http://news.therecord.com/arts/article/237124
Willard Kitchener MacDonald hid alone in Nova Scotia’s woods for 60 years, disliked posing for pictures and eschewed the everyday hustle and bustle of the outside world. But Toronto-based filmmaker Amy Goldberg — whose documentary on the famous recluse debuts at the Atlantic Film Festival this month — said she believes MacDonald secretly desired bigger, better things.
“In one way, Willard, I think, wanted to be famous,” said Goldberg, of Pushback Productions, in an interview.
“He was so interested in playing his music. In every shot that I have of Willard in old footage, he’s playing guitar or violin. (He’d ask), ‘What do you think of this song?”‘
For six decades, the man lovingly dubbed the Hermit of Gully Lake took shelter in the woods near Earltown, N.S., north of Halifax, after abandoning a troop train during the Second World War.
MacDonald, who said in interviews he didn’t believe in killing others, remained suspicious of the government and police long after Canada declared an amnesty for army deserters in 1950. He kept mostly to himself in a dilapidated, two-metre-by-two-metre shack, where he would sometimes compose music on a guitar he had fashioned himself.
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