'This Is Where the Legend of Robin Hood Came From' — Director Paul Greengrass Breaks Down the Ending of His Peasants’ Revolt Historical Drama The Uprising

Full spoilers follow for The Uprising.

Director Paul Greengrass’ The Uprising chronicles the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, but uses this actual historical event as a setup for what had secretly been a Robin Hood origin movie until a recent trailer revealed the truth. (Nowhere in the film, though, is Andrew Garfield’s protagonist referred to as Robin Hood. His peasant farmer character is known simply as Ploughman.)

After the Peasants’ Revolt is crushed by King Richard II (Woody Norman), the Ploughman, along with other survivors like Alyce (Thomasin McKenzie), abandon their previous lives and take to the woods to become outlaws. In the film’s closing moments, Ploughman and his highwaymen, camouflaged in earthy-hued clothing, emerge from the forest to attack the King’s convoy.

The Uprising’s Robin Hood Ending Explained by Director Paul Greengrass

After his fellow outlaws kill the King’s guards and he personally slays the Mayor of London (Jonny Lee Miller) in one-on-one combat, the Ploughman – or Robin Hood, if you will – pins the King to the ground. But rather than kill him, he leaves the monarch with a warning: We will haunt you forever.

The final shot of the movie is of Windsor Castle where we can hear the King screaming from night terrors. During the first half of the movie, Richard II had been paralyzed with fear and indecision, praying to God to save him from those he dreams are coming to get him. Richard II eventually finds his backbone as a leader, proclaiming he will grant the rebelling peasants’ petitions for freedoms. But then at Smithfield on June 15, 1381, Richard II betrays the serfs, and has his troops kill a slew of them, including rebel leaders Wat Tyler (Cosmo Jarvis) and John Ball (Jamie Bell). In real life, Tyler was killed there and authorities hunted down a great number of rebels in the following weeks.

Ploughman and Alyce are among those rebels who escape Smithfield alive, making their way back to Ploughman’s farm where he finds his home burned down. With nothing left, Ploughman weeps at the graves of his dead family and takes fistfuls of dirt and smears it across his face. The Ploughman is symbolically buried with them, and the outlaw who will inspire the legend of Robin Hood is born. The film then jumps ahead a year to depict the attack on the King’s convoy described above.

I recently chatted with the film’s writer-director, Paul Greengrass, who explained that his intent was always to incorporate the legend of Robin Hood into his story and that he was supportive of Focus Features’ brief pivot to marketing the film as The Uprising: The Rise of Robin Hood.

IGN: Focus very briefly marketed The Uprising as literally "The Rise of Robin Hood." What were your thoughts on that? And is that true to your film?

Paul Greengrass: I believe entirely so. So let me explain that because completely is the answer, 100%. I'll tell you why. So I sit down on Day Two of the [Covid-19] pandemic to write this film that's going to be about a fictional farmer because I knew that I was going to do that in a part of the world that I knew, those Essex-Suffolk marshes. It's where the Greengrasses come from, but a little bit north of there, but essentially that world. And I grew up in Gravesend in Kent, which is very close to Maidstone where he goes. That's all very, very familiar to me and I understood all that world.

I'm going to tell the story of this fictional character. So what I need to do is have him be there at the start of the uprising in this tax collection scene, and then I'm going to have to have him join the Kent rebels, and then he's going to march to London, take part in the revolution or the uprising, see the dreams and hopes of the revolution or the uprising betrayed by the revolution itself, and then ultimately by the king, because the history books tell us that the rebellion, the uprising, was crushed.

OK. If you're making my movie, I can't end with, "And then Ploughman dies," because I don't want to make that movie. That's not a movie. That's not a historical epic. He's got to survive, right? That's point one. Because you want the dreams of The Uprising to live on. So he escapes, he goes to the forest, and he's reborn as an outlaw. That always made perfect sense to me.

IGN: And historically it rings true too.

Greengrass: Completely. And let me tell you why in two really profound ways. First of all, and I knew this obviously before I started writing the film, because I was charting it out in my mind in those early days of lockdown because you start with, "OK, the hero's journey. OK, simple farmer. He's going to do that. And I don't want him to die, so he's going to have to take the idea, as you say, and live on." And he's going to go there, and he's going to become an outlaw. OK.

I knew by then that the first reference to Robin Hood was a few years before the Peasants' Revolt in the poem, Piers Plowman. What he's referring to in the poem is Rober Hood or Rob the Hood or whatever, that was basically a moniker given to a criminal or an outlaw. And there was clearly stories passing around. You're not talking courtly poets. You're talking about down where its history is not really recorded.

You get little glimpses of it, and that's one in Piers Plowman, that people told stories about an outlaw called Rob or Rob the Hood. That's the very first reference, just literally a few years before the Peasants' Revolt. And other characters in the Peasants' Revolt are referenced in the poem, like Tom Hollander's character [who gets] his head chopped off. He's referencing it because it's really the dream of a farmer. That's why I called my farmer Ploughman as a nod to that poem.

Only I know that and other people who did English [as a] major, but it made sense to me. After the uprising was crushed – now, we're talking history, not movie – after the uprising was crushed, what changed? The truth is subterraneanly, a huge amount changed because people started to feel differently about themselves. This was the first moment that people, ordinary folk, ordinary men and women, came center stage and said, "We matter. What we want matters. Our rights matter." It's the first moment. And from then on, the crown, the oligarchs could never quite take the people for granted. You can see that echoing down the next 100, 200 years.

IGN: You can almost draw a line from that to later rebellions in Ireland and the United States.

Greengrass: Sure, the United States. Because what emerged out of the Peasants' Revolt, not the next day, but over time, this sense that individual rights lead to individual representations was the seed that was planted, that flowered. It flowered ultimately in the Enlightenment. It flowered in the American Revolution, which was about getting rid of the king and ruling ourselves alone. And there's a very famous work of history by a woman called Barbara Tuchman called A Distant Mirror. It's a study of the 14th century, and the Peasants' Revolt was a big part of it. And she basically makes the argument in the book that you draw this line from the disturbances of the 14th century all the way through the Enlightenment up through the American Constitution. It's part of the journey towards individual representation.

So the thrust of it, to have an ending where my character says we're going to rule ourselves alone was absolutely emotionally true, true to the movie, but also interestingly with the thrust of where the world went. But the second more interesting point for your question is that the legend of Robin Hood, the real explosion of the popularity of outlaw stories, is all after the Peasants' Revolt. That's when various outlaw stories started to be really wildly popular. And the most popular of course of all is Robin Hood. And why is that? Because it was a way people kept those dreams alive.

There was nobody ever called Robin Hood. He was a superhero, really. He was a guy they told stories about who stood up against the powerful when they felt powerless. And so they kept the dream alive, and he became popular. A bit like in the '30s, people told stories about outlaws like Bonnie and Clyde. It's kind of what happens in hard times. And that Robin Hood was a yeoman. He was an outlaw. He was a bit like our guy. And I'm not saying he was in the Peasants' Revolt, but he emerges after in that sensibility. The Robin of Loxley Robin Hood, the disaffected, the dispossessed aristocrat, that's a Victorian 20th century invention of the Robin Hood myth because it's highly romantic.

And what actually happened was, of course, when they're going to bring a movie out, they do marketing screenings, and this all came up in the marketing and an American audience didn't know it, that this is where the legend of Robin Hood came from. And it was like something that in these screenings, particularly young people by the way, "Oh, that's really cool. We didn't know that." So that's where it all came from. So you go, "OK, well, let's push a bit of that into social media." That made sense to me. I have no problem with it. It's true to the movie and true to where that legend came from.

IGN: As I watched the film, I knew enough about that era and that particular moment in English history to be like, "Oh, it's not like Andrew Garfield pulls out a knife and goes, ‘The name's Hood, Robin Hood.’" But I'm like, "Oh, I see. He's setting up this is where those outlaws come from."

Greengrass: He's no longer Ploughman. When he puts some earth on his face, takes his family with him, takes the land that he's lived on. And now, he's reborn. He's reborn with a hood and a mask. He's going to be an outlaw forever. And then you enter a sort of cinematic place where, "Fuck it. I'm going to ambush the king," because you want to symbolize that he lives on, and that I think is really cool and satisfying.

And you've got to have a movie that entertains people. When I wrote that original screenplay, do you know what the title was? The Hood. That's what I called it six years ago. It was always called The Hood. Then it got retitled. By the way, I was happy to call it The Uprising. I called it The Hood, then I called it The Rage, and then I called it The Uprising.

IGN: Think about Braveheart. You can't end it with William Wallace just getting disemboweled. You have to have the sword flying into the field. You got to know that it was worth something. Even Spartacus, when he dies, the whole “I'm Spartacus!”, all of that, even it's trying to find that silver lining within the real history. You can't change history, but you can modulate it to have a meaning.

Greengrass: You said it, you keep the dream – the flame of freedom stays alive, and the hero's journey continues. And I never wanted my character to die because it didn't feel interesting to me. It felt interesting to me to end him as an outlaw. That was the place where he was headed, and a sort of mythic one where he shed all his identity, became a sort of mythic, a never named outlaw who took on the king and said, "No, I could kill you, but instead, we'll just stay and haunt you forever."

IGN: It's OK. Richard II has a bad enough ending as is.

Greengrass: Exactly. Exactly.

IGN: Obviously, there was at least a little back and forth between the UK exhibitor and the US in terms of the Robin Hood subtitle. Do you think it's because you mentioned the test audiences here in the States and the younger people not knowing, is it something that maybe UK audiences just know? Or is there something more about the fact that we've had all these Robin Hood movies lately?

Greengrass: Honestly and truly, I think all of this is sort of beside the point. First of all, let's take the Focus thing. So they're trying to do a campaign for the movie, which is their job, and I think they're doing a great job. I love the trailer. I love all their materials. What's interesting to me is, it's always interesting when you release a film, you see how sophisticated and different selling movies is. It's hard. It's hard. And how important it is, we're never going to keep cinema alive unless we find a way of connecting with audiences.

In the old days, like when you made a Bourne movie 25 years ago, whatever it was, 20 years ago, you build it and then you pump it out with a thousand TV ads. It was like mass mainstream marketing, but that's not how movies are sold now, and particularly not a Focus movie, which is what this is. You've got to connect with audiences much more directly through social media and all the rest of it. So there are hundreds of these messages of which some contained that Robin Hood thing. I was good with it.

In terms of the UK distributor, it was like one story because they phoned the guy, and he didn't happen to have known at that point what the next phase [was] and it's like suddenly it becomes a story and you go, "Oh my God, is that really what..." As if he said he didn't like the film. He loves the film. He's releasing it for God's sake. He'll be trying to find his way in the UK of reaching the audience that will want to come and see this movie. I don't know because I have nothing to do with marketing, but I suspect it feels to me logically, what they tried to do is find where their audience is and then try and ease it out. And what's the next adjacent bit that you can get? Oh, cool. That audience might be interested in a bit of Robin Hood. Well, it's in the movie. So we'll try and target that. That will make sense to me. The other guy, his date is later. We're not releasing in the UK until the 9th of October. So he's got slightly different issues. He doesn't want to go too early because you want, as I understand it, to unfold your marketing campaign by degrees. You don't want to come out and tell everybody what the ending is first.

IGN: I was a little surprised about the Robin Hood trailer reveal, because to me, I was treating that as a spoiler. That's the end of the movie. And I was a little shocked at them putting that out there, to be honest.

Greengrass: What they felt, I'm sure, is that it will tell people what's in the movie in a good way, in a way that will make a younger male audience want to come and explore it, because [otherwise they might think] it's not a Robin Hood movie.

The Uprising is now playing in North American theaters.

Editor’s note: This interview has been edited for clarity.