Christopher Lee talks about The Wicker Man

some journalists said it was the citizen kane of horror movies and anthony who wrote it and robin hardy who directed it and i and the other people who were in it we didn't think that was the right word to use it's a brilliant film a brilliant film but i don't know how much you know about the history of that film do you know much about the history of the making of the film you're done have any of you ever read a magazine called cine fantastique have you read the story about the making of the wicker man you haven't it's the whole whole magazine oh i see well i'm not going to go into the whole story it's too complicated but uh we made the movie remarkable film remarkable film brilliantly written and the part was written for me which doesn't happen very often chaperone wrote it for me personally i was very happy to be in it it's a remarkable film it's a cult film still all over the world they're talking about remaking it in america with nicholas cage no that's i mean that's what universal says they're going to remake the movie but i don't know what they're going to do and somebody said they'd seen on the internet that they wanted me in the film i thought well what do i play because if this is an american story and he's an american obviously and everybody else is american well i could play americans but what would i do in the story i could play lord samurai obviously um so i don't know what's going to happen but when the film was finished and i saw it i thought there was a enormous amount of film missing i would think at least 15 to 20 minutes and i saw it with my agent and my wife in british lab projection room in london in 1973 and we went upstairs and we saw the head of british land there was a man called michael dealey and he said i said thank you very much for showing us the film michael and so he said what did you think of it and i said well i think it's damn good and i have my agents and i think it's a tremendous film and michael dealey said i think it's one of the 10 worst films i've ever seen i i had to degree so when i saw it i spoke to the producer peter snell i spoke to the director robin hardy and i spoke to the editor i spoke to anthony schaffler and i said let's try and find the negative and what we call the out takes you know the bits you don't use but you print them never been seen again never been seen we couldn't find it and that's 30 years ago nearly i still believe it exists somewhere in cairns with no domain but i still believe that but nobody's ever seen it since so we couldn't re-cut it re-edit it which is what i wanted to do it would have been ten times as good that answer your question

Channel: Srdjan Mitrovic

Views: 240,615

Keywords: Christophr, Lee, horror, film, festival, press, wicker, man

Id: M39giPEjE6Y

Length: 3min 28sec (208 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 25 2007