Russell Crowe as Robin Hood: Maximus goes to Nottingham

There are many extraordinary things about being on the set of the new Ridley Scott film Robin Hood. We are in Bourne Wood, near Farnham in Surrey, a recreational area known for its pine trees and sandy footpaths, but today there is a colossal French castle on the crest of a hill. How did they do that, you find yourself asking. Had I come a week earlier, I would have found a medieval town here too, painstakingly recreated by thatching experts and wattle specialists, but then the crew set the whole town on fire as part of the action and now there is only scorched earth and blackened stumps.

Today they are shooting the film’s big opening scene where Richard the Lionheart storms a castle in France. There are 125 horses, 500 archers, a lot of shouting and a lot of mud. There is everything castle legends tell you to expect: flaming arrows; a battering ram; a flood of burning pitch. But perhaps the most extraordinary thing is that only on a Ridley Scott film could this vast throng of 1,000 people, trucks and equipment possibly be described as a 'medium-size set’.

'It’s kind of scary. We’re doing bigger things most days than many do in their entire films,’ Charlie Schlissel, the executive producer, says. 'But we’re taking one of the greatest British filmmakers and giving him one of the most classic British tales, so you expect him to bring some life to it.’

Written by the Oscar-winning screenwriter Brian Helgeland, and filmed in England and Wales, Robin Hood features a stellar cast: Russell Crowe as Robin; Cate Blanchett as Marian; Max von Sydow as her father, Sir Walter Loxley; William Hurt as Sir William Marshall; Danny Huston as Richard the Lionheart; Mark Strong as Sir Godfrey; and Matthew Macfadyen as the Sheriff of Nottingham. With a budget of £130 million, it also has visual ambitions on a magnificent scale. Nottingham Village, for example, was created on the Hampton estate near Guildford, where the crew constructed 50 buildings (including a church, a tavern and a mill with a working water wheel), planted an orchard, created a river, and generally prepped 600 acres of meadowland. The battle scene on the beach at St David’s, Wales, involved hundreds of horses, 400 boats and 1,500 extras.

But then Ridley Scott is known for epic scale (Alien, Blade Runner, Gladiator). He likes big-landscape shots, scenes that are continually awesome and thrilling. And he likes Russell Crowe – as well as Gladiator they have worked together on A Good Year, American Gangster and Body of Lies. Gladiator won an Oscar for best picture in 2000. Robin Hood aims to be the same huge period spectacle: 'the Gladiator version of Robin Hood,’ according to its producer, Brian Grazer. It re-unites Ridley Scott not only with his strong hero from Gladiator – Crowe played Maximus, the Roman general who became a gladiator slave – but also with Arthur Max, the Bafta-winning production designer. Robin Hood even shares the same location as Gladiator: Bourne Wood. 'Ridley was looking for a forest he could burn and the only forest he could burn was near Bratislava,’ Schlissel says. 'Ridley didn’t want to go to Bratislava, so he came here and they [the Forestry Commission] said he could burn some trees.’

But there is one big difference, of course. Gladiator breathed life into a genre that had been absent from the big screen since films such as Ben-Hur, Spartacus and The Fall of the Roman Empire from the 1960s. Robin Hood, on the other hand, has featured in more than 30 film and television productions, ranging from Douglas Fairbanks (Robin Hood, 1922) to Errol Flynn (The Adven­tures of Robin Hood, 1952); Sean Connery and Audrey Hepburn (Robin and Marian; 1976); and Kevin Costner’s Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (1991); as well as the popular 1950s television series starring Richard Greene, and the more recent BBC series (2006).

'Robin Hood movies for the most part are underwhelming,’ observes Ridley Scott, who has claimed that his favourite version is Mel Brooks’s Men in Tights (1993). 'I don’t think this is going to be underwhelming in any shape or form. We’re trying to combine a little bit of seriousness with the real romance of what we think and dream Robin Hood movies to be.’

Robin Hood opens in 1199 with a siege and the death of a king. Richard the Lionheart is killed by an arrow in his neck while collecting a small debt from a French castle on his way home from his Third Crusade in the Holy Lands. (He needs the money because he is penniless after years of fighting.) This is where we first meet Robin Hood, or rather Robin Longstride, long-serving infantryman in King Richard’s army. Rendered leaderless, Robin heads home – the first time he has been back since he was five. And he doesn’t like what he finds: poverty, corruption, unchecked power. ('You were not allowed to pick up firewood in the forest, not allowed to take your pigs into the forest to eat acorns, not allowed to do anything without the permission of the king,’ Crowe will later instruct me; expertise gathered, he says, from reading more than 30 books about Robin Hood and the late-12th and 13th centuries.)

England is bankrupt thanks to Richard’s war­mongering, threatened by a civil war and by France, and in the hands of an inept successor, John, best known for introducing PAYE tax. The country is riven by inequality, and the air humming with revolution. Step forward Robin Hood, who becomes its champion.

Direct action, it transpires, is in his DNA: his father was Thomas Longstride, the principal author of what was to become the Forest Charter, a precedent to Magna Carta which provided rights and privileges for the common man against the aristocracy. Longstride was executed for his efforts, an event witnessed by his young son, aged five. This is the back-story to a film that is itself a back-story: 'Ridley wanted to tell the man-before-the-myth version of Robin Hood,’ explains Brian Helgeland, whose screenwriting Oscar was for LA Confidential. 'Everybody knows the myth, and obviously that is an exaggeration of the real events. This myth is rooted in the downtrodden and the idea that whenever the powers-that-be need to be checked, a man will rise up and look after the common people. Especially in English history, it’s been an outlaw that has filled that position. What Ridley wanted to do was to imagine what the real events might have been from which the Robin Hood legend sprang.’

Helgeland fleshes out the characters of the Sheriff of Nottingham, Marian and her father-in-law, and fixes Robin in a particular patch of history to expose the power of the barons and how England was controlled at the time. It takes audiences up close to the hardship and poverty, the sort of world where Robin Hood learnt his trade, and ends where most of the Robin Hood films begin: with an outlaw. Only this time Robin Hood is not a larky swashbuckler but a master of grave intent. It’s a tough, macho, muddy take: a far cry from the soft focus of Prince of Thieves ('Robin Hood-lite,’ Arthur Max scoffs). Here is a film working hard to prove to audiences that Robin Hood comprises more than Kevin Costner prancing around in tights. (In fact, Crowe wears leather breeches. 'They’re called braies,’ Janty Yates, the costume designer, explains. 'Like leather or suede stockings, not the knitted horrors we’ve seen in Robin Hood films since about 1923. They’re a bit more macho.’)

Not that Robin Hood had a straightforward journey to the screen. The film began in 2006 with Brian Grazer and a script called Nottingham. This was reworked into Robin Hood after Russell Crowe said he would play the lead. 'I don’t think there’s been a satisfying Robin Hood. That is one of the key reasons for wanting to make another one,’ Crowe says, adding that Richard Greene’s Robin Hood was part of his childhood. 'I’ve just always liked the idea that there is somebody out there who cares.’

Ridley Scott, on the other hand, favoured Rupert Bear, the Lone Ranger and Roy Rogers as a child. 'I wasn’t sure about it, actually, when Russell came to me,’ he recalls. 'But he said, “Come on! We should do this. We’ll change things.” And that’s how it began.’ They recruited Helgeland, who came up with the drive to 'humanise the legend’. But the film had a halting start because of direct action of a different kind: the 2007 writers’ strike; and the threat of the Screen Actors Guild strike, in 2008. The 91-day shoot finally began in April 2009. 'Getting this thing moving forward was tough,’ Schlissel says. 'It [industrial action] added a year to the process.’

11pm, July 23: the crew are about to shoot an elaborately choreographed fight scene between Robin Hood and Little John (Kevin Durand) at King Richard’s camp in a valley in Bourne Wood. Robin Longstride (who has yet to return to England and discover his revolutionary alter ego) is running a casino on the camp for his fellow soldiers and a brawl breaks out over an unpaid bill. The atmosphere is rich with campfires, drunken soldiers, human voices against the night, breath that steams the air. Scott has spared no expense in furnishing the camp down to the last bunch of redcurrants in Richard’s exquisite Italian and French silk tent, the archers’ chainmail (plastic, by the way, and the product of two lengthy processes, first in China and then New Zealand).

'OK, let’s shoot this puppy,’ the assistant director shouts. Crowe takes off his fleece and suddenly here is Robin Hood: stocky, stubbled, and though shorter than most of the men around him, walking taller than any of them. But here too is Maximus: same low brow, quick eyes and cropped hair.

'I grew my hair long for ages,’ Crowe explains, 'and when we started filming, he [Scott] said let’s do that thing where you chop your hair right down and wear a beard. I said that’s Maximus, and he said look, if we’re going to steal from anybody, I think we’re OK to steal from ourselves.’

'Russell has massive strength, determination and a definitive heroic quality,’ Scott says. 'He’s a man’s man.’ And Crowe has found his match in Cate Blanchett’s Marian, who isn't a maid at all, but a feisty widow who mucks out stables, runs the estate and is spared the standard activities of courtly heroines: picking herbs for monks, hand-rearing forest fawns. 'The idea of a damsel in distress has been a constant irritation of all female actors,’ Scott says. 'I didn’t want Marian to be umbilical, the female interest – that awful description – so we avoided it like crazy; and you don’t do that [female interest] with Cate Blanchett.’

'Because Russell and Ridley have such a long history together of making films that go straight to the heart of the matter, it was a very exciting combination for me,’ Blanchett says. But this wasn’t the only reason she was drawn to the film. 'The power of the forest is at the heart of the Robin Hood myth. We’re so saturated with the power of the state, and the power of the church. As an antidote, the rule of nature is really enticing.’

One interesting aspect of Ridley Scott’s work is his cavalier attitude to the script. 'He’ll say, right, I want a little more spirituality or I want more iconographic Robin Hood moments,’ says Crowe, who also enjoys variations on the story; they seal their camaraderie by discussing options. 'Listen – this will be great. Robin goes hunting, see, and then…’

Matthew Macfadyen says he arrived on set with only four scenes as the Sheriff of Nottingham, but ended up with six and a wildly different outcome. The script was 'quite fluid’, he says. 'First I was going to be stabbed by Cate Blanchett, then I got new pages through and I was killed by Mark Strong [Sir Godfrey], then I was going to be murdered by a thug on horseback. So my deaths got worse and worse.’ In fact, Scott liked his performance so much that he kept him alive. 'The Sheriff is more of an idiot than an evil psycho,’ Macfadyen says.

There is another distinctive feature to Scott’s shooting style. 'He likes multiple cameras, which take a long time to set up but once you have them you’re covering a lot of angles at the same time,’ Schlissel says. 'So all the footage cuts together.’ Mark Strong, who worked with Scott on his Jordanian intelligence thriller Syriana, reveals that when Scott watches the monitors with the script supervisor, as the scene plays back he taps the screen at moments, editing as he goes along.

'He’s going, “I think I’ll use that moment and that moment and that moment.” He’s so in control of his game that you just feel safe in his hands.’

It is for his visual acumen that Scott, a former art director, is famed: 'the Titian of filmmaking,’ Crowe observes. Scott seems to provoke this sort of awed devotion in those who work with him: he shoots in the same way an artist paints, using backlight to create shadows behind the actors (Pieter Breugel and George de la Tour were aesthetic inspirations on Robin Hood); he does his own storyboards before shooting starts each day. 'I can really draw,’ he says, 'but it’s not about drawing, it’s actually about making you think.’ He has an acute visual memory and references specific imagery from an extraordinary variety of films: the river scene in The Lion in Winter (1968) when Katharine Hepburn comes up the river in a barge ('Ridley said that is the way the river should look,’ Arthur Max says); The Name of the Rose (1986, the bleakness of the abbey); The Return of Martin Guerre (1982, farming lifestyle); Pelle the Conqueror (1988, rusty armour); On the Waterfront (1954, Terry Malloy’s pigeon coop – 'A whole room rather than just a dovecote, so spatially interesting,’ Max says).

Scott owes much to Max, who furnished the world that took place in Scott’s mind. Look at any of the set detail in this 144-minute film, from portcullis to doorknobs, and you can be sure it has been pored over and hunted down by Max and his team. 'We’ve done a lot of big movies,’ he says, 'but this is the biggest we’ve ever done.’ The huge slab-slate roofs on the houses in Nottingham were taken from a village in the Iberian Peninsula (they took moulds of the slabs); the crude, raw look to 12th-century London, achieved by using reclaimed chestnut, oak and hickory from old barns in Bulgaria; the 11th/12th-century cog boat that floats into the Royal Dock at the Tower of London (really Virginia Water) is an exact replica, but with a draft of only 18in so it could navigate the shallow water. 'I’m very proud of that,’ Max says. And the bureaucracy was a nightmare: it took two weeks and 'a whole bunch of presentations’ to get permission to prune one branch from an oak tree – the downside of filming in the Queen’s personal riding wood in Windsor Great Park.

2am, July 24: back on the set at Bourne Wood, Ridley Scott has finished shooting. (And Crowe has finished his movie-star turn for the crew and extras: an impromptu version of Bruce Springsteen’s Highway Patrolman.) 'This is the small bit, by the way,’ Scott reminds me as we survey the valley in the half-light: the trucks, cameramen, gaffers, script supervisors, generators, smoke machines, tents, cauldrons, fire extinguishers, campfires, stables, horses and 1,000 people packing up to go home. 'It’s massive, what we’ve been doing.’

• Robin Hood, released on May 14, is the opening- night film of the Cannes Festival on May 12