| The Battle of Sherwood Forest In the race to bring 'Robin Hood'back to the screen, the behind-the-scenes clashes rivaled those captured on film. By Gregg Kilday and Garth Pearce Entertainment Weekly, June 21, 1991 No one can say what life was really like in the English forests of the 1190s, but this painstakingly created set of Robin Hood's Sherwood Forest camp must come close. Low-lying hovels are covered with brown grass; a bull is led reluctantly to a post; birds and rabbits hang in preparation for cooking; children push each other into the mud as they play; a hunter plods along with a deer slung over his shoulder; and women throw tired-looking vegetables into a huge pot. The voice of an assistant director is urgent over his bull horn: "Special effects-there is a canister in shot. Okay, clear the skyline. Keep your white collar inside your tunic, that woodsman over there. Keep it quite. Stand by to shoot." Total silence. Cameras roll. Action. Kevin Costner, in the faded leathers of a 12th-century woodsman, opens his mouth to speak but stops as he hears a distinctly 20th-century sound; the whine of jet engines. The sound gradually swells into a teeth-jarring roar, and an enormous 747 sail just a few thousand feet above the clearing on its landing approach to London's Heathrow Airport. It's the third jet to pass overhead in the past 10 minutes; an unusual change of wind has forced air traffic controllers to divert flights from their normal routes to a path directly over the set in Burnham Beeches, Buckinghamshire, just 10 miles from the runways. This is the first day of shooting at the Sherwood Forest location (not the real Sherwood Forest, which is in Nottinghamshire to the north), but Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves is already behind schedule and the filmmakers are under pressure. The 747s are the least of their problems. Attempting to take the latest flyby in stride, Costner flashes his easy-going smile, and in moments filming resumes. But later, taking his lunch break picnic-style on a blanket spread out on the forest floor; he doesn't hide his growing concern. "It's very dangerous to be [working] so fast," he says, "We are relying on the weather, and every time the weather turns against us we could get behind. When that happens there is always the feeling that certain people want to do something about it to shorten the filming time. That is not always the cure." Director Kevin Reynolds is doing his best to maintain a sense of calm, but he also knows he's struggling to keep chaos at bay. "Are things going as planned?" he says, repeating a visitor's question. "Ha! You always start with a picture in your mind, and it is a compromise all the way from there. We have been struggling from Day One. We are trying to finish by Christmas, and the days are getting shorter. It's horrible." If the two Kevins had known on that autumn day how much tougher their work would become by the end, their misgivings would have been even graver. They began the project as friends. Reynolds had given Costner his first big break, a lead part in the director's 1985 coming-of-age movie, Fandango. And, when Costner's reputation was on the line directing Dances With Wolves, Reynolds pitched in, directing the challenging buffalo hunt, which became one of the hit movie's most memorable scenes. In fact, if not for their long-standing friendship, it's doubtful either one would have been involved in Robin Hood at all. "To be honest, I was never a giant Robin Hood fan," Reynolds admits. "But liked the story and the time period. I thought it would be intriguing to do a medieval action picture." With just two films to his credit--Fandango and The Beast, a little-seen 1988 feature about the war in Afghanistan--he could hardly turn down a $50 million production, but he had no illusions about why he was chosen. "I'd done two pictures that hadn't made a dime, so I kind of knew they wanted me because of my connections with Kevin," he says. Kevin Costner, 36, had his own doubts about doing justice to the rakish Robin Hood. The first time he was offered the script, he turned it down. But when Reynolds called to say he'd signed aboard, the actor reconsidered. "I felt Kevin was such a good filmmaker I would do it," he says. "I'd never dreamed of doing a movie like this, but I thought this was a different Robin Hood. It told the story in a new way, without repeating it or making a joke of it." Both the director and the star knew that they'd be up against a brutal production schedule, one that left little time for planning, rehearsals, or second thoughts about how to shoot. To their credit, the movie that opened last weekend (Owen Gleiberman's review is on page 38) bears little sign of the woes that attended its creation. But Robin Hood took its toll in other ways. Even before it was finished, Costner was the subject of embarrassing rumors that his performance was too laid-back and h is accent more L.A. than U.K. Most disruptive of all, a last-minute re-cutting to bolster his on-screen presence led to a nasty battle between Reynolds and the producers. Just weeks before the first big picture of his career was to hit the theaters, Reynolds walked out on the project. At the end of May, when Warner Bros., Robin Hood's distributor, first previewed the film to the press in New Orleans (where Costner is filming director Oliver Stone's JFK), Reynolds was conspicuous by his absence. "I'm disappointed he's not here," Costner admitted. "And I think he's disappointed that he couldn't make everything be exactly his way. If you don't have final cut, that's going to happen. But I thought he directed a really wonderful movie." Several days later, sitting in a deli in Studio City, Calif., Reynolds took little pleasure in the compliment. In his late 30s, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt and looking more like a clean-cut member of the crew than a director on the verge of a blockbuster, he seemed at pains not to inflame the awkward personal situation. "You know how Hollywood is-'You go along, you get along' is sort of the attitude," he said philosophically. "Sometimes you just reach a point where you say, 'I'm not going to go along anymore. I think I've compromised enough.' So I've moved on to other things." CONSIDERING THAT THE STORY has been around for 800 years, mounting yet another screen version of the Robin Hood legend (the first was in 1909) was startlingly like a Saturday matinee cliff-hanger. The notion of creating a Robin for the '90s first occurred to British writer-producer Pen Densham, who summed up his idea as "Robin Hood a la Raiders." In August of 1989, Densham hammered out a 92-page outline that he and his producing partner, John Watson, then turned into a screenplay. They broke with the traditional account of Robin as a devil-may-care adventurer (best embodied by Errol Flynn in 1938) by re-imagining him as a rich kid transformed into a socially conscious rebel by imprisonment in Jerusalem during the Crusades. |