The first day of shooting on his debut feature, 2021’s “Pig,” was the first time writer-director Michael Sarnoski had ever been on a professional film set. Previously he had made shorts with just a few friends, but now he had an assistant director and a whole crew of people working under him. And he had a decision to make — what kind of director would he be?
“It was kind of learning in the process of making ‘Pig,’” Sarnoski, 38, says over a charcuterie board at a Miracle Mile restaurant during a recent interview. “Actually being quieter and not the sort of typical yelly director persona you imagine is fine and a really pleasant way to be a director.”
The acclaim for “Pig,” a tense drama starring Nicolas Cage as a former chef searching for his stolen truffle pig, led to making the bigger-budget “A Quiet Place: Day One,” starring Lupita Nyong’o in the third installment in the hit apocalyptic horror-thriller franchise.
Which brings Sarnoski to “The Death of Robin Hood,” in which Hugh Jackman stars not as a swashbuckling romantic hero but as a haunted man facing down the grim reality of what his life has added up to. He spends his time defending himself against the cousins, children and compatriots of those he has killed over the years. After nearly dying in a battle, he is taken to a remote island, where an enigmatic woman (Jodie Comer) nurses him back to health.
Within the movie’s first few moments, Robin has stabbed a girl in the neck and skull and shot an arrow through the back of a young boy’s head, making clear that this is a complex, uncompromising character study more in line with Clint Eastwood in “Unforgiven” than Errol Flynn in “The Adventures of Robin Hood.”
With a tousle of wavy hair, a full beard and a gentle air about him, Sarnoski does not exactly fit into the emerging crop of 20-something filmmakers now taking over Hollywood. Raised in Milwaukee, Sarnoski attended Yale before moving to L.A. some 15 years ago, quietly working on scripts and honing his distinctly personal voice that explores the inner lives of lonely, tormented souls within the framework of genre storytelling.
Shot on 35mm film over only 30 days in rugged locations in Northern Ireland, “The Death of Robin Hood” finds Sarnoski combining what he learned from his previous two features, working somewhere in between while continuing to grow in ambition.
“Take the intimacy and the family feeling of making an indie movie like ‘Pig’ and then take what I had learned about how to wrangle the scope and action of something like ‘Quiet Place’ and smush those together and make something that’s in that mid-to-low-budget range,” he says. “It was like, OK, we’re making something that has scale, but we’re doing it for a reasonable budget and we can make kind of a grownup drama out of it and surround ourselves with people that get it and care and know what we’re trying to make.”
Sarnoski’s attachment to the myth of Robin Hood — a dashing man of the people who robbed from the rich to give to the poor — has deep roots. His father died when he was only 9 years old, and a neighbor who became a mentor gave him a copy of a schoolboy’s anthology. In it was “Robin Hood’s Death,” an ancient ballad in which the character meets a lonely, sad end. Combined with Disney’s popular 1973 animated version of the adventure tale, for Sarnoski there was always an inherent tension within the legend.
“This feels like a Robin that lived in me for a long time,” the director says of his subversive take. “I think even as a child I was trying to integrate those two ideas of a dancing fox and a real human being quietly dying. How does that make sense?”
Thinking about Robin Hood for some 30 years finally resulted in a script he wrote just before he began work on “A Quiet Place,” intending it as a way to get it out of his system.
“This attempt to humanize Robin, understand him for his good and his bad and try and understand that character as a person, was the instinct behind this.”
Jackman was sent the script from producer Aaron Ryder, the pair having worked together on Christopher Nolan’s 2006 dramatic thriller “The Prestige.” Then the actor mentioned the possible project to James Mangold, who directed Jackman in “The Wolverine” and “Logan,” and the veteran filmmaker said what a fan he was of Sarnoski’s work.
“Whatever high expectations I had only were exceeded by Michael,” says Jackman during a recent video call from New York. “He’s a deep thinker but he’s also light. There’s an ease about him on set. He’s collaborative and yet assured. It all just feels like he’s born to do it, like the most natural, easy thing in the world. Great sports people, you just go, I feel like the game has slowed down for them. They seem to have more time than other players. That’s how it feels with Michael. He just doesn’t seem rushed by anything.”
Sarnoski, in turn, saw Jackman’s versatility, able to span an action character like Wolverine, a violent vigilante in “Prisoners” and even a Neil Diamond impersonator in “Song Sung Blue.” All of it only added to the unpredictability of the character.
“He’s kind of the perfect combo of all these things,” says Sarnoski. “It’s easy for me to say this, but I think this is just an incredible performance from him. This weirdly combines a lot of different elements of Hugh Jackman in a way that I don’t think I’ve ever seen him do it.”
“The Death of Robin Hood” plays as something of an origin story in reverse — a tale of un-becoming, as Robin, going by the name Randolph, slowly reveals who he really is and reckons with the emotional toll his life has taken on him. Following the rough-and-tumble scenes of the film’s early going, it builds to a quiet, sustained moment between Jackman, Comer and young Faith Delaney alone together as the life literally drains from Robin’s body.
Most of the action is frontloaded in the film, making the steady build to that final scene all the more otherworldly. Even as the story leads to the inevitable outcome of its title, there is still a sense of surprise and revelation.
“That’s the thing I was expecting the whole time I was reading the script,” says Jackman. “I’m like, OK, he’s going to become Robin Hood, he’s going to save everyone that he loves. And it doesn’t go there at all. This goes to a far more meditative and yet powerful ending. It’s so beautiful how the rug gets pulled.”
Shot in only one day and clocking in around eight minutes, the final scene feels as much like a seance or invocation as a piece of drama.
“I remember shooting that scene all the way through and everyone on set, the crew was crying,” says Sarnoski. “And it was one of these things: Are we going to be able to land this moment in the movie? When you read it on the page, it’s a big long monologue from Hugh and some different things happening and you’re like, I think it’s going to be cool, but we’ll see how it works out.” (It has resulted in what might be some of the most emotionally vulnerable moments of Jackman’s long career.)
For the moment, Sarnoski seems to be enjoying an anonymity that may not last much longer. Before his new film’s L.A. premiere at the New Beverly Cinema, where a post-screening Q&A was moderated by Patton Oswalt, he unassumingly slid past the concession stand line that snaked into the theater, no one recognizing him as the director of the film they had all come to see.
He’s also in the midst of planning a move to New York and recently got married. (His wife, Urshula Edwards, a board member of Doctors Without Borders, was also the script supervisor on “The Death of Robin Hood.”) Upcoming, he’ll adapt the popular video game “Death Stranding” for himself to direct.
It’s not bad for someone who just a few years ago needed to work up the courage to see himself as a director.
“I want to make movies about characters that I care about and worlds that I find exciting and that I feel that only I could do the way I want to do it,” he says. “I’ve been lucky enough that I’m trying to just chase those things that excite me creatively. And so far I’ve gotten to do that. Hopefully I can keep it up.”
Given Sarnoski’s ability to pull formidable performances from top actors, viewers will be hoping for the same thing.
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