On screen, Robin Hood has been robbing from the rich to feed the poor for nearly as long as movies have been made. The likes of Errol Flynn, Kevin Costner and Sean Connery have put their imprint on the character, portraying him as everything from a swashbuckling rogue to a battle-hardened crusader. Even Walt Disney got in on the action, depicting Sherwood Forest as an animated haven for anthropomorphic foxes, bears and chickens. Given the dozens of films about Robin Hood, Michael Sarnoski, the director of “Pig” and “A Quiet Place: Day One,” worried there wasn’t much left to say about the famous thief.

“I loved the legend since I was a little kid,” Sarnoski says. “But I loved the ballad about the death of Robin Hood almost as much. This idea that this immortal folkloric figure also has a very human, simple, quiet death stayed with me.”

So Sarnoski used the story of Robin Hood’s last days as a jumping off point to offer a very different look at the outlaw, one that treated him as a haunted, guilt-stricken figure whose criminality is a matter of survival, not charity. It’s a savage take on the fable that is more aligned with “Unforgiven” or “Valhalla Rising” than the kind-hearted, tights-wearing merry men from so many movies.
“The earliest written mention of Robin Hood is in this history book called the Scotichronicon, which is basically a chronicle of Scotland, and it calls him a murderous cutthroat who common folk are so fond of glorifying,” Sarnoski says over a lunch at a midtown Manhattan restaurant. “That made me think about what a medieval bandit would really be like. They would not have existed in a glamorous happy world where they were worried about the poor.”

As he researched the story, Sarnoski listened to lectures on medieval history. “One of the teachers remarked that we think of medieval battles as knights on horses, but most of the time it was just peasants beating each other to death with shovels and rocks.”
Audiences will see Sarnoski’s mournful vision on Friday when “The Death of Robin Hood” opens in theaters. It stars Hugh Jackman as a murderous, thuggish Robin, long past his prime and hunted by the people he once terrorized and robbed.
“Hugh understood the character,” Sarnoski says. “He could bring the viciousness that I needed, like we’ve seen him do in ‘Prisoners’ and ‘Logan,’ but he’s such a kind, warm person that no matter how many kids he kills and horrible things he does, you believe he can be redeemed.”
Produced for roughly $20 million, “The Death of Robin Hood” was a scrappy affair. It shot for 30 days in remote sections of Northern Ireland with the cast and crew braving the cold to bring an authentically gritty story to the screen. There’s action in the film, but most of those sequences, including a bravura fight scene set in a farmhouse that’s been set ablaze, take place in the first 30 minutes. The rest of the movie is meditative, following Robin as he recovers from his wounds in a remote priory, where a mysterious healer (Jodie Comer) nurses him back to health. They grow close and their relationship takes an unexpected turn.
“I don’t want this to be some $100 million action-adventure,” Sarnoski says. “I want to make a movie for a responsible amount that can be weird and unique and have some edges.”
That meant getting buy-in on the title. Sarnoski wrote the script on spec and the film was packaged with Jackman and Comer before A24 came on board. Some potential buyers argued audiences would be turned off.
“Early on people were worried we were spoiling the movie or that it’s a bummer of a title,” Sarnoski says. “For me it felt like a chapter in an old book. I took a lot of liberties and changed the characters. I explored some nuances. I’m not trying to trick the audience about the tone of the story. And when A24 came on board, they eventually were like ‘we can market the shit out of this title.'”
Like “Pig,” the Nicolas Cage revenge drama that put Sarnoski on the map, “The Death of Robin Hood” is atmospheric and assured. It’s beautifully shot with Sarnoski’s camera capturing a rugged, mountainous landscape that’s as unrelenting and unforgiving as the film’s tortured protagonist. Given the darkness of his work, you’d expect Sarnoski to be an idiosyncratic Lynch-ian figure or a Peckinpah-ish man’s man. Instead, he’s bespectacled and soft-spoken, dressed in a blazer that makes him look more than an antiquarian than an auteur as he eats steak tartare with truffles.

Sarnoski, who grew up Milwaukee and went to Yale, got his start making low-budget short films and documentaries. When he got his big break with “Pig” in 2021, he worried he’d didn’t have what it took to call the shots on a feature.
“I’m a pretty anxious person in my daily life and always second-guessing myself,” Sarnoski says. “But I remember walking onto the set the first day of ‘Pig,’ and there were 10 seconds where I was like, “Holy shit, Nic Cage is walking up dressed as a character that I created.’ And then I just went to work and all that other shit just faded away.”
Sarnoski has found himself in demand after “A Quiet Place: Day One” scored at the box office and “Pig” was embraced by critics. Having offered his darker take on Robin Hood, he will next re-team with A24 on a live-action film adaptation of the video game “Death Stranding.” The story unfolds in a post-apocalyptic America that is ravaged by supernatural creatures. Sarnoski recently turned in a second draft of the script and hopes to shoot the picture in Iceland and Northern Ireland next year.
“I want it to feel big, but also offbeat and character driven,” Sarnoski says. “This takes place in the world of the video game, but I have my own set of characters. There are some like overlapping characters that fans will be excited to see, but it’s very much my own story within this universe.”
After that, Sarnoski has an idea for a smaller, low-budget personal project.
“I want to keep floating between the studio system and the indie world,” Sarnoski says. “If I can have a career like that, I’ll feel very spoiled.”
Here are five films Sarnoski says inspired “The Death of Robin Hood.”
“I love the physical brutality of the story and how it is set against the bleakness of the landscape. You just feel cold and alone watching it. And then there are these really intense moments of violence that are abrupt and unpleasant. That’s how I approached the violence in ‘Robin Hood.’ I want it to leave a sour taste in your mouth.”
“It takes place in the same time period as ‘Robin Hood.’ There’s a realness to it. You feel like it captures what it must have been like then and not in some cliched old-timey version of the medieval era that Hollywood used to make. And it’s also a deeply human tragedy. It’s impossible not to be moved by it.”

“The film conveys the danger of nature. Everything around the characters is designed to kill them so they are never safe. I wanted that kind of intensity for the first 30 minutes of my movie. I wanted you to feel you could never let your guard down.”
“I thought a lot about this movie for the scenes in the Priory. I tried to convey the same sense of stumbling upon this unlikely community that has created a world of its own that’s beautiful and serene, but there’s this fragility to what’s been built. It could all collapse at any moment.”
“Robin Hood spends part of the film in bed and sick with Jodie’s character looking after him. That also caused them to build this unexpected understanding. They trust each other but that trust manifests in a peculiar way that takes the story in a darker direction much like ‘The Phantom Thread.'”

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