Filmmaker Paul Greengrass on rage, rebellion and ‘The Uprising’

**Tonya Mosley** (0:00)
This is Fresh Air, I'm Tonya Mosley. My guest today, director Paul Greengrass, makes films about the choices ordinary people make when they're trapped inside forces they cannot control.
He's taken us to the streets of Derry as British soldiers opened fire on civil rights marchers in Bloody Sunday, aboard a hijacked plane on September 11th and United 93, and onto a cargo ship seized by Somali pirates and Captain Phillips.
His new film, The Uprising, takes on a story familiar to generations of English schoolchildren, the Peasants' Revolt of 1381
In the film, the play cut the population in half, making workers more valuable than ever, but the ruling class is determined to keep them in their place. When the government imposes a brutal tax to finance its wars, tens of thousands march on London. Andrew Garfield stars as an unnamed farmer called the Ploughman. He's buried his wife and children and is deep in debt on land that no longer produces a crop. As the revolt gathers around him, his private grief becomes political rage. And in this scene, the radical priest, John Ball, played by Jamie Bell, offers the Ploughman a new way to understand his suffering.

**Paul Greengrass** (1:19)
God has taken much from me. God left my fields long ago.

**Tonya Mosley** (1:24)
No, He has not left you. It is His plan.
Why would God have a plan to cause us such pain?

**Paul Greengrass** (1:33)
The sickness was His punishment for the crimes of the rich.
So why do we suffer also? To show us the truth. And fill us with rage.
Surrender to it.

**Tonya Mosley** (1:48)
And that was the second truth.
I saw the uprising earlier this summer. And since then, just weeks before the September 10th release, the film has taken on a surprising new frame. The rise of Robin Hood. Paul Greengrass, welcome back to Fresh Air.

**Paul Greengrass** (2:06)
Very nice to be here again.

**Tonya Mosley** (2:08)
So Paul, I am very curious about this connection between the Peasants' Revolt and the story that we know of Robin Hood. Tell me about it.

**Paul Greengrass** (2:19)
Well, the film is about the Peasants' Revolt, which is one of the greatest rebellions in English history in 1381 in the middle of the medieval world. And it's from that period that the legend of Robin Hood emerged and the two are connected because both of them speak to a bitterly divided world between the rich and the poor. And one of the things that occurred, you know, Robin Hood was really just a moniker for an outlaw prior to 1381 But after the Peasants' Revolt, that was when the ballads and the legend of Robin Hood got going and became wildly popular in medieval England because it spoke to people's desires for a better world, a fairer world against, you know, the rapacious rich.
And so in the story of this simple farmer, he eventually becomes an outlaw and he becomes an outlaw at the time when the Robin Hood legend was getting going and it got going because of the world that the Peasants' Revolt took place in.

**Tonya Mosley** (3:26)
This is a story that you grew up learning as a schoolboy. And it came back up for you though during the pandemic.

**Paul Greengrass** (3:34)
Correct.

**Tonya Mosley** (3:34)
Take me to that place where you're thinking about this story coming back up for you.

**Paul Greengrass** (3:41)
Well, yes, I started writing it in the pandemic. I've been thinking for a while about doing a sort of story rooted in English history and about sort of resistance and a sort of freedom fighter type film. And so when the pandemic came and we were all locked down, it just became natural. What I wanted was to do a story about an ordinary person, an ordinary farmer caught up in tumultuous events, events that would feel, I think, although it's set in the medieval world, would feel very familiar to an audience today. Because I think in many ways, when you think of the turbulence in our world today, it is driven by these great inequalities and the rage that people feel about elites and all those things that wherever you are on the political spectrum, I think we recognize that that's what's going on in your country and mine and Europe and beyond.
It just seemed to me this story really spoke to that.

**Tonya Mosley** (4:41)
I was really struck by the fact that we lost more than a million people to Covid in this country and during the plague, half of England.

**Paul Greengrass** (4:49)
Unimaginable really, isn't it? It is unimaginable. When you look back, it's only a few years and yet, it seems like we haven't really processed it properly. But I think that's how it goes. I think these things work in subterranean and mysterious ways. It certainly was the case in medieval Europe.