The real-life couple behind the movie everyone is talking about

Wicker has been generating all sorts of buzz for its funny, sexy and decidedly kooky take on marital and sexual relations.So it’s perhaps little wonder that the people behind it, writer-directors Eleanor Wilson and Alex Huston Fischer, are themselves a couple.“I’ll give you Alex’s biographical information and he can give you mine,” volunteers Wilson.“Eleanor lived in Melbourne and then came to New York to study,” begins Fischer.“From Adelaide,” she interjects.“Then London, then Melbourne, then to New York, to study at the Actors’ Playhouse,” the American Fischer resumes.“The Neighbourhood Playhouse,” she corrects. She pauses briefly, then adds: “I’ll tell you my stuff.”“It’s like The Dating Game,” he says, referring to the 1960s TV show.“I know,” she says, laughing. “The price is not right, Alex.”It’s rather endearing that they aren’t in total sync. It helps explain why Wicker – a feminist fable set in a vaguely medieval England, about a woman who conjures the ideal husband, who just happens to look like a basket – is so astute in its clear-eyed skewering of relationship dynamics.The movie was a popular choice to open the Melbourne International Film Festival in August, but the chatter has really picked up in the last few weeks, with thirst memes about a willowy Alexander Skarsgård and think pieces and an entirely understandable fascination with the mechanics of making love with a man of wood.Something Wicker this way comes … but what of the couple behind it?Married writer-directors Eleanor Wilson and Alex Huston Fischer on the set of their film Wicker with Olivia Colman as the Fisherwoman and Elizabeth Debicki as the Tailor’s Wife.RoadshowThe pair met in New York in late 2015, and almost immediately decided to try working together. “Eleanor was like, ‘I have this movie idea, what do you think?’,” says Fischer. “She asked if we would write together, and I thought that would be fun, and then we did.”“And then we kept doing it,” she says. “Now we’re married, we have a kid [aged four], we have two movies.”They work alone and with other people, too. “But most things we write together,” says Wilson.Do you always agree? Did you bicker over Wicker?“Writing with somebody is way more fun than writing alone,” says Fischer. “Writing alone can be torture.”“We enjoy making each other laugh and trying to impress each other, so it tends to make the work better because we’ve got an immediate audience we have to show our work to,” Wilson says. “You’re always thinking, ‘is this going to be funny?’ At least that’s how we wrote Wicker. We were mostly focused on making each other laugh throughout that process.”Eleanor Wilson and Alex Huston Fischer at the LA premiere of their movie last month.AP Photo/Jordan StraussThe film is adapted from a short story, The Wicker Husband, written by Ursula Wills. While the essential elements were all there in the 14-page source material, “there was not a tonne of character specificity, and it was very scant in dialogue, which is an incredible gift to people who love writing dialogue and love digging into character,” Wilson says. “So we really pulled apart the village and the couples and tried to figure out exactly what each couple’s thing was, and dived into that.”They didn’t divide the characters by gender. It was more a case of each taking the bit they felt inspired to work on that particular day. “It’s sometimes a little more fun to write in the other gender’s voice and put yourself in that mindset,” observes Wilson.Fischer wrote some “brilliant” stuff for the Tailor’s Wife, the bitter, judgmental and ultimately envious character played by Elizabeth Debicki. “And the Baker Man [who asks the Wicker husband to sleep with his own wife because he feels incapable of satisfying her needs] just poured out of me.”Was any of the stuff in the film drawn from your own lives or experiences?“Probably, but I couldn’t tell you,” says Fischer.“I think it’s drawn from our psyches,” says Wilson. “I think it’s all in there somewhere. I think a lot about the Tailor’s Wife. I’ve always felt very close to her, even though she’s obviously not the best character in the movie. There’s something about her that I feel is justified, a deep-rooted anger that I had that needed to be resolved in a character in that way.”Anger about what?“Domestic labour, the mental load, for sure.”For independent filmmakers with just one prior feature to their name – the comedy Save Yourselves!, in which a couple on a retreat completely miss the fact that the planet has been invaded by aliens; released in 2020, COVID killed it at the box office, but made its theme of isolation seem eerily prescient – Wilson and Fischer have had a dream run with Wicker. And much of that, they readily acknowledge, is down to its female lead.From the outset, they’d had Olivia Colman in mind as the Fisherwoman, a stoic and lusty outsider who dares to ask for what she wants, and gets it.But, says Fischer, “we were told she probably won’t read this, she’s probably not going to do it, just go to somebody who’s more likely.”“But we just gave it a shot anyway,” says Wilson, “and we’re very lucky that she happens to be the kind of person who reads scripts and follows her heart…”Alexander Skarsgård as the Husband made of wicker.Roadshow“...and considers the actual work and the part as opposed to what’s the best thing for her career,” adds Fischer. “Because if she was just deciding what’s the best option for her career, she probably wouldn’t have made a movie with the two of us.”With Colman locked, all the other pieces began to fall into place. “The whole industry wants to work with her,” says Wilson.New Zealand special effects house Weta, which designed the prosthetic wicker suit Skarsgård wears, was also key to getting the film made. Skarsgård followed Colman, and then came the money.“It does sometimes feel that this project got magic dust sprinkled on it in a way that’s a little bit beyond us and our understanding,” says Wilson.Now that their film is out there for the whole world to see, what precisely do its makers want audiences to take away from it?“We just hope people have a good time,” Wilson says. “We’d just love it if people go to the cinema and have a laugh. If you think about it beyond that, that’s great. If you don’t, and it’s just a good time, that’s great too.”Wicker is in cinemas now.Must-see movies, interviews and all the latest from the world of film delivered to your inbox. Sign up for our Screening Room newsletter.