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, 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. Now, he lets one of folklore’s 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 “best filmmaking experience” he’s had yet.
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. “35 just lends itself so well to capturing those natural environments,” Sarnoski tells The A.V. Club. “It just feels like you’re there the whole time in these massive places…Pat and I don’t shot list a bunch, and we don’t 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—I loved it.”
That intensity carries over to the medieval atmosphere of his Robin Hood, where life is bloody, brutal, and likely pretty short. “That was a very brutal world of violence, it was a hard place to survive in, and it was cold and bleak,” the filmmaker says of his setting, which he notes was aesthetically inspired by films like The Virgin Spring and Valhalla Rising. But the approach “didn’t come from the instinct of ‘Oh, let’s subvert this character.’ 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.”
Unsurprisingly, considering his filmography, this meant grappling with some regret. “All my characters so far have this sense of, they’re in this place of regret or they’ve given up on their lives—they know what their lot in life was and now they’re just marking time now, not waiting for new growth or new discoveries,” Sarnoski says. It’s a relatable thing for him: “You don’t have to be some old man living in the woods to feel stuck in your life.” For Robin Hood, specifically, though, it means an outlaw coming to terms with the actions that made him famous, and the consequences that ensued.
Finding that realism in the characters meant evoking realism in the setting: “We were letting a lot of these places speak for themselves. It’s not a VFX-heavy movie, it’s very practical. A lot of it was about capturing the true ancient, epic beauty of these places.” One can see this in the above image, where Robin is meeting Jodie Comer’s prioress, Sister Brigid, at a “very intense moment in their relationship, where a lot of things are laid bare and they’re confronting each other.” 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’s final day of shooting. “We were scouting that area for the interiors of that building and all this beautiful stonework,” Sarnoski says. “We 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 ‘We need to shoot a scene there for sure.’ We literally just climbed over a wall from the road and were like, ‘Yeah we can just plop ’em right here.’ It was perfect.”
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’d learned not to be afraid of. “Some of those bigger practical scale things, I wasn’t scared of trying to do that,” he explains. “There’s a whole sequence where there’s 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.” Not getting “spooked” by that is a matter of trust, built up with collaborators as excited about the project as he is.
And that excitement is still very much present for Sarnoski. He wrote the script for The Death Of Robin Hood, a sort of “one for me” 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? “Absolutely, I wanted something precious to me that I could be working on in the background and it ended up being that and beyond.”
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