“It was not the horses keeping me awake at night”
Robin and her friends, “The Hoods”, are always fighting with their rival gang for the piece of woodland at the end of the street. In the imagination of 11-year-old Robin, the wooden sheds there are transformed into a medieval village, where the children fight epic battles on horses, armed with swords and bows, instead of on bicycles and with sticks. Until a shady property developer shows up, who wants to raze the forest to the ground and instead promises the residents a stylish building complex.
When we There seems to be no brakes on British director Phil Hawkins. Not on his ability to elaborate on the thin line between fantasy and reality in his film, not on his ambition to go big with whirlwind adventures for young audiences (for which he could convince star actors from Harry Potter and GAME OF THRONES) and not on the enthusiasm with which he built tree houses on set.
How to pitch a project like this? People must have thought: what is this thing?
Phil Hawkins: The screenwriters did a great job of setting up the whole idea of reality and fantasy but the execution of how those would happen, wasn’t specific on page. The writers and I all had the same ambition to make it as big as possible but maybe they cleverly kept the scale a little reserved not to scare producers off. I thought it was the best script I ever read so my pitch to them was all about how to do reality and fantasy, how to make seamless transitions, and how to fully commit to that world of imagination. The producers didn’t quite know what to expect. Was it going to be a fancy dress spectacle or a low-budget Monty Python rip-off? Nobody wanted that. Until the moment we started shooting, they didn’t realise how big and epic it was going to look.
You say ‘fully commit’ yet you consistently decide to always break the illusion. Even in the most epic, heroic historic scene, there’s a kid with a cell phone.
Hawkins: Because that’s the game. It is important to take ourselves seriously to a point and then remind the audience what it is that we’re actually doing… It’s kids playing! It was a fine balance we needed to make, and that balance constantly evolves throughout the film. Every single transition is different, and every time it happens for specific reasons – whether comical or dramatic. The director’s voice – or whatever pretentious expression you want to use – is in knowing when to switch between fantasy and reality, and why, so the audience doesn’t get lost.
You make it look epic, with knights in full armour, but at the same time there’s always a bit of cardboard box involved as well. Would it have been the same film if you’d had twice the budget?
Hawkins: The basic principle would have been the same, but It would have been bigger, there would have been more kids and more armour, and probably I would have done more with the battle sequences. This film is about imagination, and that comes without limits. It was about trying to do a lot for a little. We had to shoot fast, and make it feel big.
It takes a while – about 10 minutes – until the first grown-up enters the scene. Some of the adults are willing to support the kids in their dispute. Others are willing to support them in their imagination.
Hawkins: For Aura – the witch character – I guess imagination is all she has, and maybe – as the film suggests – there’s some medicinal things involved that make her more open to imagination / hallucination. Even though she actually comes across as a recluse, what she wants the most is to reconnect with her family. She is an old hippie, that’s her vibe, but we beefed up that character in the script, and gave her more of an arc and a backstory.
Regarding the parents, it’s about them being there when they’re needed.
Hawkins: Every kid wants to know that their parents have their back. I hope ROBIN AND THE HOODS is not just for kids – it can work for parents too. I see them smiling during a screening, reconnecting with their childhood. I love the fact that inside us all, no matter how, we can access our childhoods again, and this makes us better people. Only people working with children’s films might understand how difficult it is to speak to a multi-generational audience.
Robin says we should give away the crown in order to save it! I’m not sure if those words have ever been used in a historical context.
Hawkins: That says something about her growth. The crown is what symbolises her childhood. What she’s essentially saying is that, I can give away this crown now because I don’t need it any longer. What’s more important is my imagination, and the ability for everyone to play. The selfish Robin is gone.
Have you heard about a film called BLOCK 5?
Hawkins: It’s fascinating! I watched it with pleasure. It was basically the same story but with different characters and a different approach. It’s often said that it would be interesting to give the same film to five different directors and they’d all be very different. Now I’ve had this experience with our film.
But the way you both worked with excavators is very similar. You make them monsters, dragons…
Hawkins: That’s one of the things I wish we had a bit more time for – to play up the dragons and the fighting. We rigged those dragons’ arms to lift up and breathe fire, but we never had the time to really do that.
Where is your story set?
Hawkins: Let’s call it ‘regional generic’… The place should represent a lot of England and a lot of ‘outside of England’. It could be everywhere, so every kid can recognise it.
You know that I totally believed this set was in one location, in one small forest? It felt like one unity, one cinematographic landscape.
Hawkins: Thanks for telling me – my obsession for a detailed set geography drives people crazy sometimes. One of my favourite moments in the film is when you finally see the kingdom for what it actually is – not as impressive as the bridges and the battlefield in Robin’s imagination. We discussed if we should get the camera up into the air, revealing that the woods were just this scrubby bush, but I didn’t want to hurt what the audience was bringing to it.
That set must have looked quite amusement park-ish?
Hawkins: The kids and crew, they loved that set. It was all real, on location in a forest, and it is still there. The farmer that allowed us on his land kept it – it will probably soon appear in a 1000 commercials. If you think that I’m a big kid, you should have seen our production designer Sivo Gluck… We were like two kids playing in the woods, with bigger toys and a bigger budget, trying to build the tree houses we would have loved as kids. The way we made use of recyclable and organic forest materials, makes it feel like it’s been there forever – it’s kind of lost in time. I love how it engages with people’s memories. If you ask how many grown-ups ever rode their bicycle imagining it was a horse, everyone would say yes. We all did. This film awakens all of this.
How did you work with the mass scenes, directing 50 kids into a battle?
Hawkins: For me that was the most fun. I obviously had talented stunt people and a team offering me the right tools. I didn’t find it stressful, except that there’s always time pressure involved. And my personal pressure about ‘how to make this look like BRAVEHEART without a BRAVEHEART budget?’ We couldn’t stick seven cameras on it like Ridley Scott would do and then cut all the best footage together. Every shot had to be planned. So when we were doing the one-shot-reality-fantasy-switch-battle, there was no extra footage filmed. If that didn’t work, I would have had a hole in the movie. I’ve been using those extras and backgrounds to the maximum extent, so if we had a 360 shot, I’d be reusing the same kids but moving them to different positions so it looked like we had a lot more than we did!
That’s the technical part. Meanwhile you had 50 kids to work with.
Hawkins: A director who complains about working with kids and animals, is a director striving for ultimate control. While you should accept the chaos of working with kids and use it to your advantage. You wouldn’t micromanage the performance of an Oscar-winning actor, would you? Then why would you do that with a kid? I always cast kids that can help me make the movie, kids that have agency. And I don’t patronise young actors, I talk to them the same way as with adults. That for me is the key to working with children. Whether there’s one or 50, we’re all on the same team.
You make it sound easy.
Hawkins: People assume that the scenes with horses and battles were the hardest to direct. For me, the most difficult were the domestic scenes because I knew how to ‘do big’, but I needed to make sure that the family life also felt cinematic and big, even if set in a small bedroom. That’s what kept me up at night, not the horses.
Another thing you needed to make it work was an epic soundtrack. Sometimes very epic!
Hawkins: I’m genuinely blown away by that score. James Everingham works for Hans Zimmer’s company Bleeding Fingers. So Big is in his DNA. And I am a follower of the Steven Spielberg and John Williams tradition, with a lyrical approach towards film scores – I want them to sound as big as possible. We didn’t have the budget for an orchestra, but what he did was mind-blowing. There’s a lot of clever tricks with motifs involved, to make reality and fantasy sound different but yet they become one at times.
Imagine you had the freedom to fill a cinema with 300 people. Who would be in the audience?
Hawkins: Anyone that could get me Star Wars? What would give me the most joy is for kids to go in with a belief that their voice doesn’t matter and to come out inspired that they can make a difference. The fact that I’ve watched it with different audiences in different countries across different languages and it worked… has been a real joy. I won the Junior Jury Award in Schlingel – if I would have had to choose one award, it would have been that one, voted by the exact audience that the film is made for. It’s an instant validation for me, targeting kids that are 30 years younger than me.
Gert Hermans