Inside The Uprising With Greengrass and Garfield — SkimNews
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- Paul Greengrass wrote and directed "The Uprising," a film about England's 14th-century Peasants' Revolt in which Andrew Garfield plays a humble farmer known only as "Ploughman" who sparks a countrywide uprising after a tax collector arrives at his village.
- Greengrass began writing the script on the second day of the COVID-19 lockdown; his first draft was titled "The Hood" and he said the essential architecture of the film "didn't change very much" through subsequent rewrites.
- Garfield emailed Greengrass immediately after reading the script, calling it "an antidote to the disenfranchisement and a kind of isolation and anxiety" and saying he felt compelled to fight for the role of Ploughman.
- Greengrass linked the Peasants' Revolt outlaws directly to the later Robin Hood ballads, arguing they "postdate the Peasants' Revolt" and served as "the people's stories" that kept the dream of resistance alive after the revolt was crushed.
- Dan Jones, historian and author of "Summer of Blood," served as the film's on-set consultant — Garfield said he could text Jones questions like "Where would my ox sleep?" and receive answers accurate to the month and season.
- The film was shot in Bavaria and Germany, including in an ancient Nuremberg church, with Greengrass citing Kubrick's Spartacus, Braveheart and Gladiator as reference points for "a big historical epic."
Why it matters: Greengrass began writing on day two of COVID lockdown as an explicit antidote to feeling "powerless" in the face of unaccountable power — and Garfield signed on the same day he read the script, agreeing the film is a "call to action" for anyone feeling "disenfranchised," deliberately using a 14th-century revolt to comment on present-day frustration.
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