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 Robert Downey Jr.’s reimagined detective is into bare-knuckle boxing. |
LONDON — There’s no mystery to Robert Downey Jr.’s good mood.
“Sometimes,” the 44-year-old actor tells journalists assembled for this day’s news conference, “you just feel like you’re in the right groove.”
It’s an observation that could easily apply to his own professional and personal life. After years of drug-induced distress, he’s now married — to producer Susan Downey — and free of the rehab-prison-relapse cycle that publicly and privately plagued him. He is also, thanks to 2008’s Iron Man and Tropic Thunder, a bankable movie star, sought after for comedies, dramas and comic-book adaptations (Iron Man 2 opens in May).
Here, though, in London’s spookily impressive Freemasons’ Hall, the topic of discussion — and Downey’s groove — isn’t his real life, but his latest film Sherlock Holmes. Namely, how he went about slipping into the character and clothes — if not the deerstalker hat — of the legendary Victorian detective.
Guiding him in that task was Guy Ritchie, the director of Cockney crime yarns Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch, and who was also married to Madonna for eight years. Ritchie’s fingerprints — or bruises and blood stains — are all over this coarser, modern re-imagining. This Holmes bare-knuckle boxes. His sidekick, Dr. Watson (Jude Law) is a war veteran with vices of his own. And the script supplies sexual energy as well, in the form of femme fatale Irene Adler (Rachel McAdams).
“I managed to hold on to an English identity, but at the same time we had American muscle and American pockets. It’s the perfect segue for me,” says Ritchie.
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“From a very young age I had an image of Sherlock Holmes and the partnership (between him and Watson), so I feel most of my creative ammunition came from Doyle. The deerstalker and ‘Elementary, my dear Watson’ never happened, actually, and the deerstalker is never referred to in the books. Although we all are aware of the obvious symbols of Sherlock Holmes, (the producers) and I made a decision early on that if we were going to do this we’d have to dust off Sherlock Holmes and create what we thought, to some degree, an authentic Conan Doyle version that wasn’t contaminated with previous symbols. So we could have a fresh take on Sherlock Holmes.”
The studio, he says, embraced the creative direction — so much so that Ritchie fought to rein his own rapid-fire style in.
“They wanted Guy Ritchie-isms,” he says. Ritchie, however, just wanted a hit.
But at what cost? Is this latest Sherlock sacrilege? Not according to producer Joel Silver, who says it wasn’t the original short stories and novels that were “stuffy” but the film adaptations that defined Holmes in the pop consciousness.
“They used to have a phrase in the old days of Hollywood: There were rug movies and dust movies. Those original movies were rug movies — they were all inside, intellectual pictures. Clearly, Sherlock is a dust actor. What we did, we invested ourselves in trying to make a contemporary movie that feels fresh and original, but still embraces what Conan Doyle did.”
Nevertheless, the new movie does glance over some of the more troubling aspects of Holmes’ personality — notably, a drug habit that involved a 7% solution of cocaine in water. In the movie, the addiction is hinted at, though never clarified. Downey says he wasn’t seeking to distance himself from his own demons.
“I love The Seven Percent Solution. It was never a high enough percentage for me,” he says. “(It was) kind of a weak, tepid solution, if you ask me. It’s a PG-13 movie. And even if it wasn’t, if you go back to the source material, he was never described as some strung-out weirdo. And also back in Victorian times, it was legal and acceptable. You could go down to your corner pharmacist and grab all that stuff. We thought it would be irresponsible to not make any references to it.”
For purists, though, the boldest example of revisionism may not be that Holmes is now a martial-artist and rogue, but that Watson has slimmed down and smartened up.
“It’s been coined the ‘Hotson’ versus ‘Potsun’ scenario,” Ritchie says, referring to Watson’s usually portly frame. “We really wanted a good-looking Watson. This is because I always thought of them as an equal partnership like Butch and Sundance. I just thought that was more fair to Doyle.”
And more attractive to prospective stars.
Law admits he had no interest packing on weight to act as the dim comic relief to Downey’s dashing deductive genius.
“I knew it was going to be a different take on the older films of Sherlock Holmes,” Law says, referring to his Watson as possessing “a bit of an edge.”
But he adds, “Then you go back to the books and realize how much this rediscovery was actually in the source material.”
Which includes what may be the world’s first bromance between a superhero and his sidekick.
“They’re talking about Jude and I like we should be doing romantic comedies,” Downey says. But isn’t it? Kind of, he hedges. “It’s a love affair of sorts.”
Holmes’ villain stays in the shadows
LONDON — Will Sherlock Holmes next cross intellects with an inglourious basterd?
Earlier this year, it was rumoured Brad Pitt — who starred in Guy Ritchie’s Snatch — would turn up as arch-nemesis Professor Moriarty in the inevitable sequel.
The filmmakers, though, aren’t saying if Moriarty will be in a follow-up — or who might portray him.
“The question’s not answered yet, so we’ve left that to ourselves to answer,” says producer Joel Silver.
Still, he acknowledges, “I think it potentially has franchise capabilities, which I think is very good.”
In the movie, opening Christmas Day, Moriarty appears only as a shadowy figure with a disguised voice.
“I think we tried very hard to allow the audience to embrace the fact there may be more of a story,” Silver says.
“Hopefully the audience loves it and embraces it, and we can continue our journey.”
And just in case, while the makers are cagey in public about the franchise’s future prospects, it is known a screenplay for a second film is being written.
In the meantime, without a Moriarty to antagonize Holmes, the new film relies on Mark Strong (Body of Lies) as the satanic Lord Blackwood.
“By not making it Moriarty, you create something much more interesting because you couldn’t have a Moriarty who dabbled in the occult,” Strong says. “It’s in a way more inventive.”
kevin.williamson@sunmedia.ca