Early look: Downey/Law are elementary to new 'Sherlock'
Updated 14h 53m ago
By Susan Wloszczyna, USA TODAY
BROOKLYN, N.Y. — The renowned London residence at 221B Baker Street has temporarily relocated to the Marcy Avenue Armory.
On a sound stage inside the cavernous building, time travels back to 1891 as two men in Victorian garb occupy a second-floor flat. Strewn about is all manner of masculine-type clutter — investigative tools, dusty books, souvenirs from exotic lands, anatomical drawings, rotten apple cores, crushed walnut shells, neglected plants and preserved animals parts.
MORE: Get clued in on Downey's shabbier Sherlock
Jude Law's dapper Dr. John H. Watson, preparing to leave both his bachelor and sleuthing days behind, packs up his belongings in the tidier portion of the apartment. Robert Downey Jr.'s wiry Sherlock Holmes, deeply perturbed by his friend's pending departure after a decade together as crime-fighting colleagues, answers a knock at the door.
Suddenly, a recently deceased body is dropped on a table in the middle of the room by two constables.
Watson: "Who is he?"
Holmes: "That's my new roommate."
You won't find that chummy exchange in any of Arthur Conan Doyle's exploits of the great detective. Nor does it lurk in the script for Sherlock Holmes, the Dec. 25 release that marks the first major big-screen adaptation of the private eye's adventures since Michael Caine's comical sham of a Sherlock in 1988's Without a Clue.
Downey, 44, and Law, 36, jazzed up the dialogue on the spot, with an assist from director/writer Guy Ritchie, the artist formerly known as Madonna's husband and a specialist in nimbly paced gangster capers (1998's Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, 2000's Snatch, last year's RocknRolla) that rely heavily upon male interaction and relentless cursing.
The language has been tamed for this PG-13 outing. But manly bonding between bohemian Holmes and bourgeois Watson is at the core of the story. Trendy types might even describe it as a "bromance," especially when Downey's detective bristles at the very thought of his friend's nuptials coming between them. But the relationship takes its cues from a long line of what used to be known simply as buddy films.
"There are many duos we wanted to draw from," Law says. "Something as eccentric as The Odd Couple to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Withnail and I and Laurel and Hardy. It's the kind of friendship you can only have with someone of the same sex, a person you adore but who infuriates you."
A Holmes fan at the helm
After 73 days of shooting what Warner Bros. hopes is not only a holiday blockbuster but the launch of a franchise, the actors are comfortable enough in their personas that improvising in character is a breeze. "Initially, we were just infusing the dialogue with Doyle-isms," says Downey, who dons a jaunty fedora and oft-disheveled attire in a break from more conservative portraits of the gumshoe. Law, a rather trim Watson who is more of a brawler than a bumbler, kept a notebook handy with scribbled phrases from the original tales just in case.
"Now we tend to speak a little more on his behalf," Downey says, referring to Sherlock's inventor. "Truth be told, we have been working our tokheses off. We've been at it for a long, long, long time."
Yet the atmosphere is decidedly easygoing. Between takes, the star cracks jokes and affectionately hugs wife Susan, a producer on the film. Meanwhile, Mark Strong, the strikingly tall Ritchie regular who plays a satanic aristocrat of a villain named Lord Blackwood, strides by while incongruously toting a Bliss Spa bag.
"It's such a relaxed set, even if it's at the tail end of the shoot," Downey observes. Adding to the calm is fair-haired and boyish Ritchie, 40, as he strums his acoustic guitar like a Zen troubadour while waiting for shooting to resume.
If Ritchie is feeling under the gun as he oversees his first big-budget period piece while transitioning from laddish art-house romps to mainstream crowd-pleasers, there are no clues to support it.
Says Strong, who was in Ritchie's Revolver and RocknRolla: "He is exactly the same as he was on his last two movies. You only panic if you don't know what you are supposed to be doing."
Did Ritchie consider that he might be asking for trouble by messing with a literary icon?
"I didn't really think of the downside as much as I thought about the upside," the filmmaker says. "I was a Holmes fan when I was a child. They are the first stories I remember. I also liked the approach the studio was coming at. To me, it was the perfect segue from small independent films to something more ambitious and quintessentially English. So I've got my cake and I can eat it."
Not that it hasn't been a challenge for cast and crew both here and in England as they attempt to drag a well-etched 19th-century archetype, personified by a suave if snooty Basil Rathbone in 14 films in the '30s and '40s, into the 21st century for an action-hero makeover.
"Sherlock was perceived as stuffy and old-fashioned," says Lionel Wigram, a producer on the Harry Potter series who initiated the revival about a decade ago. "I thought the TV ones (including, most recently, those starring Jeremy Brett and Rupert Everett) were wonderful, but in a Masterpiece Theatre kind of way. It felt like there was a great opportunity to do something bigger than that."
To persuade those who "did not get it," Wigram wrote a graphic novel and had an artist depict Sherlock in comic-book form. The image that convinced the studio suits? The sleuth, scruffy and stubbly, with a whip in one hand and a sword in the other.
"We are trying to make a fun adventure movie," he says. "My favorites are the Bond films. Raiders of the Lost Ark. I want to make a movie like that."
Familiarity does breed box office. "The word of the day is 'branding,' " says Hollywood mogul Joel Silver, another of the film's producers and a force behind the Die Hard and Matrix series. "We are always looking for branded ideas. Audiences are interested in seeing something they know."
But with a difference, too. This Holmes is as brainy as ever but is a bruiser as well. Bare-fisted boxing, sword fighting and a mastery of martial arts have been added to his arsenal of weapons.
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