(This article contains spoilers for “The Uprising,” opening in theaters Friday.)
As filmmaker Paul Greengrass prepared last year to shoot “The Uprising,” a historical epic about the 1381 English Peasants’ Revolt, he knew the movie’s climax spoke to the current moment. But it was more on the nose than he ever intended.
As Andrew Garfield’s plowman leads an ambush on King Richard II, in the wake of the quashed rebellion, the reluctant revolutionary leans toward the monarch and issues his own decree:
“No kings.”
Greengrass wrote that line — and the rest of the script — in 2020, during the early days of the coronavirus pandemic shutdowns. When filming began last fall in Germany, a few months after the first No Kings protest against President Donald Trump, Greengrass knew those words would reverberate with an unintended echo.
“I thought, ‘Well, it was in my screenplay! So I’m not going to take it out,’” Greengrass said during a recent video chat from Los Angeles. “It’s integral to the movie, and emotionally consistent with it.”
It’s only fitting that “The Uprising” still resonates. Greengrass, 71, has become a foremost chronicler of visceral docudrama with such films as “United 93,” “Captain Phillips,” “22 July” and “The Lost Bus.” Before “The Uprising,” the 1870-set “News of the World” was the only bona fide period piece in his filmography. But even when the English writer and director ventures back centuries, it’s through a decidedly modern lens.
“It felt very prescient and kind of predictive, and unfortunately so,” Garfield said of the film’s “no kings” moment. “I think that there is a very strong burgeoning emergence of truth in current activist movements, where people are waking up to the fact that those that are making the laws, those that are writing history, they don’t have common people’s best interests at heart. It feels like an awakening from a kind of cult on a mass scale.”
Those parallels were the impetus for Greengrass’s interest in the rebellion, which is well known in the United Kingdom but less recognized stateside. The plight of the 14th-century rebels, who sacked the Tower of London and executed public officials in response to rising taxes and other socioeconomic concerns, stemmed from the kind of anti-government sentiment that still sparks civil unrest — from Bangladesh to Kenya to D.C.
“What struck me straight away was how contemporary it was,” Greengrass said. “It’s the story of the deeply divided world, a failing state, oligarchs jealously guarding their power, a rising rage beyond that they were sort of blind and deaf to. And then there’s that sense amongst the wider population that there was an elite that was locking them out, rigging the system against them.
“That demand for individual rights, economic rights, self-determination became the great driver of the Enlightenment — on into the American Revolution and beyond.”
Greengrass’s understanding of grassroots movements stems from his background as a journalist and documentary filmmaker who spent most of his 20s working on the ITV current affairs series “World in Action.” He was deployed around the world, covering the Troubles in Northern Ireland, the South African apartheid and Ferdinand Marcos’s dictatorship in the Philippines, and found himself increasingly drawn to “those moments where the world turns.”
“In those years, I spent a lot of time in conflicted places,” he said. “When you’ve seen how crowds behave, in Northern Ireland or in many other places, it gives you an understanding of what I suppose you’d call people power.”
The cinema-verité, shaky-cam style Greengrass developed as a documentarian would become a fixture of his dramatized filmography, whether he was overseeing the immersive action of three Jason Bourne movies or re-creating the real-world events captured in “United 93” and “Captain Phillips.”
“He’s just one of those very rare filmmakers,” Garfield said, “that can kind of shake you to your core and make you feel your own sense of soul and humanity.”
“The Uprising” is something of a departure with its centuries-ago setting, but Greengrass still delivers many a stylish set piece. And that’s very much by design.
“It feels very much of a piece of other films I’ve made,” Greengrass said. “Most importantly, if you make a movie, you have to entertain people. It’s got to be an exciting movie with clear stakes and a hero’s journey, and end up rewarding people for the time [they] spent. You don’t want a movie that’s a total downer. But you want something about it that makes it feel alive as opposed to just looking at distant history.”
That also means wielding artistic license. “The Uprising” features real-life rebellion leaders, including soldier Wat Tyler (Cosmo Jarvis) and priest John Ball (Jamie Bell), but Garfield’s plowman is fictionalized. In playing the pushed-to-the-edge farmer, Garfield sees his character as an avatar not just for the 14th-century common folk, but for the modern working class as well.
“I think we’re all craving more justice against those in power,” Garfield said. “So it feels very universal, and it feels like a story for all of us that are railing kind of futilely against a system that doesn’t serve us.”
Although history sealed Tyler’s and Ball’s grisly fates, as many rebels died and the revolt was suppressed, Greengrass wasn’t interested in ending there. Thus he imagined the one-year-later coda, in which the plowman and a band of his fellow survivors confront the king, declare their independence as people of the forest and leave the ruler to live out his days fearing their vengeance.
And it’s no coincidence that Garfield’s character is last seen hooded and cloaked in garb that evokes a certain egalitarian outlaw. As Greengrass points out, the first written record of Robin Hood came in William Langland’s 1370s poem “Piers Plowman” — a text that also influenced his decision to center the film on a plowman. Following the rebellion, the legend of the man who stole from the rich and gave to the poor only grew.
“These outlaw stories began to be told and became wildly, wildly popular,” Greengrass said. “The most popular of all, of course, was Robin Hood. Why did they get told? Because it was a way after the rebellion that people kept the dreams of the rebellion alive, even though they appeared to have lost.”
That in mind, Focus Features recently began marketing the film with the tagline “Witness the Rise of Robin Hood.” But is Garfield’s unnamed plowman actually Robin himself?
“I never call him Robin Hood,” Greengrass said. “He just clearly has become an outlaw, and he confronts the king because you want him to confront the king. That’s how the legend of Robin Hood absolutely would have begun — with people surviving that rebellion and telling stories about a character a bit like that.”
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