Tale of slings and arrows - 12/5/09

By ANDREW FENTON

A thinned-down Russell Crowe, dressed in tight leather pants and holding a battered steel-string guitar. Softly he begins to sing Bruce Springsteen's Highway Patrolman as 100 or so grotty, long-haired and bearded soldiers crowd around.

And then, as one, they join in to sing backing vocals.

At the end, everyone lets out a huge cheer.

The short interlude over, everyone resumes positions to shoot a comical fight scene between Robin Hood and Little John (Kevin Durand).

It involves Crowe swinging from the rafters and whacking Durand in the face with a dead chicken.

"Enjoy this fight,'' instructs an assistant director. "It's a good reward after a hard day's killing.''

It's day 80 on the set of Ridley Scott's $155 million Robin Hood film (it's still officially known only as Untitled Robin Hood Adventure) at The Bourne, about 20 minutes from Heathrow.

We're standing on "Gladiator Hill'', so named because it's the exact spot Maximus led the Roman Army to victory against Germanic barbarians in the opening scenes of Scott's and Crowe's first -- and most successful -- collaboration. It's far from the only similarity between this version of Robin Hood and the Academy Award-winning epic. At times, it seems like they're deliberately trying to recreate that Gladiator magic.

Rusty has been through a rigorous fitness regime with a trainer from the US National Basketball Association to shed the sweaty fat-man look from Body Of Pies -- sorry, Body Of Lies -- and shortly before filming, Scott instructed his newly buffed action star to crop his hair close and to grow a beard.

But Crowe says the two films differ sharply in emphasis.

"If Gladiator was in total a metaphor about death, then this is about rebirth,'' he says. "Every character in this film that you care about comes to a better place through the course of the narrative.''

Apart from occasional flashes of annoyance whenever he thinks a question might have a hidden agenda, Crowe appears relaxed and amiable. And he has every reason to be in a good mood.

After more drafts than the Middle East road map for peace, two abandoned attempts to start production and an endless stream of "bad-boy Crowe'' news stories, the film previously known as Nottingham is now just two weeks from wrapping and $8.3 million under budget.

It's been a massive undertaking. Tonight's epic battle between the French and the English involves 400 extras, dozens of horses and almost 500 crew members.

Director Scott is a crumpled-looking man wearing a hooded windcheater.

"This is the small bit, by the way,'' he says in his soft burr. "It's massive, what we've been doing.''

The production has just finished a fortnight's filming at a beach in Pembrokeshire, Wales, where Scott staged a huge sea-borne invasion of England. "It's like an action replay of the William the Conqueror landing in 1066,'' he says.

Scott's long-time costume designer, Janty Yates, says the sequence was the apex of the production.

"I was crying to see it -- it's the culmination of everything we've been working for,'' she says.

The film began life as a high-concept screenplay that reversed the famed legend by making the Sheriff of Nottingham the good guy. It sparked a bidding war and eventually sold to Universal for a seven-figure sum.

Ironically, neither Crowe nor Scott -- who were then collaborating on American Gangster -- liked the idea.

"Some stories you can take and flip over but I just can't see the point of doing that with Robin Hood,'' Crowe says.

"I wasn't interested in doing a story where the main character was a well-meaning public servant.

"Without being rude, that script was CSI: Sherwood Forest. I mean, the sheriff was wandering around examining the trajectory of an arrow, s... like that.''

But he liked the idea of doing justice to the legend.

"I said, `I'm really into making a Robin Hood, but I don't want to make it from this perspective','' he says.

Crowe told producer Brian Grazer he'd make a version of the tale if Scott was the director.

"Within 48 hours it was a done deal,'' he says.

The current version of the script -- probably about number 713 if the rumours are true -- exists because the production was postponed just weeks away from filming on two separate occasions. The writers' strike, and then a threatened actors' strike, were both major factors but there were constant concerns about the script.

Scott says it's always a battle to get a script in shape. "The hardest single thing to do is to actually write the screenplay,'' he says. "Once I've got the screenplay, making movies is easy for me.''

Crowe argues -- without being asked -- that this version of Robin Hood took no longer to develop than any other film, it's just it was done in public.

Whenever the various writers completed a draft, they'd tell people their ideas.

"Every time I saw one of those articles I was like, 'Oh boys, you're in for a little bit of disappointment','' Crowe says with a grin.

So, contrary to what you may have heard, Robin Hood will not be assuming the Sheriff's identity after seeing him killed in battle and Crowe will most certainly not be playing both Robin Hood and the Sheriff simultaneously.

Instead they've gone with a gritty, historically appropriate origins tale. Robin and the men who become his band of outlaws have spent a decade fighting the Crusades with King Richard the Lionheart's army. After Richard (Danny Huston) is killed, Robin returns to Nottingham, where he's appalled by what England has become.

He sets out to fight for the rights of men and sets in train events that lead to the Magna Carta. Along the way he falls for the strong-willed Lady Marian, played by Cate Blanchett.

Blanchett, of course, came on board to replace Sienna Miller, who was reportedly too young to be credible as Marian opposite Crowe. Scott appears happy to support this version.

"I think we kind of ended up more appropriately,'' he says. " Russell will kill me for saying this but [Miller's] so much younger. [Blanchett] is the equivalent of Russell in terms of strength on screen. As lovely as Sienna Miller is, it seems doubtful she would have been able to summon up as much strength in the part.''

Crowe says he has been a fan of Blanchett's since watching her in her first major stage role opposite Geoffrey Rush in the 1993 David Mamet play Oleanna.

"I saw her on a poster and I didn't even know what the play was,'' he says.

"Her face was just arresting and so I went and saw the play and she was magnificent. When she came on board [the film] it was just spectacular. Ridley and I could never have imagined just how fantastic she would be with us. And particularly as Ridley tends to be a very robust guy. She just flows with all of that.''

The film is Crowe's fifth collaboration with Scott the "very robust'' director -- and the production has been dogged by rumours they have been at loggerheads.

Talk to each of them individually, however, and there's a sense it's this tension that produces results.

Scott says he likes the fact he doesn't have to tiptoe around Crowe's feelings.

"It's easier if you've waltzed before: you've got the arguments out of the way and fundamentally, it's down to you being able to say, `What? I hate that!''' he says. "And him saying, `Well, why are we doing that?' So you get straight to it as opposed to a polite waltz.''

Crowe puts it more bluntly: "We don't agree on anything. But we talk through it.''
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Thanks, Steph, CGee