My guests today are the husband-and-wife writing and directing team Alex Huston Fischer and Eleanor Wilson, whose excellent new movie Wicker hits theaters this Friday.
My conversation with Alex and Eleanor – or Al and El, as people call them – fits snugly into one of my favorite subcategories of this podcast: the married couple episode! It started with the glorious chaos of talking to Mandy Patinkin and Kathryn Grody, continued with musicians and actors Peter Dreimanis and Leah Fay Goldstein (who recorded with their newborn baby in tow!), and now goes from strength to strength with this episode.
Alex and Eleanor have been a couple for more than a decade and have been making films together for about half that time. In 2020, they released their debut feature, Save Yourselves!, an inspired comedy about a couple sequestered in Upstate New York for a digital detox … who become aware that while they were offline aliens invaded Earth.
Charming, inventive and incredibly fun, Save Yourselves! announced the pair as filmmakers to watch, and created the opportunity for them to make their second film, Wicker ...
A buzz hit at Sundance this past winter, Wicker stars Olivia Colman as a fisherwoman who commissions the local basket weaver (Peter Dinklage) to make her a wicker husband … who turns out to be Alexander Skarsgård! The film is funny, sexy, highly entertaining – and extremely original. If you’ve seen the trailer for Wicker, you might have a sense of what it is, but trust me, the film is a lot more complex and expansive than is hinted at, and to me it’s one of the must-see movies of the fall.
On the subject of expectations, I didn’t really know quite where my conversation with Alex and Eleanor would go exactly, but we ended up touching on some wonderfully unlikely subjects, including: the innocent wisdom of their son Augie, Alex’s history with night terrors (and the injury they caused him just before Sundance), medieval polyphasic sleep rhythms (obviously!), Eleanor’s love of the Australian magpie, the unfortunate mullet Alex got last time he was Down Under, and much more.
Wicker opens this Friday and is essential big-screen viewing, and if you missed Save Yourselves! when it first came out, you should definitely catch up with it now!
Oh, and also go read the wonderful piece on Yahoo Serious that Alex and Eleanor wrote for Talkhouse back in 2020.
This episode was produced by Myron Kaplan and our new theme music is “Partly Cloudy Days” by Oscar Louis.
Oscar Louis’s band Nowhere Else to Be has their debut album dropping December 4 – go follow them now!
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Next week on Nobody’s Ever Asked Me That, my guest is singer-songwriter Clara Mann …
