{"id":693172,"date":"2026-05-25T18:55:09","date_gmt":"2026-05-25T18:55:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/693172\/"},"modified":"2026-05-25T18:55:09","modified_gmt":"2026-05-25T18:55:09","slug":"the-death-of-robin-hood-exclusive-first-look-director-interview","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/693172\/","title":{"rendered":"The Death Of Robin Hood exclusive first look, director interview"},"content":{"rendered":"

Over just two movies, filmmaker Michael Sarnoski has launched a career out of quiet endings. He gave Nicolas Cage one of his best modern roles with Pig<\/a>, about a reclusive ex-chef in search of his stolen foraging pig, and brought grim catharsis to his first blockbuster, A Quiet Place: Day One<\/a>. Now, he lets one of folklore\u2019s most famous figures look back over his life in the upcoming The Death Of Robin Hood, led by a grizzled Hugh Jackman. The A.V. Club has an exclusive look at the film, which hits theaters on June 19, and spoke with Sarnoski about the \u201cbest filmmaking experience\u201d he\u2019s had yet.<\/p>\n

Shooting for the first time on 35mm film with his regular cinematographer Pat Scola, Sarnoski went to real locations around Northern Ireland for the production. \u201c35 just lends itself so well to capturing those natural environments,\u201d Sarnoski tells The A.V. Club. \u201cIt just feels like you\u2019re there the whole time in these massive places\u2026Pat and I don\u2019t shot list a bunch, and we don\u2019t do a lot of takes, so we were already kind of shooting like we were shooting on film. But then on this one, it felt like everyone was on the same page about the urgency and intensity\u2014I loved it.\u201d<\/p>\n

That intensity carries over to the medieval atmosphere of his Robin Hood, where life is bloody, brutal, and likely pretty short. \u201cThat was a very brutal world of violence, it was a hard place to survive in, and it was cold and bleak,\u201d the filmmaker says of his setting, which he notes was aesthetically inspired by films like The Virgin Spring and Valhalla Rising. But the approach \u201cdidn\u2019t come from the instinct of \u2018Oh, let\u2019s subvert this character.\u2019 There really is an old legend about the death of Robin Hood and I always thought it was a little thin. I wanted to examine the characters a little more deeply.\u201d<\/p>\n

Unsurprisingly, considering his filmography, this meant grappling with some regret. \u201cAll my characters so far have this sense of, they\u2019re in this place of regret or they\u2019ve given up on their lives\u2014they know what their lot in life was and now they\u2019re just marking time now, not waiting for new growth or new discoveries,\u201d Sarnoski says. It\u2019s a relatable thing for him: \u201cYou don\u2019t have to be some old man living in the woods to feel stuck in your life.\u201d For Robin Hood, specifically, though, it means an outlaw coming to terms with the actions that made him famous, and the consequences that ensued.<\/p>\n

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Finding that realism in the characters meant evoking realism in the setting: \u201cWe were letting a lot of these places speak for themselves. It\u2019s not a VFX-heavy movie, it\u2019s very practical. A lot of it was about capturing the true ancient, epic beauty of these places.\u201d One can see this in the above image, where Robin is meeting Jodie Comer\u2019s prioress, Sister Brigid, at a \u201cvery intense moment in their relationship, where a lot of things are laid bare and they\u2019re confronting each other.\u201d Filmed at Rock Of Cashel in the Republic Of Ireland, which is where many of the priory locations are set, this moment was captured on the production\u2019s final day of shooting. \u201cWe were scouting that area for the interiors of that building and all this beautiful stonework,\u201d Sarnoski says. \u201cWe were walking back to the cars and right by the parking lot, there was this grassy hill in front of the wall where you could catch just a little bit of the structure, and we were like \u2018We need to shoot a scene there for sure.\u2019 We literally just climbed over a wall from the road and were like, \u2018Yeah we can just plop \u2019em right here.\u2019 It was perfect.\u201d<\/p>\n

This flexibility came, in part, from a sense of freedom he got from working both in indie and franchise film. Scaling the former up to be closer to the latter was something he\u2019d learned not to be afraid of. \u201cSome of those bigger practical scale things, I wasn\u2019t scared of trying to do that,\u201d he explains. \u201cThere\u2019s a whole sequence where there\u2019s a burning hut, and we figured out a way to do that entirely practically. It meant working with production design and special effects to figure out how to build this hut so it can burn for 15 minutes at a time. You have to build sections out of metal so they can be removed as the fire expands.\u201d Not getting \u201cspooked\u201d by that is a matter of trust, built up with collaborators as excited about the project as he is.\u00a0<\/p>\n

And that excitement is still very much present for Sarnoski. He wrote the script for The Death Of Robin Hood, a sort of \u201cone for me\u201d that he gave himself before taking on A Quiet Place. Now that the film is finished, does it still feel like it was one for him? \u201cAbsolutely, I wanted something precious to me that I could be working on in the background and it ended up being that and beyond.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Over just two movies, filmmaker Michael Sarnoski has launched a career out of quiet endings. He gave Nicolas…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":693173,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[49,48,75],"class_list":["post-693172","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-entertainment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/693172","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=693172"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/693172\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/693173"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=693172"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=693172"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=693172"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}