ROBIN HOOD: PRINCE OF THIEVES
No Christmases were called off in the writing of this retrospective.
Buff looks back at how one American Kevin teamed up with another to give Nottingham’s legendary outlaw a new lease of life in Robin Hood: Prince Of Thieves. But it wasn’t all plain sailing: production problems, casting issues and on-set difficulties proving almost as dastardly as the scene-stealing Sheriff…
Valentine’s Day, 1990. James G. Robinson and his team at Morgan Creek Productions have a matter of hours to snap up one of the hottest scripts in Hollywood – a bold take on the Robin Hood story by British co-writers Pen Densham and John Watson the former has summed up as “Robin Hood, à la Raiders.”
“We thought it was commercial, distinctive and great fun,” recalls company president David Nicksay, who exhorted Robinson, Morgan Creek’s founder and owner, to make the deal. By 10pm that evening, the deal was done. Robin Hood: Prince Of Thieves was theirs – for a princely sum of $1.2m.
The urgency was understandable. Densham and Watson’s script was one of five Robin Hood treatments then doing the rounds, with both 20th Century Fox and Tri-Star Pictures eager to get their own versions of the legend into production. All the competing Robins had one man in mind to play Nottingham’s iconic outlaw: 35-yearold Kevin Costner, riding high off the back of such box-office hits as
The Untouchables and Field Of Dreams. Morgan Creek’s pitch to the star had an extra bonus, though – the chance to collaborate with director Kevin
Reynolds, a close friend who had given him an early break in 1985 comedy Fandango and who had recently helped him out by taking some second unit off his hands on his upcoming passion project, Dances With Wolves.
“I’d be lying if I didn’t say I thought one of the reasons they wanted me was because of my relationship with Kevin,” said Reynolds at the time. “Kevin wasn’t signed when I came on board, so perhaps our past relationship made the choice easier.” With only a few movies to his name (tank drama The Beast, a co-writing credit on Red Dawn), the chance to helm a $50m Warner Bros actioner was not one he could pass up. Robin Hood, though, came with strings attached: a mere 10 weeks of pre-production, a punishing 13-week shooting schedule and a pre-Christmas wrap date, vital if the movie were to have any chance of beating Fox’s Robin Hood into cinemas. Tri-Star’s spin had fallen by the wayside, but John Irvin’s film – now with Patrick Bergin as Robin in place of a previously mooted Mel Gibson – was very much a go and gearing up for its own autumn shoot in England.
“To be honest, I was never a giant Robin Hood fan,” Reynolds would later
admit to reporters. “But I liked the story and time period, and I thought it would be intriguing to do a medieval action picture.” If the Texan director had any illusions he was in for an easy ride, however, they were immediately dispelled by Costner’s first day of shooting – an attempt to capture Robin’s first steps on English soil after his return from the Crusades that was later deemed unusable. “By the end of the day, Kevin was so cold and tired that he couldn’t lift himself,” recalled Morgan Freeman, along for the ride as Robin’s Moorish buddy Azeem. “It was the first day and I said, ‘Oh my God, is this what we’re in for?’” (Costner himself took control of the muchneeded reshoot two months later.)
At least Freeman made it in front of the camera. Robin Wright, the actress originally lined up to play Maid Marian, was forced to pull out after falling pregnant, while the work of the film’s costume designer had so few fans they were soon given their marching orders. John Bloomfield was brought in two weeks before shooting, while Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio took on the role of Marian just four days before the cameras started rolling. Another casualty was Costner’s dialogue coach, who was dismissed not long after Robinson heard his pupil’s stilted stab at a cod-English brogue. “I’m the one who said ‘Enough of this,’” he explained later. “‘Have Kevin play Kevin Costner,’ I said. ‘We’ll fix it at dubbing stage.’”
With Costner defaulting to his customary Californian drawl, Christian Slater deploying his New York staccato as Will Scarlett and Michael Wincott using his distinctive Canuck rasp as Guy of Gisborne, it’s fair to say Prince
Of Thieves could well have been subtitled Mix Of Accents. “We have an interesting blend of voices, which I think will be accepted when people hear them,” said John Watson, whose screenplay duties earned him a producing credit alongside Densham and Richard Lewis. When it came to other parts, though, Reynolds was keen to draw from the UK’s rich wealth of acting talent. Geraldine McEwan was thrilled to be cast as malevolent witch Mortianna, even if it did necessitate two hours of make-up to be turned into a grotesque, wrinkled hag. Alan Rickman, meanwhile, was persuaded to take the dastardly Sheriff of Nottingham on, having been promised he would have free rein to doctor his character’s dialogue.
“I was not particularly taken with the idea,” Rickman would confess at the time. “I thought: ‘What? Robin Hood – again?’ But I read it and thought of more potential for the Sheriff. I’d also been doing other things since Die Hard, so I thought it was OK to arch my eyebrows again in villainy.” Rickman’s first notion was to recruit his comedian friend Ruby Wax and playwright Peter Barnes to spruce up his lines, a creative brainwave that resulted in some of the Sheriff’s most celebrated moments. “You. My room. 10:30 tonight,” he is seen telling a wench. “You. 10:45,” he then tells another. “And bring a friend!” The actor knew he was on to something when he saw crew members trying not to laugh when he was filming his scenes. The producers, however, did not see the funny side, ordering Rickman’s screen time to be reduced when early test audiences found the Sheriff more likeable than Costner’s hero. The AWOL footage, which included a scene revealing Mortianna to be the Sheriff’s mother, was eventually restored in a 155-minute extended cut released in 2009. Costner would later tell Total Film, “He understood that it was a part that he could take big chunks out of and really, really embrace. And he certainly did… He had such a wonderful delivery – a great ability to be not only a leading man, but a character actor.”
Reynolds, meanwhile, was feeling the pressure. “It has been a tough shoot, working six days [a week] flat out for seven months,” he told one reporter. “I couldn’t storyboard everything as closely as I wanted, and I’ve winged it a lot more than I would have liked. We started in September [1990] with the English autumn already upon us, and with each day there was a prospect of worsening weather and
less light. By the time we got closer to Christmas, we were down to six hours of usable light a day.”
Saturday 24 November was particularly fraught, it being the one day Sean Connery was available to make a fleeting cameo as Richard the Lionheart. Costner’s Untouchables co-star had agreed to turn up unannounced at Robin and Marian’s wedding in return for a $400,000 paycheck (to be donated to the Scottish Educational Trust) and a guarantee he’d be done by teatime. To everybody’s relief, the scene went off without a hitch, though there was no time to film a brief interchange between Connery and Freeman’s characters that Costner had hoped to interpolate.
“I’ve had the pulse of every movie I’ve ever worked on,” the actor would later remark. “I’ve known when they were going right, and I’ve known when they were going south. And I don’t know where this movie is going.” Costner, indeed, was not alone in feeling trepidation when Robin Hood: Prince Of Thieves finally reached cinemas in June 1991, two weeks later than the Memorial Day weekend debut that had originally been planned. Irvin’s aforementioned rival version did end up appearing in cinemas first, although in the US, it premiered on television. The critics were certainly not kind, eviscerating Costner for his incongruous cadence and ridiculing the film for its illogical geography. For example, Robin and Azeem are seen landing near Eastbourne in one scene and walking on Hadrian’s Wall the next. Audiences, though, felt differently, coming in sufficient numbers for the film to gross a whopping $25m in its opening weekend.
By the time Prince Of Thieves was done, it had looted more than $390m at the global box office – enough to see it crowned the second highest-grossing movie of 1991 (Terminator 2: Judgment Day took the honours that year, taking $520m worldwide). Its impact was also felt in the music charts, with Bryan Adams’ love ballad ‘(Everything I
Do) I Do It For You’ enjoying 16 consecutive weeks as the
UK’s number-one single.
The following year brought further success – an Oscar nomination for Adams, a Bafta nod for Bloomfield and a Best Supporting Actor trophy for Rickman from the British awards body. “This will be a healthy reminder to me that subtlety isn’t everything,” he observed wryly as he accepted his prize. For Costner, alas, there was zilch – unless, that is, one counts the Worst Actor accolade he received at that year’s Golden Raspberries.
Thirty years on, it’s hard to see why anyone would take so violently against a film so keen to entertain. Considering too how average subsequent Robins turned out to be (yes, we’re talking about Ridley Scott’s bland 2010 version and the swaggering 2018 reboot here), it is surely time Reynolds’ film was given its due. Costner initially came out of it feeling it was “not a great professional experience”, but has had merrier memories since, recalling in 2017 how he had spent one lunch break looking for magic mushrooms in the forest with his stuntman. And in 2016, Costner told TF that Prince Of Thieves is one of the films that comes up the most when he’s approached by fans. “Robin Hood comes up with a lot of young people – I don’t know why. It comes up a lot, and it comes up a lot around the world.” The deaths of Rickman, Connery and composer Michael Kamen, meanwhile, have left us all the more appreciative of their contributions to this 1990s classic – not least Kamen’s, whose stirring overture lived on as the theme tune for Morgan Creek’s company logo. Then it begins!
ROBIN HOOD: PRINCE OF THIEVES IS AVAILABLE NOW ON BLU-RAY AND DVD.
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