The rest, he dismissed, saying: "We're at another level." Crowe has made similar claims: "When the first script came to me, I said I'd do Robin Hood, but I wanted to do a fresh version where we revitalise every part of the story," he told the Sunday Times. Scott has said the only Robin Hood film he really liked was Mel Brooks's spoof, Men in Tights. I would be less harsh on the new movie were it not for the exaggerated claims made on its behalf by director and star. It condenses 20 years of history (c 1199-1218) into a couple of hours, and puts Robin centre stage in a story in which he had no part at all. The echo of Maximus is heard throughout the new film: wronged son returning to claim what is rightfully his and, in so doing, uphold the honour of the dead Good King Richard, oppose the depredations of Bad King John, beat off the French, and prepare the land for Magna Carta and a blissful future, winning the hand of Cate Blanchett's feisty Maid Marian into the bargain. It has given an essentially local tale – Robin's banditry somewhere in northern England – a context never intended in the 15th-century ballads on which the Robin Hood mythos is based. I always like to know where they're coming from." Scott's Robin has been fighting alongside King Richard (the Lionheart) in the Crusades – but the entire Crusades backstory that now dominates treatments of Robin was, in fact, established in the public imagination by Ridley's namesake, Sir Walter Scott, in his novel Ivanhoe (1820).
Scott has told Empire magazine that history is at the heart of his thinking.
The horse, naturally, is white: what else would a hero, about to save England from French invaders, ride? I fear there may be some historical disconnect here. Russell Crowe – looking the spit of Maximus, the hero of Gladiator, with cropped hair, bloodied cheek and an expression of furious determination – is astride a horse. This is significant, because, as I settle down to try to unravel the eight centuries of myth and legend that have accreted around the outlaw, I am looking at a still from the new Ridley Scott movie, which will open the Cannes film festival on 12 May.
'R obin Hood was almost certainly a pedestrian," David Crook, the retired former assistant keeper of public records at the Public Record Office, tells me over tea one afternoon at his home in Grantham.
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