MTV recently sat down with Ridley Scott to set the record straight on 'Nottingham,' Ridley's big screen apdatation of Robin Hood, heres what he had to say:
On The Name Change
“Oh yes, I think we are just going to call it ‘Robin Hood’,” Scott revealed. “We start in almost 2 months.”
“Robin Hood is in the army of Richard Coeur de Lion,” he said of how we’ll find the character early in the film “He is a bowman in the army of Richard Coeur de Lion.”
About The Orginal Plot For Nottingham
“[Crowe as both Robin and the Sheriff of Nottingham] was an idea so far back, way back when at the time I had this proposed to me, and I read it and thought, ‘I don’t really know what it does for it, but it’s alright’,” Scott recalled of the now-abandoned idea. “It is better to simply have the evolution of a character called Robin Hood, who will come out of a point in the Crusades which is the end.”
The Sheriff's Role In Robin HoodThe Sheriff will be “less important; the Sheriff of Nottingham is always a kind of an amusing character in most of the movies, who represents the hierarchy in the story at that point,” Scott explained. “The hierarchy and the wealthy always ruled over the under class, and fundamentally that doesn’t change, because Robin Hood is actually the person who finally - in terms of the overall classical idea of the film - will help the poor, probably taking from the rich.”
The Background
“[In] 1066 Harold II went against William the Conqueror. Harold took an arrow in his eye, and William the Conqueror took over England, and so France owned everything right through,” Scott explained of the turmoil of that age. “Even to the extent of changing the architecture of the churches from Anglo-Saxon to Roman, that’s French; they changed the arches in the churches.”
Russel Crowe Overweight RumorsOh that is silly; all that stuff is bullsh-t,” Scott insisted. “He is going to be totally fit. That is not a problem at all.”
“And he’s been working on his bow and arrow for about 4 months,” Scott revealed. “He sends me tapes of him hitting targets at about 45 meters. He’s pretty good!”
