Hugh Jackman and Michael Sarnoski attend A24's The Death Of Robin Hood world premiere at AMC Lincoln Square 13 on June 10, in New York City.Stephanie Augello/Getty Images
How do you deliver a fresh take on a character who’s been around for about 800 years? Well, you add plenty of blood, muck and the grizzled visage of Hugh Jackman. That was the approach, for starters, of writer-director Michael Sarnoski when he started imagining The Death of Robin Hood.
A loose adaptation of an anonymous 17th-century ballad, the film stars Jackman as an isolated outlaw in Northern Ireland circa 1247 who is pulled into one last, exceptionally violent scheme by his one-time merry man Little John (played by Bill Skarsgard). After barely escaping with his life – but having taken many others’ – Robin recuperates under the care of a watchful nun (Jodie Comer) and a bandaged-to-the-hilt leper (Murray Bartlett).
The film not only marks a stark departure in Robin Hood legend, but also a jump back into the harder-scrabble corners of indie film for Sarnoski, after his work within the blockbuster machinery of A Quiet Place: Day One. Ahead of Robin Hood’s release this weekend, Sarnoski spoke with The Globe and Mail about tying his own kind of bow on the prince of thieves mythos.
In a way, I felt a lot of this film was a mirror image of your first feature, Pig. That movie starts off with a hero who is content in the life he leads, but is pulled into dark violence. Here, Robin is first plunged into a gory battle, then settles into a more quiet existence. Or is my read off-base?
It’s an interesting read, and I don’t disagree. For me, the core similarity in all of my movies is characters who feel like, on some level, their life is over. They’ve either literally or spiritually removed themselves from society, and feel there is no further growth for them. And then they’re challenged to have a connection that drives them deeper into understanding themselves. I wouldn’t say it was intentional, but you do see that throughline.
This was written before you started work on the Quiet Place spinoff. Was it jarring going from the more independent world, writing a script on spec, to the machinery of a blockbuster franchise?
The Quiet Place world is a lot less jarring than people might think, from a production standpoint. It’s a much bigger movie, but at the end of the day, it’s a collaborative thing. You’re still a director talking to a core group of five people. It’s just there, those five people had 20 more people under them. It’s like the military in some way, there’s a structure that allows you to scale it up. And that is kind of what I wanted to strip away in Robin Hood. To make it more indie-minded, where it feels like a core family making this movie.
Sarnoski at the world premiere screening of The Death of Robin Hood.David Dee Delgado/Reuters
You also had to shoot this one in just 30 days, which is incredibly ambitious for a film shot on location, with a number of heavily choreographed action sequences.
You need to have a smoothly-oiled machine, so everyone knows what they’re doing. It’s a lot of planning for these remote, expansive locations in Northern Ireland. We also were shooting on film, which encourages you to be really focused on what you’re trying to achieve. It’s a swirling endeavour, like building a car while you’re trying to drive it. But everyone felt supported and listened to.
The violence gets very intense in the earlier sequences. How dark did you allow yourself to go here?
The action was important because we needed to land the visceral, unsettling nature of that. It’s not supposed to be glorified Hollywood action – it’s supposed to make you feel a little sick. Which is what Robin is grappling with for the rest of the movie, that legacy of violence. We needed to not sugarcoat it. It was brutal. So that took a lot of planning with the stunt coordinators, the actors, and figuring out how to strip away that showiness that we’re used to seeing. We knew we wanted it to be muddy. Just guys rolling around in the muck, desperately trying to kill each other. Hugh was so willing to put himself in it. He was getting his face buried in the mud. He was having a rough go, but we all loved it.
What was it like working with Hugh compared to Nicolas Cage on Pig? You have two actors with very different public-facing personas.
I haven’t compared them too much, but they are both such professionals. They know exactly what they need to do. They’re so focused, and also know how to keep a nice vibe on set. On Pig, Nic was a little quieter and internal, but in a gentle and sweet way. These guys, they could be divas if they wanted to. They could make other people’s lives miserable. But they go out of their way not to do that.
You’re working on the adaptation of Hideo Kojima‘s Death Stranding video game. Can you say what your vision is for that?
I’m working on the script right now, and the reason I wanted to do that movie was to dive into the studio world again. And Kojima was so generous and welcoming into his world. He said, “We’re not going to do a story of the game, we’re going to do a story you want to tell within that world,” so he let me come up with my own characters and find my journey. It was very brave of him to say, here’s this thing I’ve been working on for the last 15 years of my life, my baby, and I’m giving you complete control over it.
This interview has been condensed and edited.