Guy Ritchie, Gerard Butler Interview, RockNRolla

There is a scheme afoot and we throw Guy Ritchie and the entire cast against the wall for 50 questions! At Comic-Con we caught up with director Guy Ritchie (Snatch) and actors Gerard Butler, Idris Elba, Jeremy Piven and Chris “Ludacris” Bridges who talked to us about their new action film, RocknRolla.

In RocknRolla, London's criminals learn of a scheme that makes them see dollar signs and they'll do anything to pad their pockets with the loot. The cast of memorable characters also includes Thandie Newton and Tom Wilkinson.

Here’s what the director and actors had to tell us:

MoviesOnline: Guy, what was your inspiration for this film?

Guy Ritchie: Well, the thing is, it’s in the same genre as Snatch and Lock Stock, and I felt as though I wanted to do another one, partly because of the amount of enthusiasm I got from those movies, but also because England’s changed so much in the last 15-20 years. The world of crime has consequently changed so much in the last 20 years so, to a degree, part of the movie is about old school gangsters being pushed out by the new school, and an aspect of that is eastern European or Russian. A few years ago, your average gangster had made a few million pounds and was seen as a big to-do, and that’s really been eclipsed by the international eastern gangster who now comes packing billions. He’s like a mobile corporation. And, to a degree, one of the stories is a reflection of the old school natives, trying to hang on to business as it used to be, but they’re just being pushed out by corporate, massive crime, in a purely criminal sense.

MoviesOnline: Why does this genre click with you so well?

Guy Ritchie: I don’t know. I just like under-cultures and subcultures. It just happens to be my thing.

MoviesOnline: What are the similarities and differences in tone with this, as compared to your previous films?

Guy Ritchie: Well, it’s in the same genre, so if you saw this and you saw Snatch, you would suspect that the same filmmaker was behind it.

MoviesOnline: Are there any differences?

Guy Ritchie: I’d like to think so because otherwise we’d have called it Snatch 2. It’s a new take, and it’s a contemporary take, and the stories are new, but you can tell that the guy that made those movies previously is the guy that made this movie. But, that’s part of the package. That’s what I like to do, so it’s influenced.

MoviesOnline: As you get older and you make more films, has the way you approach criminals changed? Do you approach criminals less romantically? Is it different now?

Guy Ritchie: Probably not. That will probably be the answer to that one. No, it’s pretty much an objective view of crime, on the whole. I try not to be ethical or moral about it. It’s simply an observation, and commentary on that observation. That sounded relatively intellectual.

MoviesOnline: Can each of you talk about the characters that you play in this film, and your take on working on this film?

Gerard Butler: My name is One Two and I’m part of the gang. Myself and Idris and Tom Hardy are small-town crooks who, at the start of the movie, are actually trying to do something that is almost legitimate, and they get screwed over by the more native boss, who sees us as immigrants, which I suppose we are, in a way. We spend the rest of the movie trying to make that up, and trying to cover our asses, and messing with the Russians, who then start blaming other people, so then it becomes that irresistible Guy Ritchie movie.

Idris Elba: I play Mumbles, who is part of a gang that, in London, we call earners. They’re out there making a little bit of money, any which way they can. They’re smart guys. They’re street smart, but they just do it the dodgy way.

Jeremy Piven: I was in Cannes when I read the script and I just wanted to be a part of the movie, in any way, shape or form. So, I basically begged and tried to bribe Guy and, somehow, I made it into the movie. [Ludacris and I] are the only American voices in it. The characters originally came about because of an Andre 3000 video.

Guy Ritchie: It did, yeah. It was influenced by Andre and Big Boi. The characters were influenced by that and inspired by that.

Jeremy Piven: So, I just wanted to take the ride, and it did not disappoint, that’s for sure.

Ludacris: Without giving too much of the story away, most of Jeremy’s and my scenes are together. We play the managers of the rock ‘n’ roll artist who the movie is basically named after. The Russian mob is coming into London and taking over organized crime, and there’s just different things going on. We’re hustlers, in our own right. That’s what we do. We’re the two Americans in the movie.

MoviesOnline: Have any of you ever met somebody from the underworld or crime?

Ludacris: I plead the fifth.

Guy Ritchie: Absolutely not. The criminal underbelly of society is heavily frowned upon by myself. [Laughs]
 
MoviesOnline: Do you find that they ever want to get involved and be part of the process?

Guy Ritchie: Yes. Many of the ideas come from them. The pig feeding story, for example, in Snatch, if anyone is familiar with it, is a cliché of how people dispose of bodies. Since then, I’ve seen it pop up in several movies. And, I had met the guy that used to remove the teeth before they chopped him up and gave him to the pigs. [Laughs] By the way, now he’s a grandfather, he’s a lovely chap, he gives to charity, he runs his local football team and he looks like your average, avuncular, generous individual. So, sometimes, there’s nothing exotic about the exoticism of crime. It’s kind of interesting in itself that sometimes people can do what we see as heinous and nefarious acts. To them, it’s just par for the course.

MoviesOnline: Can the actors talk about working with Guy, who is such a stylist, and getting to understand his process?

Ludacris: He practices his jujitsu early in the morning, and then he comes in, energetic as Hell, to set, every day. He knows exactly what he wants and how everything is supposed to pan out. He’s very particular and very opinionated. I’ve never worked with anybody like him, but he’s a very great guy. I was very happy to work with him. I learned a lot from him.

Idris Elba: Guy has this thing where he counts down to the action. That was new to me. It was an interesting way to work. You could see the whole room focus and get into the Guy Ritchie space, which was great, actually.

Gerard Butler: What I loved about Guy is that name. It’s in your soul. He’s an institution. And, suddenly, you’re there and you’re working with him. What surprised me was how easy-going he was. Then, you can trust that you have a director who knows exactly what he wants, but he’s going to let you do what you want. There was a natural flow that we all got into, as we hung out and spent time together. The script had a rhythm, and he really understands that, but at the same time, he just lets it happen and interjects when it’s necessary. That’s what’s great about the movie. It has this flow and this rhythm that’s in the script, and you just have to learn to trust that. He’s the master director of it all.

Guy Ritchie: Thanks, Gerry. You will have another job after that.

MoviesOnline: Revolver was a very ambitious film. Do you think that it’s been understood by audiences now?

Guy Ritchie: I don’t know. I always knew it could be a tricky sell, purely because of its ambition, but it’s exactly the movie that I set out to make. It’s the movie that I’m happy with, but it’s going to divide opinions, certainly. By its very definition, that’s what it was designed to do.

MoviesOnline: What is the social commentary in RocknRolla?

Guy Ritchie: The social commentary is everything I’ve been talking about. The social commentary is about the face of England, and how England no longer has the identity that we previously understood it to have. It’s become international, like New York has become international. So, the commentary is how cultural identities have shifted. If you take New York and London now, they’re so much more similar than they used to be, and it’s commentary on that. It’s commentary on how crime has shifted. It’s commentary on how business is conducted. Previously people could offer, let’s say a million pounds for a house, and then an oligarch would come along and would say, “Just to take it off the market and to save any haggling, I’ll offer you 20 million.” That wasn’t necessarily uncommon. It suddenly became, “It’s going for a million? Well, I’ll offer two or three.” And then, you just go, “Oh, fuck it! How much do you want for it? Here’s 20 million.” Now, they did that with football teams. They did it with football players. They did it with every sort of cultural manifestation that we had. These exponential bids would suddenly come into the equation. That had tremendous cultural effect upon the way everything was manifest. So, we try to reflect some of that within the movie, too.

MoviesOnline: Is it important for you to keep exploring contemporary London, as you continue making movies?

Guy Ritchie: Well, I’ve used the word exponential, and I think it’s pertinent toward culture, in general, and, particularly, any capital that moves as fast as New York or London. Technology is the reduction of time and space, in motion. It’s done that to culture, too. So everything is moving so exponentially fast that we can’t keep tabs on it. So, I suppose this is the interesting part, just before it completely goes off the Richter scale, in terms of its pace of changing. This is like a documentary, before we can’t recognize it at all for the identity it once had.

MoviesOnline: As your career keeps going, audiences come to expect certain things from you. Are audiences harder to surprise with twists and turns now?

Guy Ritchie: I think it depends on what genre I’m going into. The movie after this, we’re doing Sherlock Holmes, and that is clearly going to be in a different genre. So, I think people would expect something very different and, hopefully, a flavor of what it is that they’re familiar with. This was clear in the fact that it did what it said on the tin. I was interested in this genre that people are familiar with, and I hope it’s got enough stuff in it, that is new nutrition, to inspire an audience.

MoviesOnline: Does it keep people guessing?

Guy Ritchie: Oh, no. I’ve been ambitious with how the plots interweave. The hard work is actually writing the thing. Shooting it is comparatively easy.

MoviesOnline: How different is your take going to be on Sherlock Holmes?

Guy Ritchie: It’s going to be very contemporary. Originally, Sherlock Holmes was this intellectual action man and they played down the action man aspect because they just didn’t have the means of executing the action in an interesting way. Well, we do have the means and we have the technology, so we’re just riding on the back of that.

MoviesOnline: When you say contemporary, do you mean present-day?

Guy Ritchie: No, it still remains in its period. But, we like the idea that he’s an intellectual action guy, to a degree.

MoviesOnline: Is there a race against time with the Sacha Baron Cohen project about Sherlock Holmes?

Guy Ritchie: They don’t even have a script yet, so we’re hoping not.

MoviesOnline: Gerard, can you talk about working on Game, and how insane that was to make?

Gerard Butler: That was a pretty intense experience, working with Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor. They have an incredible imagination and they create a great connection with pop culture and science. This movie is very much an example of that. I’ve never quite met guys that can create a story so cleverly with such great characters, and yet add such a dark vibe to it. They do it for fun.

MoviesOnline: Gerard, are you involved with the sequel to 300 at all?

Gerard Butler: No. They mentioned it, and we’ll leave it at that. It’s a very interesting idea, I have to say.

MoviesOnline: Guy, is Sherlock Holmes going to be London-based as well?

Guy Ritchie: Yeah.

MoviesOnline: Are you still a fan of London?

Guy Ritchie: That’s me hometown, yeah.

MoviesOnline: Do you have a pub?

Guy Ritchie: I do have a pub. It’s much harder to run a pub than it is to make a film, by the way. [Laughs]

MoviesOnline: What do you love about London?

Guy Ritchie: I was born there and I’ve seen it change and I know a great deal about it. I’m invested. I live vicariously through my wife, so I was once a spy and now I’ve become a tourist. It’s much more fun to live in London as a tourist than it is as a spy. A spy always looks for the bad stuff and a tourist always looks for the good stuff. So, it makes it easy, being married to an American.

MoviesOnline: Have you discovered new things about London, being married to an American?

Guy Ritchie: Sure. I mean, London’s big. You think New York’s big. New York goes up. London just goes on and on and on. London’s been going on for 2,000 years, and it hasn’t stopped for 2,000 years. New York’s been going for like 300 years.

MoviesOnline: Has the smoking ban in England affected your pub at all?

Guy Ritchie: The only reason I went into the pub business is because they stopped smoking in pubs. But, I think four pubs a day go out of business because of it.

MoviesOnline: Idris, you and Gerard play characters in this who are on the verge of going legit. Why is it that criminals can’t seem to make that jump?

Idris Elba: The reality is that 80% of criminals end up in jail or dead. That’s the reality. The other 20% end up being politicians. [Laughs] It’s good to be home, making a movie with Guy in London with a really good bunch of actors and a good crew. Honestly, this film, from start to finish, is really, really good.

MoviesOnline: With everything you’ve had going on this summer, is everything okay for you?

Guy Ritchie: As far as I’m aware.

“RocknRolla” will opens in theaters on October 31st.