Making merry, Ian Sharp polished the action for a hooded hero & roguish rabbit.What do the first six episodes of Robin of Sherwood share with sequences in Who Framed Roger Rabbit and the conclusion of Split Second? The common factor is director Ian Sharp, an Englishman with a deep Lancashire accent and an infectious chortle. Ten years after finishing the job, Sharp looks back proudly on helming the entire first season of Sherwood. “I must confess that when I first got that script, I thought, ‘Oh, God, another Robin Hood? What on Earth do I want to do Robin Hood for?’ And then when I read it, I was desperate to do it—the images just came flying off the page. I virtually saw the film as I read it, because of the way that Kip [series creator Richard Carpenter] had written it.” Sharp was brought into Sherwood “when they had just done the script’s first draft,” on the strength of his direction of action-laden episodes of the English buddy-cop show The Professionals and the film Who Dares Wins (a.k.a. The Final Option). The latter also introduced him to actor Mark Ryan (STARLOG #166). Sharp liked him enough to suggest Ryan for what was meant to be a one-shot role in Robin of Sherwood’s opening segment; the well-known result was Ryan’s regular role as the outlaw Nasir. The idea of having Nasir fight with two swords instead of one was instigated when it was decided the Saracen should win his first episode duel with Robin, instead of losing as originally planned. “We thought it would be a bit of a different swordfight, to have Robin up against the twin swords. And it would make it feasible that Robin could lose, because he’s up against a power that’s beyond him. We made Robin a little more vulnerable.” Robin’s tumultuous relationships with his men were something the series’ creative team took pains to emphasize. “Because kids now would not turn around and say, ‘Right, we’ll follow the leader here.’ They would say, ‘Come on, prove yourself.’ So, he was always under pressure a bit as the leader, particularly from Scarlet [Ray Winstone, STARLOG #188], who was the real soldier of the piece. It makes Robin a much more well-rounded character, not to just have things handed to him on a plate. That’s down to Kip—it was always in the script.” The Old Prisoner (Stuart Linden), a loony inmate of the Nottingham Castle hole-in-the-floor dungeon who refuses rescue in numerous episodes, was born from Sharp’s reluctance to depict a mundane jailbreak. “I was really scratching my head thinking about this scene, because it had always been written [to take place] in a cell [with a door]. I thought, ‘God, I’ve seen this a thousand times,’ with the guard being held around the throat while somebody gets the key out. And I was talking about this to [producer Paul Knight] and he said casually, after about two months of agonizing over what we were going to do about this bloody cell, ‘Well, of course, in those days, they would have had dungeons.’ I said, ‘Well, why didn't you say that before?’ Now suddenly that’s a fantastic scene. ’Cause having the guys in a pit makes it totally different. We realized that to get everybody out, we would have to have another person in the pit [to stay at the bottom to give the others a leg up]. It would have to be somebody who didn’t want to leave, so we would make him an old-timer, and that’s how that character came about.” Merry MenSharp’s enthusiasm for the visual possibilities at Alnwick Castle, used for the Nottingham stronghold, led to various establishments: “The escape from the castle was originally two lines, and it’s about a five-minute sequence in the end. But you go to a location and think, ‘Oh, it would be great if Robin came off here and ran along the battlements there, and I could have all the sheep and stuff down here and …’ That scene where they all come running out, flying under the drawbridge and all that stuff, arose out of me just walking around the location.” Other sites were less inspiring. “Our major problem was the weather. We started shooting at the end of April [1983] and by May 19, it was the wettest May on record. It just never stopped raining, really sheeting down, day after day. When we were up in Alnwick, we could do interiors, we could switch around, but when we got into the forest stuff, there simply weren’t any interiors, there was no weather cover. At some stage,” Sharp laughs, “you can actually see steam rising off the Merry Men. They were very good about it, because they were absolutely soaked to the skin in quite a number of the scenes. And it gave some of it quite a good look, made it more real. “But, there were days when we couldn’t even walk out, let alone film. The rain was just so bad it was blowing the camera around. I decided that rather than the flat forest, [I wanted] slopes overlooking this wonderful area in Bristol, to give it more of a jungle feel. Much of the series was filmed on these steep slopes, and people just couldn’t keep their footing. All I can remember is standing under umbrellas on slippery slopes with half the crew falling down in the mud. And the actors couldn’t even stand up.” Clive Mantle (STARLOG #180), who portrayed Little John, recalls that despite the deluges, “No one lost their temper, no one got angry or upset, because Sharpie had such a good humor at the helm.” He cites a scene that’s a favorite of both actor and director: “In the episode where Richard the Lionheart came back, I had a scene with Robin telling him that Lionheart wasn’t all he was cracked up to be. It was my biggest scene of the year. Sharp wrapped an hour early that night after I had three or four goes at it, knowing he wasn’t going to get any more out of me that night. He just said, ‘Have a good night’s sleep, come back in the morning and we’ll do it.’ We did the scene the next morning and it was perfect. Some directors would stomp about and curse at you for not getting it right—[Sharp] was so supportive and he could reach each of us in a different way.” Michael Praed, who played Robin, had done mainly stage work prior to the series. “I had Ian Sharp teach me about film,” Praed states warmly. “I have a lot to thank him for. He got a bunch of novices to look quite natural and relaxed. He has a degree in psychology, which helps. If we got uptight and started to move a bit like this—” he hunches his shoulders protectively, “he would work out all these great games for us to play.” Sharp doesn’t recall any specific techniques he used to loosen up the performers, but he recalls one prank: “Any director hates eating scenes. For a start, it’s all static, and unless it’s something like Tom Jones, the moment you see ‘Interior: Restaurant’ in a script, you think, ‘God, no.’ In Robin, [the eating scenes] were quite fun, because they were outdoors and it’s part of the local color of the forest. On some occasions, I made them carry on doing take after take when they were eating, wondering how long it would be before they realized we had the shot, and they were just eating themselves stupid. “The hardest thing toward the series’ end was trying to think of another way a Norman could be killed off a horse, or another way to do a swordfight. But generally, I just found the whole thing so enjoyable that I never thought about any kind of hard aspect to it.” […] |