Robin Hardy
by Daniel Robert Epstein for SuicideGirls (http://suicidegirls.com/)

Robin Hardy cemented his place in film history in the early 70’s when he wrote and directed the cult film, The Wicker Man. Since then Hardy has done a number of film and television projects but has never tackled the subject of pagans again until now. His new novel Cowboys for Christ posits the idea of two Texas missionaries, one an upcoming young female singer and the other her celibate boyfriend, go to Scotland to preach Christ. But in the small Scottish village of Tressock they are preparing to fulfill a horrifying pagan fertility ritual.

Check out the official website for Cowboys for Christ

Daniel Robert Epstein: What was the inspiration for the book?

Robin Hardy: Obviously there’s a background in the book in The Wicker Man but it is not directly related. I have a home up in Vermont so I have spent a lot of time in the States. I’ve been following with some trepidation however this religion-political movement that you’ve got there. I thought that if we were going to do another story in that genre, it would be rather interesting to take these innocent young people and plant them into post-Christian Europe and see what happens. I spent a little time in Texas. These Cowboys for Christ churches are a whole series of churches that are not only in Texas. They’re in Montana and Wyoming although I haven’t visited them there. They’re very big on music of course. I think that they’re probably less extreme fundamentalists than a lot of others really. They’re run more like a normal Baptist church. When I lived in New York I used to occasionally go to one of those wonderful gospel-singing churches up in Harlem where the music is so great. They have a big choir at the back of the church, whereas the Episcopalian church that I used to go to when I was a child, there was always a choir and the preacher was up front in the middle of the sanctuary. Then there was the congregation with a lot of interaction between the two. Cowboys for Christ churches are like that only instead of having the choir, they’ve got a band. They’ve got a big cattle trough for dipping calves in water and when people were moved, they go up and they confess whatever it is they’ve done. Then they are plunged into this water and taken away to be dried somewhere. Then they come back and everyone says “Hallelujah” and they’ve been born again. Rather like Catholic Church confession really. You’ve got a whole new chance in life.

DRE: How true are the characters in the book to the people that you met?

RH: Pretty true. Beth, the young female character, has had a career very much like LeAnn Rimes and two or three of those relatively young girls. They’ve made their $50 million by the time they’re 19 or 20 and they’ve usually had a daddy or a mommy who shepherded them through. Sometimes that was a good relationship and sometimes it wasn’t. I think the interesting thing in my concept is that the girl finds that she has a voice that can be adapted for opera and for really ambitious singing rather than simply to being styled for various types of pop. I think it’s an interesting idea that someone could discover while being put through that Nashville mill that they can actually sing like Maria Callas.

DRE: What fascinates you about the paganist culture that’s in The Wicker Man and this book?

RH: What interests me about it is that we in Western Europe share a series of versions of the Pagan religion, which are still with us in all sorts of ways. The days of the week are named after the old god. All the symbolism of Christmas and Easter was from the Pagan church. It’s interesting too that in the 21st century most of us in Western Europe thought religion was never going to be a factor in our lives again. Then suddenly the United States got into a highly religious mood and we’ve got Islam being religiously aggressive so I think it’s intriguing to revive these ideas. I’m not suggesting more than a very small number of people are reviving them, although we do have quite large groups of Pagans in England and I think the same is true in a lot of other Western European countries. I say quite large, but they’re tiny really. They’re probably a few thousands of people rather than hundreds of thousands. But they’re there and they make their statements. At Stonehenge we’ve just had the summer solstice ceremonies and they closed all the main roads for miles around and these people arrived and celebrated the sun.

What I really wanted to say in Cowboys for Christ is that having lived half my life in the United States and half my life outside, I’m more and more aware of how extraordinarily cut off America is from the rest of the world. One of my sons went to a Massachusetts school and graduated but he was taught no geography whatsoever and had one year of world history but because he traveled quite a lot with me and my family, he knows something about the rest of the world. The officials of the current government and the armed forces go out into places about which they know staggeringly little.

When I say that my young protagonist in my book knows staggeringly little, they might just as well be in Papua, New Guinea than in Scotland. They have an innocent stroke of ignorance which makes them easy victims. The reviews of the book have felt that the young Americans are quite attractive characters and they worry about what has happened to them and they quite rightly feel they don’t deserve the trap that they find themselves in. But I think it’s an important part of our world these days that we try and learn a little more about the world around us than we’re doing at the moment.

DRE: There’s always been humor in your work. I don’t think I’ve ever read anything that compares a woman’s pubic hair as looking like Hitler’s mustache.

RH: Humor is important because I think the whole thing about this kind of book is that you want to have the audience feel that these are normal people. Normal people have sex so this business of women having their pubic hair cut into all these rather exotic shapes happens to be a current custom. I really want to emphasize that these young people are moving into what is just a normal zeitgeist. They’re not working everyday for some castle in Transylvania where everybody is creepy. But the sex is deliberately amusing. Nevertheless, it does have the effect of lulling the reader into a sense of nothing very terrible can happen in this kind of environment.

DRE: When did you know that The Wicker Man had turned into a cult movie?

RH: It took a long time but it was popular on television both in America and in the UK right up until the release of the DVD. When the DVD was released in both countries, it really took off. But when I did the original distribution with Christopher Lee, he and I went all around the United States with the film and we knew that it had made an amazing impact.

DRE: I’m surprised that it made an impact when you were first promoting it.

RH: Well it was buried in England because of the political state of the studios, one of those classic assassinate the president by rubbishing his film. But when I got the rights back in the United States and we did the distribution in the United States the film had so many amazing write ups in the film press like in Cinefantastique. When that happened, we knew that we were onto something which was really worth promoting and that’s really how we managed to raise the money for prints and advertising money. We then went on this extraordinary press tour and in each town, the film was greeted with an amazing response from the critics. The great thing about the United States is that every town has got five to ten radio stations. It is just a mass of media just waiting for something to write about or talk about. Christopher Lee already had his reputation, so he was a good interview.

DRE: I understand that you do not want to have your name on The Wicker Man remake.

RH: Yes, when the production was going on last year. I kept on trying to get them to take it off because I had nothing to do with the remake. They kept on putting me in as the screenwriter which is ridiculous. I got my lawyers to go after the indie producers back in LA and eventually they took it off. But why they put it on, I cannot imagine.

DRE: Are you going to see the remake when it comes out?

RH: Oh yeah. I’ll see it.

DRE: I read you’re going to shoot a movie version of Cowboys for Christ.

RH: I’m hoping to shoot it in February or March of next year.

DRE: Do you have a confirmed cast?

RH: Christopher Lee is certainly going to join us again and Vanessa Redgrave is going to play his wife.

DRE: What about Sean Astin?

RH: Sean Astin wanted to play one of the roles, but I think he feels that he’s too old because the cowboys are supposed to be about 19 or 20 and Sean is in his early 30’s. Anyway, he’s taken up a career in directing and I think we will go with a younger actor which will be the right decision for him and for us. But for the moment he’s still interested in playing it. My main concern is finding the right person for Beth. So I am proposing to go and do the rounds in Texas and Nashville and LA to see if we can get Leann Rimes. But I think she’s going to be too expensive for us so we’ll try and find somebody who’s on the same trajectory.

by Daniel Robert Epstein

SG Username: AndersWolleck

web address: http://suicidegirls.com/words/Robin+Hardy/