Last November, David B. Coe became the latest artist to take on the task of presenting the Robin Hood myth.
Ridley Scott's film about England's most-famous outlaw premieres today, and Coe, a Sewanee, Tenn.-based author, recently released his novelization based on Brian Helgeland's script.
Coe discussed his reaction to the script, the film's darker tone and why Robin Hood continues to be so popular.
CP: How did you get into writing?
DC: I wrote in high school. I worked on the newspaper and did a lot of creative writing. I had an interest then. I went to college thinking that I would be a creative writing major, but got sidetracked by various things and ended up getting a PhD in history. (Laughs.) It was a pretty big sidetrack.
I continued to do writing on the side, and in fact, after I finished the PhD, I was at a point where I wasn't working as I waited to apply for academic positions. My wife had started working at the University of the South as a biology professor, but we both agreed we'd go on the market again.
She said to me that summer, "You have nothing to do and you have several months. You've been talking about writing fiction since the day I met you. Why don't you spend the summer writing fiction?" So I started working on a story that was my first novel. I started selling it around the same time about the same time as I went on the academic job market.
I was literally offered an academic position teaching history in Colorado, and heard from the man who would eventually be my editor at TOR. The two calls came within 24 hours of each another, and both said, "Take the weekend to think about it and give us an answer on Monday." It was this amazing intercession of the two threads of my life. I chose fiction and never looked back.
CP: How did you secure the contract to write the novelization of "Robin Hood"?
DC: The way this works is, the studio, in this case Universal NBC, licenses the right to the project to a publishing company. They do it at auction. They get the various publishing companies they want to bid on the movie rights to publish the novel together. As it happens, in that process, my publisher, which is TOR Books, a subsidiary of St. Martin's Press in New York, emerged as the front runner to get the license.
The acquisitions editor on that deal happened to be my editor. He came to me, and he knows that I have a degree in history and write very quickly and the quality of the work I put out. He came to me a week before they closed the deal, and he said, "This is in the works. It would mean you would have to write the entire book in five weeks. Are you interested?" I started to tremble, but I said, "Yes." He said he'd get back to me when he knew something for certain.
He got back to me a week later and said, "It's a done deal. I'm sending you the script tonight." I think that was on Nov. 30. He said I would have it the next day and that they needed the book by Jan. 4. That was it.
At one point, I got into a panic as I was working on it because it was going well, but I wanted to have a Christmas of some sort. We had family coming in, and I said, "What happens if I turn it in late?" He said, "Well, it's not like anyone can come to your door and wrest it from your hands. If it's late, it's late." I ended up handing it in on Jan. 11. I didn't use that extra week to write, I literally took a week off in the middle of the process.
CP: Did that week help your writing at all? Recharge your batteries?
DC: Absolutely. The break helped in a number of ways. One was that I was feeling pretty burnt out at the time. I spent those first three weeks and got some 63,000 words written, about 300 some odd manuscript pages. For me, that's an awesome pace. I can't maintain that at all.
I was pretty burnt out by the time I said right before Christmas that I was going to take a break and get back to it when all the family had gone back to their homes and I had the house again. The other thing that happened was that very soon after I handed the book in, we got the copy edits back and a host of revision notes from the studio. The project dragged on well beyond the Jan. 4 deadline. Had I not had that break, I think I really would have crashed and burned in the rewrite process.
CP: When you got the script, what stood out to you most?
DC: What stood out most is that it really is a unique take on the Robin Hood legend. This is not Errol Flynn's "Robin Hood" or Walt Disney's "Robin Hood" or Kevin Costner's "Robin Hood." The story is, in a sense, a prequel to "Robin Hood." It's not about Robin living in Sherwood Forest and doing battle with the Sheriff and robbing from the rich and giving to the poor. It's about how the person who becomes Robin Hood takes on that persona, and what it is that drives him to go from being a simple soldier in the crusading army of Richard the Lionheart to being, in effect, the populist outlaw.
In that way, it's a unique take. The Sheriff of Nottingham is not the main villain. There's a different guy who's the main villain, and he's a really good villain in that he's really bad. That's the Mark Strong character.
It's just a unique take. There's a lot of history. One of the reasons I liked it and one of the reasons why my editor threw it my way, I think, is that it's got a lot of history. At various times in the course of writing the book, I have to write from the point of Richard the Lionheart and King John, who is Richard's younger brother, and Eleanor of Aquitaine, in addition to writing from the point of view of Robin and Marion and Friar Tuck and those guys. It was really fun, in that way. It's a different Robin Hood.
CP: Working from a pre-existing manuscript, how much creative license did you have to make it your own? Did you have any leeway?
DC: Yeah, that's the biggest challenge for the writer. The short answer is that I had very little leeway. I couldn't change any dialog. I couldn't remove any, and I couldn't alter any, at least not without getting permission from the studio first. I also couldn't weave in any of my own sub plots.
They gave me a little bit of leeway to write in a scene or two that isn't in the movie to bridge one scene into another. The toughest thing about turning a movie into a book is that movie transitions can be abrupt. Transitions in books don't work as well when they're abrupt. There needs to be some sort of bridge to get you from one place to another. That was part of the challenge.
On the other hand, what I could do is choose who would be my point-of-view character. I could write as much internal monologue as I wanted, so I could really get into the heads of my characters, whether it be Eleanor of Aquitaine or Robin or Marion or Richard the Lionheart. That's a huge amount of freedom and a chance for me to range and play around, creatively. I enjoyed that.
Then, of course, I had to do my descriptions basically on my own. What I had to work with was a script and some movie stills. I could see some of the costuming and some of the sets. Most of the time, from a descriptive standpoint, I was on my own. Those were the places where I got to range around creatively a little bit. Yes, this is somebody else's script, somebody else's story, but it's very much my book. I got to do enough that I feel a certain level of creative ownership of the book.
CP: Was this the first novelization you'd done, and did you expect to feel that sense of ownership when you finished?
DC: The whole process was a revelation for me. I'd never done a novelization, and I hadn't even done any media tie-ins, which are pretty common in my genre, be it writing books in the "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" or "Star Trek" or "Star Wars." I had never done any of that. All my previous books had been my own, in every sense of the word.
I didn't know what to expect from it. To a degree, I expected to feel constrained by the script, and I suppose there were times when I felt that, when I wanted to take the character somewhere else. But it wasn't my story to do that to, so I didn't give it too much thought. I guess I do feel like it's more my book than I expected it would be from the outset.
CP: Did you find that your history degree ended up being helpful?
DC: Yeah, I think so. I think anybody these days, historical research is fairly easy to do online. The books I'm writing on my own right now are historical fantasy, so I'm getting even more used to doing this type of research as I write.
I knew where to go for my sources, and I had some books here that I was able to rely on from the outset. I don't want to sound self-serving, but I think there's a level of historical sensitivity that my historical training gave me in coming to the material that made me want to get it right and be as precise with the history and the marriage of history and fiction as I could be.
In terms of putting me in the mindset of the book, it helped me in ways that are hard to quantify or describe. I'm a historian as well as a writer, so I think that having that mindset going in was helpful to me. I think it benefited the books.
CP: How much extrapolation did you need to add to what was in the script in terms of historical accuracy?
DC: I think it was more complimentary than anything else. Certainly, when I was writing in Eleanor of Aquitaine's head, I was conscious of trying to bring in what I knew of and had learned about her past. There's another character in the book, a French princess who ends up marrying King John, and it really did happen.
Eleanor of Aquitaine is a really interesting character in that she's ancient. She must be in her 70s by the time this story happened. In medieval times, in the 12th and 13th centuries, that's really old. So she was actually, at one point, married to this French princess's grandfather.
So there's this scope of European history embodied in the relationship between these two women, which is a very hefty relationship. I was able to play with that a little bit in her mind as she's looking at this girl and she seems so young and she's sharing a bed with Eleanor's son, and Eleanor was married to this girl's grandfather. There's this web of familial intrigue that was quite common in European royal families in the medieval period but which is utterly foreign to us now. Being able to play with that was fun and adds a dimension to the book that you won't get in the movie because the movie is focused on other things.
CP: Do you think it was easier or harder to work within a mythology that has immediate familiarity the way Robin Hood does?
DC: It was fine for me. I think that the challenges that the book and that the movie will face, particularly the movie, is that people go to Robin Hood expecting one thing, and they'll get another. What they'll get is a high quality product. The script is well written. Ridley Scott, of course, is a terrific director, and the movie stars (Russell) Crowe, (Cate) Blanchett and William Hurt, so the cast has some gravitas to it.
People will go in there and some will expect a merry romp. You can tell just from the trailers that it's a darker movie. I think that the challenges that will come from playing with the Robin Hood legend are going to be in getting past people's expectations and getting them to expect a different version of a tale that many of us grew up with.
CP: Was that your impression when you read the script, that it was a darker version?
DC: Absolutely. The Errol Flynn version with the swinging on the chandeliers and the hearty laughter at every turn is almost a caricature of itself. (Laughs.) Even the Kevin Costner version, which is also a darker Robin Hood, has its merry moments. I'm not crazy about that version, but I love Alan Rickman as the Sheriff, and I love Morgan Freeman. It's not a terrific movie, but it does have its lighter moments like the fight in the water between Little John and Robin.
This movie has that, too. The interplay between Robin and Little John is terrific. The interplay between Little John and Will Scarlett is really humorous. I haven't seen the movie, of course, but I love Scott Grimes, so I'm sure he does a marvelous job with it.
But by the same token, you can't help but, as soon as you start reading this, noticing the darkness in King John and Richard the Lionheart. That royal family was a tragic family, and it's been portrayed in a lot of different art forms. "The Lion in Winter" is all about that family as well. You sense that darkness right away.
I use the word "gravitas" for the cast, but there's a gravitas to the script as well. This is a serious story about history and legend and where the two of them meet. If people give it a chance and look beyond, "Oh, this isn't the Robin Hood I know," they'll be impressed with what's there.
CP: Why do you think Robin Hood is a figure that continues to be revisited time and again in live-action and animated films as well as satirized in Mel Brooks' "Men in Tights?" Why does our culture return to him?
DC: That's a really good question. You can go through many different Western, particularly Anglo cultures, and see this continuing fascination with the character of the outlaw. I lived for a year in Australia, and of course, there are legendary outlaw figures there. Britain has its traditions, and we have our John Dillinger and our Bonnie and Clyde's. We glorify the violent non-conformist, in a way.
There's a populist message that is very powerful, the whole steal from the rich to give to the poor. The Errol Flynn version came out in the late '30s just as we were recovering from the Depression. The 1991 version comes right in the middle of the Bush I recession. This version comes right on the heels of the worst recession in 60 years. It's no surprise that Robin Hood makes his appearances in times of economic strife. There's a message that those who are powerful and rich needing to be tamed in order for the downtrodden to prosper that resonates with people.
CP: Having written your first novelization, would you like to write another?
DC: Yeah, I would, and I hope to have that opportunity. The fact that I met the deadline basically - a week in the publishing business is not that much - and that I felt I did a pretty good job with it, I'm hoping that I'll have that opportunity again. Yeah, it's exciting work. It's a challenge, and I never thought I would write that fast, but I learned a tremendous amount in just those five or six weeks of writing. I forced myself to be a more efficient and productive writer. I think that placing that kind of constraint on my creativity, in terms of having to follow someone else's plot line and dialog, was a valuable exercise. It forced me to find different ways to convey narrative and character than I might have with my own book.
CP: What other projects are you working on? You mentioned historical fantasy.
DC: Yes, the next book that I have coming out is set in Colonial Boston. It's a fantasy in that there's a magical element but Samuel Adams and Thomas Hutchison, who was the governor of Massachusetts during the Tea Party Crisis, show up. It's a blending of a historical story with a murder mystery with a magical element thrown in.
It's the first fantasy I've written that is not what we call "alternate world fantasy." My other 11 books have been set in other worlds. Actually, the third book of my last trilogy came out in February. It's called "The Dark-Eyes' War," and the series is called "The Blood of the Southland." All or most of those books should be available at the signing at Hamilton Place. This next one is historical, and because it's a change from what I usually write, will probably be published under the pseudonym, D.B. Jackson.
CP: When do you expect that to publish?
DC: The new book is probably going to be called "Thieftaker." It's still a ways out. We're looking at spring 2011 to publish it.