at you sideways, and then you’re like, “He did ‘The Brutalist.’”
The best thing was that he got on board really early, so he started with us around the first cut.
Alex Huston Fischer: Usually you wait till the picture is locked because it’s a lot of work to change things. But he was like, “I want to come in early,” and the way the program works now, you can update things easily.
EW: Normally things like the wicker husband sounds might be done much later in Foley, but he was getting in early, crunching baskets, crunching seaweed, all the crunchy things he could find.
AHF: And just creating the character because it is a completion of the special effect, really. That was one of the first things he did.
How do you make sure that sound is so prominent? It punctuates the film, and it has to change as his situation changes.
AHF: He’s got such great taste. We were talking about, like, how sturdy is the wicker husband at the beginning, and how rigid is he at the beginning, and how frequency-wise, how big does he sound? How strong does he sound? Or how fragile does he sound? So, finding that balance was part of the game.
EW: It’s a multi-layered sound, and it was a beautiful handoff because obviously, there’s WETA Workshop who made the suit, there’s Alexander [Skarsgård] who embodies the character. Alexander came with a lot of ideas, saying that the wicker husband starts out much more rigid and a little even tentative and–
AHF: More staccato in his speech.
EW: And then throughout the film as he’s learning more, he’s also warming up and becoming softer. Andy took the idea Alexander created with his performance and brought it into the sound design as well.
AHF: And even in the early lines when Alexander is speaking, he put a little bit more of wicker in the jaw. That’s just the wicker husband, let alone creating the whole environment, which is all an invention. We took our favorite sounds from all over the world and put them in this village. There are birds from Australia.
That village is a little fairy tale, but also a little real. Tell me about the production design.
EW: For everyone across the board, all the department heads, it was a very open brief because we really wanted it to feel not like a specific time and place. We wanted an anachronistic approach to everything and to create our own time, but still keep it specific. We kept trying to offset the time and place, keep everyone guessing about where it was, and give it a sort of universal-fable feel.
AHF: And everybody that worked on the movie brought their own culture to it, which was nice. We shot in Hungary, so there’s a lot of Hungarian influence in the folk art painted on the walls and furniture, and in the headdresses the brides wear. It’s a Hungarian tradition. The references came from Bruegel paintings.
The intricate wicker design also evokes folk art.
EW: WETA is incredible. We’re so lucky that they wanted to do this movie with us. They came on very early in the process, right around the same time Olivia [Colman] signed on. They started doing early concept art for us, which was essential to get things moving, and to show anyone what we hope and dream for this character.
AHF: We described him in the script. You know, he’s supposed to be beautiful, like a gorgeous, gorgeous man of basketball. But then you need to see what that looks like, because it can mean a number of things. And some people might think, well, is he just really like? Or it could be very, very rudimentary and stiff. But we were like, “No, no. We want the basketry to respond, to be animated as if it were a face, so it responds to the actor’s face and looks like Alexander Skarsgård, which is a really tall order.
And he was game to play a character where he’d be completely covered up?
EW: We’re lucky that he’s that kind of actor who’s just really down for something different. Partly because it was a physical challenge, but also because it was a really different character from the types he usually plays, and he’s a very earnest, pure character. Alexander speaks about the deep darkness of the wicker husband. That was an interesting challenge for him. He’s such an incredible actor. He’s so prepared and so powerful, and that’s what this role really required.
How did you work with him to develop the character’s physicality?
EW: We didn’t have that much rehearsal time, but we had done a really early Zoom read-through where he’d really brought the voice of the character, and he obviously wasn’t in his whole prosthetic during that time. But it was powerful just to see what he was doing with the voice, and it felt like he’d already cracked it from this little Zoom thing.
And the wicker was all practical? No CGI or AI?
EW: There are some tricks, and you know, spoiler moments, but for the most part that’s just what he looked like walking around. When we first got him in the prosthetic, it was really incredible. Not only him, but him and Olivia in costume together—they just seemed like such an iconic pairing.
We did a little rehearsal with him in the prosthetic, just 15 minutes, because we had a lot to do that day. We had dance rehearsals, intimacy rehearsals, and camera tests. We were like, “Let’s just have a tiny little bit of time together to do this. And we gave him some poems to read.”
Speaking of purity, he’s an extremely pure character. He’s new, and it’s so touching that, in his newness and purity, he’s completely devoted to her happiness.
AHF: And it is sort of shocking in a way. And funny at the same time. Like she doesn’t know what to do with that information. It’s too powerful. It’ll rattle you if you’re not ready, and it catches her by surprise. Because you have to be vulnerable.
This is based on a short story by Ursula Wills, adapted into a musical play. Is that what brought it to your attention?
AHF: It was the story first, then we heard it was a musical. We didn’t get to see it because we heard about it after. But our producer, Justin Lothar, was a fan of Ursula’s writing, so he sent us this short story, and we loved it. The story is short, but it’s a perfect five-act structure for a movie. We got into each character’s psychology because, in the short story, it feels very much like a fairy tale. They have one line here, one line there, and they’re kind of archetypes. And so we just wanted to dig in on who these people were. So we just filled out their idiosyncrasies.
EW: The short story was more of a fable about envy and how it can corrupt society. Which is an important layer.
AHF: So, it’s more of a moral tale, which the movie is as well. But then the movie also became a comedy and a romance.
The antagonist (I won’t say villain) is sympathetic in a way.
EW: I really relate to the tailor’s wife too, and so did Elizabeth Debicki; it’s fantastic to find an actress who can do that. She really understood it, and it was important to us that the character wasn’t portrayed as just a villain. A lot is going on that led her to behave the way she does, and that was our intention with the writing. But she really brought all of that to it.
EW: She understood the character. She and I find ourselves defending the tailor’s wife. It’s like she’s clawing her way out of being trapped.
AHF: When the movie starts, she’s on top of everything, and nothing changes for her. She doesn’t lose anything. She just sees another way.
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