“I’m 10 years old and realizing these iconic symbolic characters are human beings, I’m talking about parents in this situation, and they can fail and die just like any other person can,” he continues. “They can suffer. It’s when you’re coming to terms with what mortality is and what growing up is, and I think it all just sort of hit me right around the same time.”
The impact of that hit lingered in Sarnoski’s mind for decades, seemingly expressing itself in strange ways. The filmmaker swears he wasn’t thinking about Robin Hood when he named Nicolas Cage’s vaguely outlawish chef living in the self-exile of a forest “Robin” on Pig, but he won’t deny the similarities between that story and the Robin Hood movie he would begin writing soon afterward—or even his A Quiet Place prequel. It was in fact the prospect of tackling the latter, which led to him finally returning to that elegiac ballad about Robin and the Prioress.
“I was getting ready to write A Quiet Place, and it was just like this moment of ‘screw it.’ I’m about to go do a studio movie, so let’s just write this thing that’s always lived inside me and that I’ve always wanted to get out on paper. I know it could be a dumb idea to make another Robin Hood movie, who needs that? But I gotta get this thing out of me to see if it’s something that I wanted to put aside and leave behind, or if it’s something I wanted to pursue someday.”
What came from Sarnoski’s pen is, in some ways, a faithful adaptation of the earliest, bloodiest medieval ballads of Robin Hood, before daring exploits in the Holy Lands or Locksley lands and titles were later granted to the character’s name. In other ways, however, it’s a total inversion in which the violence is extreme, and so is the spiritual penance Robin unconsciously receives when he ends up on an island with a true holy woman.
At a glance, it could be perceived by audiences as another hero at sunset movie like Logan or the last Indiana Jones movie. It indeed stars the Wolverine himself, Hugh Jackman. But right down to the way the film ruthlessly deconstructs that romantic image from its opening scene, where Jackman’s titular highwayman is introduced more like the monster in the woods than a gruff hero, there is something darkly subversive to the material. Hence its appeal for the Wolverine actor.
“Early on in my first meeting with Hugh, we [acknowledged] there are similarities to Logan that people are going to see about this aging hero,” says Sarnoski, “but I think he got that this performance was going to go in a totally different direction. You can start with an aging man of violence. That’s a classic character trope. But there are so many ways you can go with it, and I was excited to dive into that and show people we can take it in a completely different direction, and emotionally it’s going to feel vastly different…. You’re not going to be seeing Wolverine with a bow.”