On the Robin Hood question: what would your ideal film adaptation look like, and what are your thoughts on the “Nottingham” script that eventually became the bland Ridley Scott movie?

Haven’t read the Nottingham script, but I agree with Patrick Willems that one of the main problems with both Robin Hood and King Arthur movies of recent years is that they’re doing “gritty re-imaginings” of stories that people don’t remember the original versions of. 

Not that “gritty re-imaginings” are bad per se, but I think they work a lot like deconstructions: you need to be familiar with the source material for the deconstruction to land. Hence why I don’t think either Watchmen or Batman v. Superman work thematically or dramatically, because the vast majority of film audiences didn’t have a familiarity with the texts that the source materials were reacting to and playing off of. 

This is even more true of Robin Hood and King Arthur. Compared to previous generations, people nowadays aren’t as familiar with Walter Scott and Joseph Ritson (let alone the Geste) and the children’s adaptations of the same, or for that matter with Geoffrey of Monmouth, Chrétien de Troyes, and Thomas Mallory. 

If you did a straightforward – not literal but evocative – version of those texts, I think you’d blow people’s minds because it’s like nothing they’ve seen before.