Guy Ritchie’s career as a filmmaker hasn’t followed a predetermined path. “What happens is I feel as though from a certain marketing point of view you should probably map your career out in an intelligent or formulaic way, but it just doesn’t work like that - at least in my case,” explained Ritchie. “What happens is I get excited by something and I strike while the iron's hot. That's what happened with Revolver. I just loved the concept.”
And an interesting concept it is. Writer/director Ritchie’s Revolver isn’t an easy film to summarize. Boiled down to its basics, the story follows Jason Statham as Jake Green, a con man/gambler fresh out of prison. Ray Liotta co-stars as a devious casino owner named Dorothy Macha who’s the reason Jake spent seven years in jail. Needless to say, Jake’s looking for a little revenge.
Ritchie film vet Jason Statham (Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels, Snatch) sports hair and is slightly skinnier in Revolver than he is in most of his film roles. Laughing, Ritchie revealed that Jason actually has hair but prefers to make himself bald. “I actually let his natural hair grow out. I always like working with Jason because I have a shorthand [with him]. And, by the way, I had a conversation with Jason. I said, ‘Listen, try to get your head around this,’ and he didn’t get his head around it. And then he called me back two days later and if you speak to him about it now, two years later, now it is his favorite film because gradually the concept percolates and when it does you go, ‘Hello! This is interesting,’ because it is a ubiquitous concept that affects every aspect of your life. There is no doubt that this conceptualized self, or whatever it is that you want to call it, exists now. It exists. It just depends on what you want to call it. Jason really liked that idea and I liked that idea because he was into it, so I had a main actor wanting to do it and then I wanted to do it. That is why Jason and I ended up working together on it.”
The fact Revolver’s North American release has been delayed a while could make potential ticket buyers a little skeptical. Word of a new cut of the film might also lead some to believe there’s something wrong with his movie. Ritchie’s well aware of what he’s facing with this theatrical release. “Listen, this movie is an uphill battle,” conceded Ritchie. “What can you do? It is about an uphill battle. The movie itself is about the ultimate trick and if it has any validity to it, it is always going to be an uphill battle. I anticipated that when I got myself into it. I don’t wish to make life hard for myself for the rest of my life, but the premise was too audacious for me to turn down. You sort of forget about uphill battles when you are working and you are distracted by the fact that you are doing what you are doing. My experience is that if you know what you are getting into and if you can keep a broad mind, then you will be rewarded by the experience.”
Unless you’ve already seen the film, what follows won’t mean a thing. But if you’ve watched it and need to know where the idea came from and what Ritchie had in mind, this might help clear things up. “Let me just start from the idea that intrigued me, the concept of the film because the mind hates the concept of the film, right? And that’s why the psychiatrists,” explained Ritchie. “I can’t remember the first person who brought the concept to me. I realized that my mind was trying to make it more complicated than what it actually was. The film is tremendously simple. It is simply that the only thing or entity you are battling is an eternal one. It is that voice that when you are running keeps telling you to stop just when you start getting tired. It is the ubiquitous voice that stops you from enjoying your life essentially and tricks you and seduces you and tells you this isn’t [going there]. It sort of transpires that it is not. So that is the movie, right? It is not more complicated than that.”
Ritchie continued, “Where the mind starts to make it complicated is when you really have to apply it, and then the mind really makes sure that you don’t understand it. I suppose that is what I found most intriguing about the concept is how people – you could clearly tell them – we tell them three times in the film: ‘The film is about the fact that there is ultimately no such thing, ultimately there is no major enemy, no external enemy.’ We say that three times and people are still going, ‘What is the film about?’ After you’ve told somebody three times, you are like, ‘That’s interesting because we told you three times.’ And really, that is all the film is about so there are three times where we say it conspicuously. But essentially it is what the film is about all the way through, so I’m slightly flummoxed. But I’m not that flummoxed because I understand that the mind makes it complicated, because it took me about a week to understand the premise in the first place. And then I realized I was just complicating it even though it was tremendously simple.”
Audiences may walk out of the theater having seen Revolver as just a gangster movie, which is actually what Ritchie was trying to accomplish. “I tried to do that, I tried to make it so, but what happened is that I found that people got so pissed off about the fact that they don’t understand it that they weren’t interested in it as a gangster movie. What happened was they said, ‘I don’t understand it and now I’m angry.’ Some people didn’t have that reaction, but some people went bananas. They got really upset about it and so pretty swiftly after that the gangster aspect was reduced and it was [the] ‘What is the film about?’ aspect was the only thing that anyone was interested in. I like to think that you can enjoy it on that basis, but what gets in the way is that if you don’t understand it, then you can get angry."
Page 2: Guy Ritchie on His Upcoming Movies
