The Big Picture - Guy Ritchie and the Challenges of Making ‘King Arthur’ | The Big Picture (Ep. 12)

Episode Date: May 11, 2017

Ringer editor-in-chief Sean Fennessey and executive editor Chris Ryan explore the career arc of renowned director Guy Ritchie (0:30) before sitting down with Ritchie (10:00) to discuss the challenges of making his new film, King Arthur, and his personal philosophies surrounding fear, results, and self-confidence. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Hello and welcome to a special, untitled Channel 33 Movies podcast. I'm very excited to be here with one of the Knights of the Roundtable at the Ringer, Executive Editor Chris Ryan. I'm Sean Fennessey. Which Knight? It's up to you to choose. You're either Lancelot, perhaps you're Arthur, perhaps you're Bedivere, perhaps you are Gwyneth Gwyneth.

Yeah, okay, good. So Chris and I are here to talk about King Arthur, Guy Ritchie, who has a new movie about King Arthur, and just sort of Guy's career and also why he made this movie. And, you know, a little bit after that, I'll be having a conversation with the Guy Ritchie about that movie. So, Chris, let's talk a little bit about Guy and who he is as a filmmaker. Yeah, sure. You know, this is his eighth movie. He's been making films for 20 years now. He got to start making very different kinds of movies from King Arthur, this sort of grand scale epic.

Who was he when he first showed up on the scene? Yeah, well, to me, he always represented an outgrowth of UK lad culture that was really big around the mid-90s. So you've got Oasis, you've got Loaded Magazine, this idea that soccer had become very hip and in vogue back. It had been sort of lost to hooliganism and in a lot of ways. But it was like going down to the pub. You had your team. You had your like lad band like Oasis who made proper rock anthems. And he was sort of the film extension of that.

It was a two fisted post Tarantino British gangster movies with a lot of charm and a lot of humor and a lot of violence and a lot of swagger. And that's what I always sort of associate with his early days is just a filmmaker who was in the absence of substance was swagged the hell out. That's right. Yeah. So his first two films, Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, very small independent movie starring a very young Jason Statham, among other repertory players from the Guy Ritchie universe. And then his second film, which is a much more widely seen snatch, a ringer favorite,

frankly, kind of put him on the map as a notable figure. And then he became slightly more well-known, and he started to pursue other kind of gangster movies that are maybe less hip and less interesting than what he was doing before. He also is obviously quite well known for being formerly married to Madonna. They are now divorced. But, you know, what happened to him? There's a sort of an interesting moment where he shoots out like a rocket. He has a, you know, supersonic kind of oasis moment there in British filmmaking. And then he has a little bit of a downturn in the early 2000s. You know, what do you think happened to him? And then how did he bounce back?

I think he bumped up against the ceiling of his ability to manufacture his own material. Somebody like Tarantino, who made two gangster films, essentially, in his first two movies, and then increasingly began to ripple out and experiment with genre, but always writing his own material, always creating his own worlds, always creating these iconic characters, movie after movie. Richie made Lockstock and Snatch,

and Snatch is essentially the Hollywood version of Lockstock in a lot of ways. Very much. It's just another very Byzantine crime tale, but this with prettier faces. But then he starts to really bounce up against his ability to evolve from that. And that's what, for as much as I like rock and roll as a fun movie to watch, you get to the end of that with Revolver,

which is just kind of incomprehensible and not particularly charming and lacks a lot of the energy that he brought to the earlier films. I think he actually had sort of a little bit of a renaissance as a franchise director. I think that just being somebody who added a little bit of flair, a lot of competence, and an ability to stage a set piece took him a long way when he started to make films that were these Hollywood, predisposed Hollywood blockbusters. Yeah, so basically the last 10 years of his career, essentially since he was divorced from Madonna,

have been defined by two Sherlock Holmes movies, starring Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law, which are huge hits, and The Man from UNCLE, which is interestingly kind of a cult favorite. Yeah, it's become like a cult movie now. Which I don't think I would have guessed. I would say when it came out, I thought it was a terrible idea. It was a piece of property based on a 60s television series that had been developed for 25 years in Hollywood. Soderbergh and Clooney.

Soderbergh and Clooney, yeah. And had been alive for the longest time. And ultimately when it was made, it was made with Henry Cavill and Armie Hammer, two sort of like not quite A-list stars. Guy Ritchie off of the Sherlock moment. It didn't seem like it was really going to work. But now if you talk to people in our office out in the world. They're like, oh, Vikander is amazing in that.

DeBecky is amazing in that. There's a lot of love for it. So he has managed to add a little bit of charm and grit to some of these predisposed properties, like you said. So now he makes the transition to King Arthur. King Arthur, Legend of the Sword. It's sort of an origin story. You'll hear Guy and I

talk about that a little bit in a minute but tell me about your experience with King Arthur movies does this essentially work as a movie property? Yeah well so I think there's only really one good King Arthur movie it was made in 1981 it's John Borman's Excalibur there have been other attempts here

and there obviously there's Camelot the Musical and there's the Antoine Fu the musical and um there's uh the antoine fuqua movie from i think oh four of clive owen um which was i you know a fuqua movie which is that there is a like a bare knuckle like robert aldrich movie lying underneath some like weird poorly written version of that's happening. And Warrior Princess Guinevere. Keira Knightley plays a Celtic warrior princess. The Excalibur is great because Adam Naiman actually wrote a piece for us

about this. It's basically because it commits to the bit. Because it understands that this is an incredibly romantic story. And this idea that a boy who would be king, a king who would regenerate a dying land because it's coming out of the Dark Ages

and he's sort of a Christ figure to what would become England. There's a lot of romance to that. And I think that one of the interesting things is people have always tried to approach Arthur and then put a spin on it. It's not like Robin Hood. It's like, well, we're going to do Robin Hood,

but what if we did it as Sheriff Nottingham? Or what if we did it as, you know, this guy can shoot arrows as if it's a machine gun or whatever it is that they try to approach to or we're gonna do a very historically um quote unquote accurate depiction of it and have the crusades be involved but the whole thing with arthur is that it is myth so the the idea of making it realistic or somehow updating it or modernizing it kind of goes against the actual charm of the story itself. I'm not so sure that it's one that is ever going to really resonate with modern audiences, especially as, you know, the comic book movies that we have now are so much based on the same sort of arc, you know the comic book movies that we have now are so so much based on the same sort of arc you know like of like a a hero who must rise to protect a falling like a darkened land

but i i you know when this was first announced and i think it was announced that it was going to be this huge series that richie was going to undertake yeah uh but then very quickly afterwards it was announced too that it was going to be like a cockney bare knuckle boxing king arthur not sort of this you know the one that we know from legend so i don't i don't know i i don't think that you'll ever see it's unlikely you'll ever see another really great king arthur movie because there's really only been one i think there's something interesting in guy and i talk about this as well. The original idea for the film was this sprawling three-and-a-half-hour film that captured the entire mythology of the story. And I think over time it became pretty clear to him that what he really needed was something that was closer to lock, stock, and two smoking Excaliburs. He really needed his movie, his touch, his grace.

And so basically you get a lot of hard chop editing. You get a lot of snappy dialogue, a lot of jokes, a lot of Charlie Hunnam dropping punchlines on brothel occupants. So obviously he's bringing his thing to it. It is a complicated story. I think the other secret informant on the piece is Game of Thrones. And there are a lot of Game of Thrones elements here. And you can see that he's up on Game of Thrones Season 5. Yeah. But aside from that, you know, it's an interesting moment to try to make

old IP new IP. Right. And as you'll hear from this chat with Guy, he had some interesting struggles with it too. Thanks to Chris Ryan for joining me and we'll get to my conversation with Guy Ritchie right after a word from our sponsors. Dollar Shave Club is the smarter choice. Get a great shave at a great price conveniently delivered right to your door.

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It's a $15 value for only $5. In your first month box, you get an awesome weighty handle, a full cassette of four cartridges, and a tube of their Shave Butter. After your first month, replacement cartridges ship automatically at their regular price. There are no hidden fees and no commitments. Cancel at any time. You can only get this offer at dollarshaveclub.com with Guy Ritchie. Guy Ritchie, thank you so much for being here with me today. Thank you.

Guy, I'm going to start with a very obvious question, and that is why did you make a movie about King Arthur? I think it's misleading to think it's about King Arthur, although it's much easier to understand if you frame it as such. But it's really about a man's struggle with himself and the most entertaining version of that. And really King Arthur is an alibi for that, like Beowulf is an alibi for the essence of that story. So stories are really about reclothing stories.

Stories are really all the same story. So that's what I was interested in doing. But from a creative point of view, I think it's about the challenge as much as anything else. I'd never done anything in the world of epic fantasy. That was a challenge. And that's exciting to me as a creative person. We got 300 for elephants and those sort of things. Yeah, I wanted to ask about the elephants. And the great thing about the

genre is you've got the poetic license to take these nutty sojourns. So it was a sort of combination of reasons. The myth ology of King Arthur comes tethered to all

sorts of other familiar components like Guinevere, Lancelot, Merlin, and so on. Round Tables, The Quest for the Grail. The problem with John Borman's movie, which he made in 1980, which affected me kind of deeply. Excalibur. Excalibur, I liked it. He made it for 25 bucks and he, you know,

it was a very noble effort. And he had a limited toolbox. Things have changed since then, obviously. But he was struggling against the congestion of narrative that the first half of the story, you can follow it. You go, oh, this is all great and fun and everyone's shouting it, everyone is really intense and it's got a cool music.

And then the second half of the film starts getting really congested because there's so many components that he's trying to get in there. You've got to throw in Lancelot, you've got to throw in Guinevere, Morgana, Merlin. And this incarnation was to strip that out and just deal with the origin story, if you will, of Arthur and his extraction of the sword and not worry about the other components. Because if you

bring them in, it just starts turning into a bit of a dog's breakfast. Yeah. I was going to ask you about the removal of a lot of the core elements. You know, there's mention of Merlin in the movie early on, but that's really it. Was it always going to be that kind of movie? Was it always an origin story? Yeah, I mean, you know, at times people wanted a bit of Merlin, so we entertained the idea of a bit of Merlin. But every time I started entertaining it,

the film, these films take on a kinetic energy of their own. So my job is to steer the head of the creative, head of the tiger or someone's head or someone's creativity and but the film is really it takes on its own energy and then what i do is for the first couple of weeks sort of sit back a bit and chime in should we try a bit this way should we go a bit more serious you try a bit it should be a bit funnier. You know, that romance that we had, is that going to work? And then you start to feel the tone of the actors and you start to feel the tone of the story. And as long as you remain open-minded and observant

to all the components that are moving, then you try and you just shepherd its creative path. So the film really makes the film and I just help it along. I read that the original, the first cut was three and a half hours and that it was a different kind of movie. And it's interesting because when you see the movie, it feels like a Guy Ritchie movie. It has your pace, your dialogue, your style. It feels like one of your movies. So it was surprising to me to even hear that there was a different version of that. That's my fault more than anyone else's.

Coming back to my previous point, like the idea of taking a sojourn into a completely different genre. But with that, I thought, oh, I'll make a nice, worthy, lengthy number. And so my cut came in at three and a half hours and I was desperate that it would be

an entertaining three and a half hours. Two hours was desperate that it would be an entertaining three and a half hours. Two hours into it, I realize I'm in trouble. It was evident to you right away. Yeah, it was as much. And I can tell you, it's a weird thing because the scenes were good, and the narrative was good, and I couldn't quite put my finger on why it just didn't keep me entertained. And as sensible as the scenes were, I realized that the version, the two-hour version, I thought if I just get rid of half of this, I bet it's going to move.

That must be daunting, though, to think about cutting half the movie. Yeah, it is. It is. And you've got to go and marinate on that for a little while. After a few Fridays, you start to get your nut round that it's the only option. But I'll tell you what, you can mitigate that loss by truncating everything you've got so actually all those scenes that you shot you know 20 million dollars worth of scenes that look like they end up the cutting room floor you catch the essence of those scenes and you squidge them all together so you get everything now if i went to a

studio and said look this scene is going to cost me three million dollars and it's going to be 10 seconds long it's very hard to get your nut around that because it's going to be 10 seconds long, it's very hard to get your nut around that because it's not the traditional way one does things. However, if you go for the worthy extended version and then go, well, there's that version and now here's this version. You got all the ingredients in there, but it's extremely high production value for a very short period of time.

And I found that there is a momentum to that that is quite intoxicating. And I like it. So I take my three and a half hours and I squidge it down to just under two. And I've kept all my ingredients. What I'm interested in is the essence of the narrative as entertaining as possible. Get to the essence of the narrative. I was influenced by storytellers in different departments of my life. I used to go to a gym in South London and there was some old Jewish Cockney chap who worked on the door. He used to be a pound to get into this gym.

And Ronnie Isaacs was his name. And Ronnie used to tell great stories. And in a real old sort of Cockney tradition. And the way he constructed these stories was so quirky. It was so back to front. It was so take the end and stick it at the beginning. Take the middle and stick it at the end. And somehow you understood everything. And there was a real romantic kind of quality

to his ability to tell folklore. And folklore became sexy to me because it was like a music video of narrative. Something more grand. It was grand, but it was punk rock. It was violent, yet poetic. I think that's what makes this movie really work. You can see that in your early movies, no doubt, in the way that you explain setups and clarify who characters are. But for example, when Arthur goes to the Dark Lands lands usually in a movie even the lord of the rings for example that's a 40 minute sequence where he's just he encounters a challenge and then he has to defeat the challenge and then he has to continue on but you do use kind of the punk rock version of that you just strip it down to the chords and the drums and he sinks through

it and then it's over and it works really it makes it different yeah and i have to tell you i'm not sure if i've ever realized what influenced me and the interesting thing about these interviews is only to start discovering things about yourself i'm not sure if i was really aware of that and i think that's what it is because it's not film that's influenced me to do that because I can't think of another film that does that. So it must be that tradition of telling loric stories. Right, in your language, in your version of how you see it. And my interpretation thereon. And then film has become the medium through which that is now expressed.

Was it scary at all for you to take on a movie this big? This is the biggest thing you've done, right? Size isn't intimidating. Genre is. Epic fantasy, I haven't been anywhere near that before. So that's sense it is. Some wise old fart once told me that zeros are zeros because ultimately they mean zero, which is a very interesting philosophical concept.

If you give me a million dollars or you give me $200 million, you're going to get just the same amount of attention in terms of the undertaking because you're going to do the best job that you can. And once you're in the business of expressing that vision, you pay just as much attention as you do to a million, as you do to 200, as you would to a billion. And so the zeros, they actually don't, they're not intimidating. The most intimidating job I ever did was a music video

off my own bat for 250 pounds, which was the first job I ever did. And I directed it with a friend of mine and he took his credit. I took mine. And secretly what we were doing is we're going to go, if this is absolute poo, what we're going to do is he's going to blame me and I'm going to blame him. And it gave us an alibi to make it because we were just going to blame everyone else. Yeah. But we made it.

It was successful. You're claiming credit today. And then, yeah, we both claimed credit. And we did that sort of routine. And then you realize that these are all quite an interesting thing. For some reason, I was reading Gideon's Bible in my hotel room. Well, I was trying to find my computer because I took a picture of a quote, which I found rather interesting. The wicked flee when no one pursues, but the righteous are bold as lions.

So me being the pussy that I was, and so was my mate, you're scared of things that aren't there. You're running from things that don't exist. They're illusions. Oh, judgment, oh, what happens? Fact was, who cares? You know, be judged, whatever. Really, filmmaking is about a process of not running. So, because you're scared, oh, what happens if I do, oh, what happens? And you've got to, you know, you've got to be sensible and judicious about what it is that you do. But you're fleeing from things that don't exist. Don't. Work out what is real, what you should be scared of, and what you shouldn't be scared of.

And that's very hard to have that due diligence with clarity. But did the success of, say, the Sherlock movies give you more confidence, or has it always been this way for you in the last 20 years? That's an interesting point, because if I become result-orientated, I'm back to that quote again, that you're fleeing from something that doesn't really exist. I like making movies. I mean, I'd love people to go and see this movie.

I'm sure they will. And I hope they do. But the thing is, I'd be a fool if I tethered myself to it being result-orientated. And I know it's a good movie, and I'm confident with it, and it feels fresh to me. But more importantly, I enjoyed the whole process. I wasn't lazy about the process. And I'm, if I say so myself, good at that process. I wasn't lazy about the process. And I'm,

if I say so myself, good at that process because I'm enthusiastic and that is enough. So I've won at every level of the game I've won. Now my mind will play tricks on me like it did when I made my first music video. Oh, I'm going to be scared of this, scared of that. And you've got to have this realization that there's nothing to be scared of. So if you do get judged, how can your confidence be knocked if you're not result orientated? You've got to be pragmatic about this. As I say, you've got to think it through. I'm not in the business of losing people money, all of that. But fear of judgment, you've really, you've got to leave that behind and hold on to the confidence that you've got and you know what that confidence is hard earned and it it means something and it's a

valuable commodity there's a fine line between confidence and hubris but if you can hold on to that confidence and i see another filmmaker express a very confident piece of work. I thought Django Unchained was a very confident piece of work. I get terribly excited by confident pieces of work, particularly by craftsmen of sorts. But even when someone's clumsy, if the confidence is motivating the expression, I still get a little bit lost with myself i get excited by the the creation i think you tap into the essence of the creativity

and i find that probably the most exciting component in creativity and then confidence is a major part of that enthusiasm and confidence what whiplash, when I saw the film Whiplash, I thought it was tremendously confident. And I didn't sit down when I was watching that movie. And the reason I didn't sit down was because of the confidence of the expression. Does that make you want to go start writing something or does it make you just process what you saw? I put it in the bank. Yeah.

Put it in the old enthusiasm bank. It's an interesting thing if you're around other creative people or you're influenced by other creative people. It's like you put one piece of wood next to another burning piece of wood and that piece of burning wood burns brighter. So confidence of expression is contagious. It might not come through initially, but in the end, good stuff catches up with what it is. And I think you hold on to that.

But I just, more importantly, you've got to get out of the realm of result orientation because it's just not good for you as, I use a slightly pretentious word, artist. Was there a moment when you removed results from how you felt about something you'd worked on? Was it after a certain film or a review or something like that? Honestly, it's an ongoing battle. I don't think it's one that you ever transcend.

And I'm not sure if you're supposed to transcend it. I think life is about this dance between being dirty and clean, losing and winning, and it's not really, I mean, it's a terrible cliche, but the older I get, the more it rings true to me. It's not about the destination. It is about the journey. Real creation is somewhere between a reconciliation between plagiarism of other people's creation and the ability to connect the disparate components of creation and thereby have a fresh voice or a fresh

vision. It's an amalgamation of, of plagiarization, I'm not quite sure how you'd say it, but some version of that. I see that even in King Arthur. You know, there's essentially a dojo, you're a jujitsu black belt. That must come from your interest and your point of view and things that you like in a story that previously never really had

a martial arts sequence, right? Yeah, I think so. I like guys fighting. I've always liked guys fighting. That's the interest that I have. That's one of the interests that I have. So we're quite familiar with this world. There's no plagiarism there, right? And it's just... Well, there is in a way because someone already came up with the dojo, right? Sure, but not in this setting. And then the plagiarization is me taking on the loric tradition of telling a story.

So I've pinched all sorts of components from all sorts of people. But then hopefully there's an authentic original feeling to that expression once reconciled and made manifest. Let's wrap up with this. Let's go the other direction. Now that you've done something like this, do you want to go even bigger? Is there a higher mountaintop to scale as a filmmaker? I think what there is, I'm not sure if it's bigger as much as it is bolder. And what's bolder? Bolder is to throw yourself into other genres that which you're unfamiliar with. So my intention is, at least for the foreseeable future,

is to keep throwing myself into genres that I'm not familiar with. Can you tell me some of those? Yeah, well, the next one, the next movie I'm making will be Aladdin for Disney. That is very different for you. That's very different. Actually, if you get down to the nuts and bolts of it, it's not that different because it's about a kid raised on the street with only parents and it's actually rather similar

to the narrative that I've just told. So, and it's the funniest one out of all the Disney movies. And he becomes a king. And he, you know, there you go. So there are quite a lot of correlations. And Arthur, as you know, was, the score took me three years. It's a big score and I care a lot of correlations um and arthur as you know was the score took me three years it's a big score and i care a lot about the music i said it spent the same amount of time on the music as i did on the movie so it sort of makes sense as a natural segue into me making a musical

yeah i've always cared about my music so it's new enough but old enough for me to walk into that. So I feel as though I'm walking in there with some tools, and I'm confident again. So I've got enough tools to give me confidence. Just another Friday with Guy Ritchie. Guy, thank you very much for being here, man. Thank you very much. Thanks to Dollar Shave Club for sponsoring today's episode. Dollar Shave Club is sponsoring today's episode.

Dollar Shave Club is the smarter choice. Get a great shave at a great price, conveniently delivered right to your door. For a limited time, new members get their first month of the Executive Razor with a tube of their Dr. Carver's Shave Butter for only $5 with free shipping by going to dollarshaveclub.com slash ringermovie. After that, razors are just a few bucks a month. That's dollarshaveclub.com.