Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood is currently filming on locations up and down the English countryside. Courtesy of The Daily Mail you can see a handful of paparazzi shots of King John’s soldiers attacking a village. These were all filmed in Bourne Wood, Surrey but the film has skipped between a handful of counties. There’s one image above and the others are hidden away down below the break in this story.

The same Mail article quotes Dame Eileen Atkins who recently took up the role of Eleanor of Aquitane. She seems rather concerned about having to act with a live owl but also confirms just how tricky the constant heavy rewriting is proving:

I am completely bird phobic - it’s the same owl that appeared in Harry Potter and apparently it weighs as much as a dog. I have to feed it - probably dead mice - and I’m going to go to an animal sanctuary to help me get over my phobia. They keep rewriting the script and changing my lines quite dramatically, so I’m terrified of forgetting them.

The last story we had on the matter of Robin Hood rewrites revealed that Tom Stoppard was taking up the pen. Stoppard is my dream idea of a script doctor so I’d argue that there’s very little to worry about on the surface there, but it seems like he’s being given very little time to get the new pages in.

Here are the pap snaps.

It isn’t too easy to see in these pictures but I’m sure that the costumes and props will be of the very highest standard, Ridley Scott being Ridley Scott and all. Indeed, it only seems to be the scripts that have speed-bumped any of Scott’s films since Gladiator and the better written films he’s directed since then - Matchstick Men and American Gangster in particular - have been really rather excellent.