Robin Hood and the wrong sort of leaves

For a man who spent his life in Sherwood Forest robbing the rich and giving to the poor, it is a strange excuse: Robin Hood's latest Hollywood outing has been postponed because of a failure to grasp a fundamental of botany.

The director Ridley Scott has pulled the plug on Nottingham, which was due to begin production in the UK in a fortnight's time, after realising the leafy trees providing his backdrop would turn brown with the onset of Autumn, halfway through filming.

A statement from Universal, the studio backing the project with an estimated $100m (£50m), revealed that its stars, Russell Crowe and Sienna Miller, have been informed that filming cannot commence until next spring, at the earliest, since: "The film's forest locations need to be green."

The wrong kind of leaves are not the only problem. Universal said the anticipated Screen Actors Guild strike was a "cloud" hanging over production. Most problematically, the studio is dissatisfied with the script, originally by Ethan Reiff and Cyrus Voris but re-drafted at the fingertips of the Oscar-winning screenwriter Brian Helgeland. "The current version," Universal said, "is not yet where the studio and the filmmakers want it to be in terms of realising the full value of the story."

It added: "Universal could have moved forward with one of these challenges, but the confluence of the three caused the studio to reconsider and take the time for all conditions to be optimal."

Although Universal says it is still "committed" to putting Nottingham in the cinemas, the announcement of the delay is a blow to film-goers, who have been looking forward to the renewal of Scott's partnership with Crowe since last year.

Nottingham was billed as a revisionary retelling of the Robin Hood story through the eyes of the Sheriff of Nottingham, played sympathetically by Crowe, who would emerge as its eventual hero. Miller was to play Maid Marian, while the Batman star Christian Bale was considered as another confused vigilante: a somewhat un-heroic Robin Hood.

Explaining the plot, Scott said: "Richard the Lionheart is on his return from the Crusades when he takes an arrow in his neck and dies. His brother, John, becomes king. He is actually pretty smart, but he gets a bad rap because he introduces taxation. So he's the bad guy in this."

Crowe's Sheriff of Nottingham was to be King Richard's former right-hand man, who gets torn between his duty towards the unpopular King John and his affinity towards both the English people and Robin Hood. "He is caught between the minority of haves and the majority of have nots," explained Scott.

The delay to filming, which had already been postponed, is a blow for the British film industry, which has worked hard in recent years to attract lucrative big studio productions to the UK.

As to apportioning blame: Hollywood studio executives could, perhaps, be forgiven for failing to realise that Britain's deciduous woodland would become less leafy in winter, since many of their own forests are coniferous. However, the same cannot be said for Scott, who was born and raised in Co Durham.