He reimagined Elizabeth I as a flirtatious young princess and upset David Starkey with a hedonistic Henry VIII who looks more like a male model than Holbein’s florid monarch.

Now the creator of the hit television series The Tudors is training his gaze on another English ruler: Henry V.

Michael Hirst, who also wrote Elizabeth, the film that made a star of Cate Blanchett, has signed up to write the screenplay for Agincourt.

This €30 million (£28 million) British film will explore the battle in 1415 where a bedraggled English task force — fronted by skilful longbowmen — pulled off one of the most celebrated military victories in history against a much larger French Army.

It promises to offer a gritty, violent and almost certainly highly sexed counterpoint to previous film depictions of the campaign, notably Laurence Olivier’s and Kenneth Branagh’s film adaptations of the Shakespeare play Henry V.

The film will be produced by Luc Roeg, the son of Nicolas Roeg, the British director who made the classic 1970s films Don’t Look Now, Performance and The Man Who Fell to Earth.

Roeg said that he had hired Hirst because of his success in making The Tudors accessible to a modern audience, even though his project is more of a war film than a palace romp. “If you call the film Agincourt then the battle has got to deliver,” he said. He wants the fighting to feel like a medieval version of the terrifying grunts’-eye view of the D-Day landings in Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan.

Hirst is adapting the film from the gory novel Azincourt (named after the French spelling of the battle site) by Bernard Cornwell, the historical novelist best known for his books about the fictional Napoleonic-era soldier Richard Sharpe. Roeg has also optioned the historian Juliet Barker’s account Agincourt: the King, The Campaign, The Battle and Hirst expects to mine it for “the juiciest bits”.

It was Cornwell’s novel, however, that unlocked a new way of interpreting medieval politics and warfare for a modern cinema audience.

“No one had been going around saying let’s make a movie about the battle of Agincourt,” Hirst said, from his home in Oxfordshire. “Cornwell made everyone sit up by using an archer as his chief character and seeing that world from the ground up rather than, as we usually do, from the point of view of kings and princes.”

The main character is Nicholas Hook, an English mercenary, who witnesses and dishes out unspeakable violence, rescues a damsel in distress and becomes a soldier in Henry V’s forces as they struggle, underfed and overstretched, through northern France towards their date with history.

The English and French kings are peripheral figures in Cornwell’s book but Hirst and Roeg are keen to flesh them out more too. Hirst describes Henry V as a “crazy visionary” whose personal recklessness, informed by his absolute conviction that God was protecting him, was an essential precondition for the victory at Agincourt. The mentally ill Charles VI, meanwhile, had “bouts of insanity and thought that he was made of glass”.

It will not hurt the casting that Henry V was a living legend at this point, and still in his twenties. There will be no need to take liberties with his weight and appearance as The Tudors did when making the middle-aged Henry VIII a remarkably similar size to his younger, athletic self.

Hirst prides himself on his research, sniffing out dramatic interest “from the footnotes of history books”.

Hirst’s global television smash hit has infuriated plenty of historians, notably Starkey, but he retorts that it has also galvanised the study of history among many people who did not previously relate to the past.

The plentiful sex in particular has been a recurrent talking point but Hirst is unrepentant.

He blames Britain’s “puritanical culture” for the fuss and, although he is currently undecided about how much to include in Agincourt, Cornwell’s book is certainly earthy enough already. Hirst believes that sex helps him to demonstrate that his 15th-century characters are “human beings, not characters from a museum or another planet”.

Filming is expected to start next year. One of the main imponderables for a production with such a large budget is how the very English subject matter will play in the US market but Roeg thinks he can make up any shortfall elsewhere.

“We’re expecting a big opening weekend in France,” he said..

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