Guy Ritchie Interview, Sherlock Holmes

MoviesOnline sat down with director Guy Ritchie in London recently to talk about his new film, “Sherlock Holmes,” starring Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law. In a dynamic new portrayal of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's most famous character, Downey plays the legendary detective Sherlock Holmes and Law portrays Holmes’s long time colleague, Watson. The cast also includes Rachel McAdams, Mark Strong and Eddie Marsan.

Ritchie most recently wrote, directed and produced the crime comedy "RocknRolla," featuring an international ensemble cast which premiered at the 2008 Toronto Film Festival before opening in the UK at the top of the box office. "RocknRolla" went on to win the Empire Award for Best British Film.

With “Sherlock Holmes,” Guy Ritchie reinvigorates the classic story of Sherlock Holmes offering audiences a controversial new take on the pivotal relationship between Holmes and Watson while still remaining true to the original source material.

Here’s what Guy Ritchie had to tell us:

Q: Guy, we know you best for your films in the past which have been a little bit smaller than a big blockbuster like Sherlock Holmes. Why did you choose this film?

Guy: I chose this one really because I needed the job. Outside of that, I wanted to go from a small independent film and this seemed to be the perfect segue for going from something that was small. I managed to hold onto an English identity but, at the same time, we had American muscle and American pockets. It’s the perfect segue for me to have something that’s big and broad and is essentially English but with all the American muscle.

Q: Is there any more pressure because of that American muscle and those pockets?

Guy: You’ll have to ask me that in a few days once the film opens. But, as yet, it’s really the same – the same process is involved for a small film as it is for a big film. That may all change in a few days. We’ll see.

Q: Is there any influence from the Kabbalah in this movie?

Guy: We actually derived most of our influence from esoteric schools and it was loosely based on the Masons, but the Masons themselves are heavily steeped in Hebraic scripture. So that’s where we really drew our inspiration.

Q: You’ve talked about doing a fresh take on Sherlock Holmes but you’ve also talked about if you go back to the books this is actually taking a lot of what Doyle intended. Could you go as far as to say this is the most accurate film version of what Sir Arthur Conan Doyle intended or is it a revisionist version?

Guy: It’s subjective obviously and it has to come through some sort of creative conduit. I was, as a director, to some degree that conduit. From a very young age I had an idea, an image of Sherlock Holmes and the partnership. I feel as though I’m informed by and I drew most of my creative ammunition from Doyle. It’s subjective. Every other production obviously had to deal with that which came before it.

Q: Was this an artistic decision rather than a commercial one to go on to this scale? Are we going to lose you to Hollywood or are you going to continue to make the small films as well?

Guy: I don’t know is the answer to that. I really make the films that I want to make. The interesting thing about this experience is that it wasn’t the cliché experience between filmmaker and studio. I argued for the studio. I wanted to make an accessible, broad – what they call a four quadrant movie -- and what they wanted were Guy Ritchie-isms so to speak. So, I argued for the studio and the studio argued for me. It was like two people trying to get to the bar and the other one was trying to insist that they should pay. All the arguments between the studio and myself are always coming from a positive place. I think studios have changed with their approach toward filmmakers and what they want – and I certainly found this with Warner Bros. and Jeff Robinoff who really does seem to support a filmmaker’s vision. I had a tremendously positive experience from the beginning to end. I had no negative arguments. There was no ‘us and them’ which I had anticipated and I’d heard was inevitable. That just didn’t happen.

Q: Why Sherlock Holmes? Of all the iconic characters to bring back, why him?

Guy: Partly because I was invested in Sherlock Holmes as a child so I really had a strong visual sense of who I thought Sherlock Holmes should be. Not only that, but I hadn’t seen any other productions. Unlike most people, I had no visual reference other than what I’d knocked up in my mind. Warners came to me with it as an idea and, as soon as they mentioned it, I was fascinated.

Q: Guy, can you tell us about some of the most challenging aspects of trying to recreate Victorian London?

Guy: I think that’s really a question for Sarah Greenwood (Production Designer) but I certainly had no complaints, which I usually do. I mean, I’m used to having a hammer and nail myself in all the films I’ve done before while I sort of knock things up. It was a relief to come to work and have these great cities built. They managed to manifest something that felt so authentic to me, although we shot almost entirely on location. It was inspiring to see what it was the production department could manifest. So you’d have to really ask them about that. I just loved everything they gave us to offer.

Q: What is it about Sherlock Holmes that makes him so quintessentially English?

Guy: I don’t know. In part, it’s the period and he’s a caricature, I suppose, of that period. What Doyle managed to create was a three dimensional character. He is flawed which isn’t necessarily conspicuous in many of our contemporary heroes. And the fact that he is rather selfish, rather arrogant, and suffers from depression – there are things about Sherlock Holmes that make him interesting as a character. But, I don’t quite know why he’s so quintessentially English.

Q: Why did you choose to do some re-shooting after the film was finished? Are you happy with the results?

Guy: In every film I’ve ever done, I always leave a contingency of a week for re-shoots because you never know what’s going to surface during the editing process so we always leave a week and we left a week in this one. Am I happy with the results? Yes. I’m happy with the results. It’s the film that we all intended to make. If you look at the DVD, there are no deleted scenes either, which is rather disappointing for those that like deleted scenes. There was absolutely no fat on it. Pretty much what we started with is what we ended with.

Q: What about the character of Watson?

Guy: It’s been coined the Hotson vs. Potson scenario. What we really wanted was a good looking Watson and then in the tabloids he got coined ‘Hotson.’ And this was because I’d always seen their relationship as much more of an equal partnership, more like Butch and Sundance, than I had seen it as this sort of bumbling Potson. I just thought that was fair to Conan Doyle and how we saw this partnership should be portrayed.

Q: This is an iconic figure. Are you taking a big gamble without one fleeting shot of a deerstalker or one reference to ‘elementary’ in the script and going so far away from common acceptance of what Holmes is about and how we imagine him to be?

Guy: The deerstalker and ‘Elementary, my dear Watson’ never happened. The deerstalker is never referred to in the books, although we are all aware of the obvious symbols of Sherlock Holmes. Lionel (Wilgram) and I made a decision really early on that if we were going to do this, we’d have to dust off Sherlock Holmes and create what we thought to be to some degree an authentic Conan Doyle version of a Sherlock Holmes that wasn’t contaminated with previous symbols so we could have to a degree a fresh take on Sherlock Holmes.

“Sherlock Holmes” opens in theaters on December 25^th.