Robert Downey Jr interview, Sherlock Holmes

In a dynamic new portrayal of Arthur Conan Doyle’s most famous characters, “Sherlock Holmes” sends Holmes (Robert Downey, Jr.) and his stalwart partner Watson (Jude Law) on their latest challenge. Revealing fighting skills as lethal as his legendary intellect, Holmes will battle as never before to bring down a new nemesis and unravel a deadly plot that could destroy the country.

We caught up recently at Comic-Con with stars Robert Downey, Jr. & Rachel McAdams and producers Joel Silver, Lionel Wigram & Susan Downey to talk about their new movie. Directed by Guy Ritchie, “Sherlock Holmes” promises a steampunk take on a Victorian classic and puts a controversial spin on the complex relationship between Holmes and Watson. As Downey assures us at our press conference, “It’s bad-ass!”

Here’s what they had to tell us:

Q: Robert, can you talk about your take on Sherlock Holmes?

Robert: My take is what the puritans would expect, if the puritans know what they’re talking about, that is. Several of the most surprising things right off the bat are that oft associated props have never appeared in the novels or the short stories. He never wore a deerstalker cap except maybe once for a minute, but even then it was described differently, and even the long pipe was just something that William Gillette used to not obscure his face on stage. So, the very thing that -- somebody smarter than me will know this -- what do you call something when they cut something out of black paper? Silhouette -- even those things aren't really quite accurate so we just went back as much as we could without wanting to be reverent beyond repair to help Doyle explain the characters.

Q: Robert, you have a great way of making all of the characters feel very natural. Is that easy to bring to this period in this material?

Robert: Well it's never easy to be relaxed, but we work really hard to make it seem that way and we would write out dialogue to make it seem more natural and have a flow to it. I think the other great thing about doing a period piece and doing something that's so specific to -- and I really do think Doyle was an amazing, amazing writer and storyteller, I didn't really quite know how great he was until we kept reaching out to find quotes and things he had said or descriptions he'd said or really more philosophical points of view that Doyle used through Watson and Holmes and all that stuff. The boundaries are it's Victorian England and they're gentleman and so it's not some of that wavy-gravy free-flowing stuff. It’s more boundary laden, which I think was a great challenge.

Q: Rachel, did you have a lot of fun doing this? In the trailer, it seems like you have an awful lot of fun, can you talk about the costumes and how that works within your character?

Rachel: Yeah, she's a really fun character because she’s quite different from a lot of women at that time. She's really her own boss. She's a real free spirit and she's a woman of the night and of the underworld, so she's very acrobatic and she's traveled all over the world. So, there's lots to play there. And then the costumes, I'm such a girly girl so I was like a paper doll. I was in heaven being dressed from the head down and the costumes are incredible, I mean, real life corsets with the bones and totally cinched in, and I would try to push my belly out in the morning when they were coming to strap me in. It really was like out of Gone With the Wind and I'm holding on to the trailer door and trying to eek out just a little bit of space so I can speak properly, but they managed to squeeze me in everyday. They tried to make me laugh and on the laugh they'd yank, but it was so much fun to be that authentic, to be really dropped right into the period, you know. It was great.

Q: Robert, ten years from now, will you still like to be playing characters like this?

Robert: Well, I think about rock stars and they always say they’re going to retire by this or that age, and then I think about other guys who shall remain nameless, one of which just starred with Rachel in a movie, who had double franchises going, and he wondered if he was too old to do it. I think the thing is, if the material is still good and if you still love working with the people you get to work with, then why not? I wouldn't want to launch anything else, but I think that Sherlock Holmes in particular has just been such a life changing experience, the act of researching it and making it, and Joel and I getting to do something big together and Lionel and Susan and Rachel and Jude. I’m so sorry that he's not here today. He is so the right arm of this movie. He wanted to go do something undeniably legitimate so he's doing Hamlet right now. But we, of course, say “Hamlet, anyone can do that. Who gets cast that hasn’t?” (Laughter) He was a huge part of this movie working, so really the answer to the question is, I'm down for the cause. By then we’ll probably have another kid, maybe a Shetland pony, a non-alcoholic vineyard. We might need all kinds of…I might need to really keep cranking them out.

Q: Robert, can you tell us about the relationship between you and Jude in the film? I think Rachel has described it as a love story between Holmes and Watson.

Rachel: You don’t mind?

Robert: (to Rachel) No. Well, she doesn’t give me any. (laughter)

Rachel: I’m there to kind of break them up.

Robert: It’s called circumstantial homosexuality. (laughter) To tell you the truth, this is me after lunch, honey. What do you want? Our fearless leader here would say, and by the way I've heard this is like a staple now, he’d go "We need a Butch and Sundance scene there and we need a…” And what's the other scene they need?

Rachel: The one from Heat.

Robert: Heat, yeah. “We need the Heat scene here.” We kept talking about Butch and Sundance. It's another thing entirely to actually get in the spirit of ‘what does that mean’? It means when people are so close that they almost can't stand each other, but they can't stand on their own two feet without each other. That's what we really felt. Doyle was giving us the first look at what was essentially a two-hander and Doyle essentially is Watson because he's telling the stories, but saying Watson's telling them. The process with Jude was, we met at Claridges. Joel was like, “Go, sell ‘im!” So he walks down the hall and my assistant, who never cares about anything, is like standing in the hall. She's like, “Oh my God, there he is!” And, he walks down the hall and, you know, he's dressed in that fabulous, super expensive, underdressed way, and I just said, “Dude,” and we literally, before he said he was going to do the movie, before he said he was available, before he said that he didn’t want to be quoted, we just started talking like two serious actors about what would need to happen to make this work as a piece of straight drama, and I think we became really close really quick because we just rolled up our sleeves and started working from jump.

Q: For Joel and Robert, it seems like this is a real Steampunk take on Sherlock Holmes. Do you think that’s intentional?

Robert: Joel does not understand the term.

Q: Steampunk as in Victoriana with more gadgets.

Joel: I mean, to an extent, and I wouldn't go that far. It's not like a Wild Wild West. I’m going back to the source material for Wild Wild West. It really is a movie set in 1891, but it is as if we shot it then. It doesn't really feel like…there’s no real artifice. It feels like it was shot in 1891 with incredible camera work and incredible dollies and everything, but yes, there's a part of the industrial revolution, it's happening then, but it's not so much what's going on and the details aren't that deliberate. Sherlock does know more than anybody else and I think officially he's the only fictional character admitted to the Institute of Chemistry, or what's the name? He was thought of as an actual chemist in the way Doyle wrote about him and Holmes knows everything. I mean, it's unbelievable, but he knows everything and he figures things out and there's a great line in the movie where someone says to him, "Holmes, how did you see that?" [And Holmes responds] "Because I was looking for it." And that's like a perfect Holmesian moment and I think that they were always trying -- they had the worn books in their hands and they were always trying to go back to the books and actually take lines out of the books where Sherlock will say, "Data! Data! Data! I can’t make bricks without clay."

Robert: There's a million of them. They’re the best lines you could ever want to say.

Joel: And these are Conan Doyle’s lines, so I think that it really feels like the way it should be, and look, we all love the Basil Rathbone-Nigel Bruce version of the movie, but it's very different than what we made.

Lionel: We tried to keep the gadgets we liked authentic to the times so the technology and all that is stuff you would have seen in that time and stuff that was invented around that time. The other thing I would say is that even during Victorian times there were people who had to shave and had rumpled clothing and that kind of stuff and we tried to do that with this film. Typically, with Sherlock Holmes, everybody always looked perfect and what we tried to do is make him more real by representing them as people who would be more like us. Sherlock Holmes has stubble. Sherlock Holmes is a character who spends two weeks lying on his couch in between cases. So probably he hasn’t had a bath and he hasn’t shaved and we wanted to present that because we hadn’t seen that before in any of the other movies.

Robert: It was problematic.

Rachel: We were very dirty.

Robert: (laughs) We were pretty dirty in the movie. By the way, tableau was the fucking word I was thinking of when we said silhouette. Everyone can relax now.

Rachel: I’m really sad that Hotson… Watson, Hotson. Because it was Jude Law. I’m sad that didn’t make it in[to the film].

Robert: I know. Oh yeah. Hotson.

Rachel: It wouldn’t have worked.

Robert: It was a little too far… By the way, Guy (Ritchie) typically on set would be like, “You’re alright with that one, Hotson?” And everyone would be like, “Who’s Hotson.” And he’d go, “Well, he’s the hot Watson.”

Q: How was it working with Guy Ritchie?

Robert: I'm going to pass that over to Susan Downey who has probably the best objective view on this and don't hold back.

Susan: Oh, no, no, no. Well, no doubt, I mean, Guy, he's a character. Joel and I had worked with him on RocknRolla, but obviously this was a much bigger movie, the scope of the movie, the time we had to shoot it, the money we had to make it and all that. And what's really great about Guy is he has a sense of what the feel, the vibe, the tone is going to be, which is what you see reflected in his movies and he was also very conscious that he was being given an opportunity to show kind of a different side of himself as a director. I think you're going to recognize his sense of style, but it's going to be brought to a whole new level. As far as working, what we observed working with the actors is that he gives them a lot of leeway, but there are parameters. He let's them do their thing and he'll watch and then he'll come in and, if he likes it, he'll let 'em just kind of go with it, and if he doesn't, everybody clears out and he steps in. He puts his writer's hat on and sits with them and hammers it out until we get the scene right. He's one of the most efficient directors we've ever worked with. He's very time-conscious, sometimes to the point where you're like, "Dude, just take the time you need. We'll make it work.”

Robert: I'll give you an example of that in a minute.

Susan: But no, sometimes he'll just be like, "C'mon, c'mon. We have the crew ready, we got to go, let's just get it right." He's really good about coming in and tweaking and shaping and doing that, but he lets everybody else do their jobs. He's not one of those directors who's going to micro-manage and I think Robert's worked with a few of those, so it's probably a little refreshing for that.

Robert: At some point in shooting, he actually took on a guitar teacher because he felt that, you know, why shouldn't he be utilizing his time more efficiently while he’s waiting around for set-ups.

Susan: In between set-ups --

(Laughs).

Robert: Now, Rachel McAdams’ first day of shooting, she prepares for six and a half hours, comes to set, there's two long-lens cameras, we did two takes, and I was like, "Great, now we're going to cover it," because it's her first shot, and Guy's like, "No that's alright, I think we got it," and I was like, "We don't got it (makes a shrieking sound)!" Rachel's like, "Should I have had my stand-in do it?" And you look in the movie, it's the scene where I'm looking across the punch bowl and we see that she winks at me, and he had it.

Rachel: He knew he had it.

Robert: He had it but sometimes you want to do more, particularly when you get all gussied up for half a day. You want to feel like you’re working there.

Rachel: We just want to indulge ourselves.

“Sherlock Holmes” is scheduled for theatrical release on December 25, 2009.