Hey folks, Harry here... Jesus Christ! You know. There's many things that I've come to expect from Moriarty over the years. But kissing SHERLOCK HOLMES' ass wasn't one of them! These two have serious history. I'm not talking about Vegas hotel room kinda history, but... You see, Sherlock stalked Moriarty for years. He even employed kids to track him. Moriarty moved to California to leave that sad, and frankly scary, part of his life behind him. However, Sherlock reached out to Moriarty one last time... and like some crazy abused woman wanting more, MORIARTY FLEW TO LONDON TO SPEND MORE TIME WITH HIS STALKER... Sherlock Holmes! And now. Now he's going to share that loving reunion with all of you. Here ya go...
Hey, everyone. “Moriarty” here.
Two thick paperback books. Every word Arthur Conan Doyle ever wrote about his flagship creation, Sherlock Holmes. The great detective. One of the most oft-adapted literary creations of all time. And, of course, the source of the nickname I’ve used as my alter ego here on Ain’t It Cool News for over a decade. That’s all I packed for reading material on my flight from Los Angeles to London at the start of December. I figured I’d immerse myself in the world of Holmes so that when I stepped on the set, I’d know what I expect based on the one true expert, Doyle, and I’d see how it compared. Because with Holmes, more than almost any other character except for maybe Superman, you are dealing with audience preconceptions. And that means that whatever you do, whatever form your Sherlock Holmes takes, it’s going to be different than someone expected, and that sets up the possibility of disappointment. You get a huge amount of built-in audience recognition when you work with a character like this, but you also have to accept a certain amount of baggage.
Worth it? Warner Bros. will find out this Christmas when they bet a tidy sum of money on Guy Ritchie, Jude Law, Arthur Conan Doyle, and a newly-minted juggernaut named Robert Downey Jr.
He’s had a few hits now. But is he consistent? Is the audience hungry for his take on the classics? Are they in love with him, or him as one particular thing? These are big questions, and right now, there’s no answer. We haven’t seen any real tests of Downey’s new-found commercial power. This’ll be the big one, since no matter what, “The Soloist” isn’t the sort of film that makes $250 million domestic. But done right… and sold right… “Sherlock Holmes” might be.
It was at a “Watchmen” preview event that one of the lovely ladies of Warner rolled up on me and said, “So who do you think should visit the set of ‘Sherlock Holmes’ in London… Mr. Moriarty?”
She had that huge publicist “I’ve got you and you know I’ve got you so don’t even pretend I don’t got you” smile on, the one they get when they know you and they know what you’re interested in, and they’ve got something that is a dead-perfect fit and they figure it out. In this case, that headline you’re seeing at the top of this page… well, that’s been dying to be written since I first joined Ain’t It Cool News and started contributing material under this byline.
Harry was the one who named me. When I first wrote to him, I was a loudmouth know-it-all, correcting something he’d run, and he thought it was funny. “You’re like an evil genius… you know just enough to be trouble.” And in those early pieces I wrote for Ain’t It Cool, I reeeeeally played up the mad scientist/evil genius shtick. How much fun is that? Pretending to have laboratories and henchmen and an underground network of spies and pneumatic tubes and surveillance gear. For someone who is just making his way through the trenches of this business like everyone else, that’s liberating. I was working well before there was an Ain’t It Cool. I was a WGA Member in 1994, and you have to work to become a Guild member. I’ve been working since. I think a common misconception is that I became Moriarty to try to get something out of it. Wrong. I became Moriarty because I was worried that having an opinion would cost me in this town. And I’m right about that, of course. I’ve lost work and burned down some contacts in the film industry, and I’ve frustrated my managers and agent many times over the past decade. But I found that I love the conversation so much… and I love the education I’ve gotten by traveling around the world and visiting film sets and watching some of the most interesting people working today… and I love sharing that with people so that they get the benefit of those experiences as well. “Moriarty” became a really great job, a very surprising job, and it led to me meeting some of the most important people in my life. It gave me a network of friends in a city I’d never visited until I became “Moriarty,” and even now, I’m gearing up for a week in Austin and I can’t wait. “Moriarty” became something I’d put on when I left the house, a persona that I created through well over 3.5 million published words under that byline. That’s a staggering amount of work, and I loved doing it. Every single bit of it.
So you can imagine how I felt as I was sitting on the plane on the way to London, reading volume one of the Sherlock stories, and realizing suddenly that this trip, this face-to-face with my arch-enemy, was going to be the very last thing I ever did as “Moriarty.”
I mean, I knew on some level before that, when I made the decision that I was going to be leaving the site and joining HitFix to run my own blog and my own film coverage… I knew that it would change things and that I’d leave the “Moriarty” name here at Ain’t It Cool, because I consider it a particular privilege to have had a spy name here for over ten years, and because of the history of what that spy name has meant for me, what it’s cost me, what it earned me, and what experiences are tied to it. And knowing that is one thing… but it started to feel real as I landed at Heathrow and headed for my hotel. I’ve been to London enough times now that I feel fairly comfortable getting around on public transportation, and I ended up walking a grand total of two blocks from a tube stop to my hotel, The Zetter in St. John’s Square. Checked in. Did some work. Read some more Holmes. Finished the first book. Started the second. Did some more work. Took a walk. Ate a bit. And the whole time, it kept sinking in, and I was struck with a really ferocious case of melancholy. I had a hard time focusing on anything, even when a friend e-mailed me the latest draft of the “Sherlock Holmes” script, allowing me to read it before I headed to the set in the morning, because I was hit by all these complex feelings of “I’m making a mistake” and “Can I even pull this off?” and “Why haven’t I done this already?” and any number of other conflicting emotions.
So when I met my driver the next morning and headed to set, I wasn’t feeling evil; I was feeling subdued. When I arrived on location, the building had been dressed as a slaughterhouse. And dressed convincingly, too. If they didn’t tell me that everything had been brought in, I would absolutely have believed that this building was always designed for this particular purpose. It took most of the day for me to get the full tour of the set, several major parts of which had been earmarked for different parts of an action set piece. And it wasn’t only functional and well-dressed, it was complete. If you went through the whole thing, start to finish, it worked.
Pig carcasses hanging everywhere, and blocks of ice set up all over one room. Smoke thick in the air. And amidst all of that, Lionel Wigram comes walking up, smile on his face, introduces himself. Lionel’s a former Warner executive who has become a producer on the Harry Potter series, and it was his idea to try a new spin on how to bring Sherlock Holmes to life onscreen. What’s most radical about his idea is just how loyal to the source material it is, something that has already proven to be oddly controversial. See, with Sherlock Holmes, the idea of how he’s portrayed on film has been defined over the years by the Basil Rathbone version and the Jeremy Brett version, and there are certain ideas that have set in that have nothing to do with Arthur Conan Doyle. Chief among those is the idea of Watson as a chubby dolt, a bumbling rotund sidekick. That has certainly become the standard take on things, but originally, Watson was written as a former military man who was quite good with the ladies, dashing even. He was prone to handling things physically if a situation went south, but he wasn’t stupid. He just wasn’t trained the way Sherlock was. At the time, no one was. Deductive logic as a form of crimefighting wasn’t something that was in common practice in Sherlock’s day. Science and police work were uneasy bedfellows at best. And Sherlock was a genius, way ahead of the curve, driven by his fascination with problem solving. When he was working on something, he was alive, a ball of energy, but when he was between cases, when he didn’t have something to occupy his mind, he would fall into near-chemical depressions. That version of Sherlock and Watson… we haven’t seen that on film yet. And now we’re so used to the deerstalker-and-opera-cape and chubby-nincompoop-sidekick version that this is going to feel like a reinvention.
Lionel talked to me about his approach for a while and I asked him some specific questions about the script for the film. He told me more than I think he planned to tell me at first, and then introduced me to one of the film’s other producers, Susan Downey. Yep… that Downey. As in, Mrs. Robert Downey Jr. She’s an executive for Joel Silver, which is how she met Robert in the first place when they were working on “Gothika.” She’s very smart, very funny, and she’s one of those people who make sense as a producer… when you talk to her, you can tell that shit is getting done. And it is because of her.
Together, Lionel and Susan are an enthusiastic cheerleading squad for the film. Where we’re sitting as we talk, I can see the monitors. And on the monitors, I keep getting glimpses of Robert and Jude, amidst the smoke, behind sheets of flame. Just glimpses. It’s a huge tease. Lionel can see me watching the monitors, can tell I’m getting antsy.
“Want to see a few scenes?”
He gets his laptop. Gets some headphones. Finds me a quiet corner and a director’s chair. He gives me a bit of preamble. “The first sequence comes early in the film. Watson is getting married, and he wants her to meet Sherlock, and vice-versa. And Sherlock… he’s dealing with it.” Okay. That all fits right into what Doyle wrote. That particular turning point in the stories is significant. “And the second sequence is a big moment in the investigation, an action scene at and around a giant boatyard.” So we’ll see a bit of the scale of the film. Great.
The first scene has been described several places now. It’s the first thing they’ve shown everybody. And there’s a reason. It’s a great sequence, an absolutely pitch-perfect way of putting you inside Sherlock’s head. Sherlock meets Watson and his wife-to-be for dinner. Mary (played by the ridiculously gorgeous Kelly Reilly), and as much as he wants to be happy for his friend, he can’t. He just doesn’t like the world that Watson’s opting into, the world of social engagements and evenings out and domestic responsibility. It’s a slow death to a mind like Sherlock’s, and he can’t imagine what Watson sees in it. Even if Mary is charming, it just seems suffocating to Holmes. And as he practically crawls out of his skin during the meal, ready to get out of there –-
-- it cuts to a boxing ring. In some basement club somewhere. It’s the still that everyone’s seen at this point. Shirtless Sherlock. And the guy he’s with in the ring is probably a foot taller than him and another 60 pounds heavier. And Sherlock’s sort of dancing around the guy, bitchslapping him up a bit, making him look bad, and you can tell that it’s a work-out for him. A chance to blow off some steam. But he’s not going to really hurt the guy.
As Sherlock dances around, he scans the crowd. More out of habit than any particular interest. And he sees a face go by. The face of Irene Adler (Rachel McAdams). And if you know your Holmes, your Doyle, then you know that Irene Adler is the one. She’s the one criminal who ever out-thunk him. The one woman who ever got past his defenses. She’s the one who got away in all regards. Holmes may not be built for love, but he may be built for her. And the last time he saw her, she was in disguise and on her way out of town. So it’s a shock. And it draws his concentration just long enough for the big guy to take all of that frustration, all of the little humiliations of being in the ring with Sherlock… and he puts it all behind one monster punch that knocks Sherlock to the ground. Sherlock knows he let that happen, so he stands up and smiles. “Thanks, Big Guy. I think that’s enough for today.” He turns to walk away.
And the Big Guy spits on the back of his head.
When Sherlock stops, he looks up into the camera, and everything freezes. “Let me tell you how this is going to go,” he says. And what we see is a positively autistic break-down of the big guy’s defenses, and what hits would do the exact damage needed to put him away, probably in the hospital. It’s slow-motion. It’s medical in how detailed it is. And as soon as it’s done, we return to that frozen shot of Sherlock, the Big Guy standing behind him.
And he turns around and, in real time, does everything he just said he was going to do. Perfectly. And he destroys the Big Guy. It’s just awful. Guy goes down hard. And Sherlock walks away. That’s how he approaches a fight. That’s how he approaches a mystery. That’s how he approaches someone walking into the room. That’s the world through the eyes of Sherlock Holmes, and I think Downey and Ritchie have come up with an idea that really captures the nature of how this guy thinks. How he processes things. That Sherlock-vision, that slowing-down and considering of details and options, is something that evidently will play into a few moments in the film, as he investigates crime scenes or deals with threats. I like it. It feels like a Guy Ritchie move, but a perfectly-deployed one.
And we talked a bit about the size of the film between clips, with both Lionel and Susan emphasizing that this is a big movie. London’s a character, and because it’s changing from old London to modern London, and bridges are being built and new buildings are going up behind and around and instead of old ones, it’s got to be a big film. They’re showing all of that. They’re recreating that particular moment in London, and to do that, they’ve used parts of London and a lot of locations and exteriors in Liverpool. And, of course, lots of CGI. This is going to be the largest-scale Guy Ritchie film by a significant degree.
The second sequence I watched spoke to that. What starts as a cleverly-staged close-quarters fight between Watson and Holmes and a handful of thugs escalates whem Holmes realizes he can’t outfight the biggest guy in the group. He has no choice but to run, and that chase ends up in a shipyard, where giant ships are being built. Bringing that environment to life and then making it part of the action… that’s what Ritchie and his team are up against. This may be the biggest thing Sarah Greenwood, the film’s production designer, has ever done as well, and I like that… she’s certainly got the period credentials. She’s just never worked on this scale until this film, and it’s a great canvass to play with.
What I didn’t get to see much of in the footage I was shown was the interplay between Holmes and Watson, and since that relationship is the heart of the film, that’s what I asked about when I was handing back the laptop. Lionel started to tell me what it is about the chemistry between Jude and Robert that he likes, when we were interrupted by an A.D. who had a question: were we ready to talk to Jude and Robert?
We weren’t, actually. Everyone had to hustle to find a room upstairs that had a heater in it where we could sit and talk. Did I mention how brutally cold it was in the entire location? Because it was insanely cold. Painfully cold. And I really wasn’t dressed right, because I’m from LA and even my warmest clothes aren’t that warm. But we were told that the room upstairs would be warm. And as we walked up, we ran into Robert and Jude, and I was introduced to both of them.
Jude recognized me from when we met during “Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow,” and he was nice about it. And Robert just smiled at me. “So… my esteemed foe,” he said. “Professor Moriarty. At last we meet.” He seemed very entertained by the moniker.
I couldn’t resist. I reached into my book bag and took out a small hardcover book and handed it over to him. He read the title and laughed. “Sherlock Holmes Was Wrong, by Pierre Bayard.” I explained to him how the title struck me as a brash grad-student joke, but the premise of the book is that Arthur Conan Doyle was so irritated to be writing a new Holmes story when composing “Hound of the Baskervilles” that he managed to solve his own mystery incorrectly. Bayard digs into the details laid out in the story in an effort to prove that Holmes reaches the wrong conclusion in the story. It’s a great piece of literary criticism as pop gameplay, and Downey tucked it away into his own bag as we reached the room where we sat down for our first interview…
… which you’ll read here on Wednesday, in part two of our three-part “Sherlock Holmes” set visit. You’ll read both of those Downey/Law interviews in full on Wednesday, and you’ll read my chat with Rachel McAdams on Friday along with my talk with Guy Ritchie. Today was just the start of some really great coverage with the full team, but already, you should have some sense of where Ritchie and everyone else are hoping to take this new incarnation of Sherlock Holmes.
In the meantime, stop by and see me at my new home, the Motion/Captured blog at HitFix.com.
Drew McWeeny, Los Angeles
Drew McWeeny, Los Angeles
