How 'Wicker' Went From an Unpaid 2008 Website Story to a Star-Studded Fall Film

Ursula Wills posted her fairy-tale short story“The Wicker Husband”on the website East of the Web in 2008, and for years it sat there unpaid, with no indication anything would ever come of it. Then a producer contacted her agent out of the blue, and the adaptation moved to shooting surprisingly fast. That film isWicker, now in wide release, with Olivia Colman as a lonely fisherwoman who commissions a basket weaver (Peter Dinklage) to make her a husband (Alexander Skarsgård).

The movie preserves the story’s central tension about the Wicker Husband’s free will. As Wills puts it, when he says he was“made to be with her,”he’s stating a fact as well as saying something romantic, and that double meaning is exactly what audiences are debating online. The ending, though, is more hopeful than the story’s ambiguous one, with the characters escaping together in a wagon loaded with villagers’goods. Wills also drew on a real memory: a full-size wicker man statue fishing out of a millpond on an art trail in Cornwall about 20 years ago.

If the film leaves you wanting more, Wills has a collection of 12 other short stories arriving in April. So the question is: are you team“he genuinely chooses her,”or team“he was literally built for this”? Tell us in the comments.