Last summer, Empire was lucky enough to visit our favourite London building – the Battersea Power Station – where Guy Ritchie was overseeing his latest film, Rocknrolla. During interviews on set, Ritchie and his producer, Joel Silver, hinted that they were working on something pretty special.
Fast-forward a couple of months and it became clear that that they weren’t kidding, with the announcement that Ritchie was set to direct a big-screen version of Sherlock Holmes, with Silver producing and Robert Downey Jr. starring as Arthur Conan Doyle’s brilliant master detective.
But details have been scarce on the ground, so we jumped at the chance to quiz Ritchie and Silver about the movie when they were doing the rounds earlier today at Comic-Con. First, Silver confirmed that Sherlock Holmes, and not the rumoured Dirty Dozen remake, had been the special project he had hinted at last year.
“We had talked about it then,” he admitted. “We wanted to work together on a number of things but this came together very quickly. Robert Downey said he wanted to do it and we start shooting in October!”
Although the film is based on a forthcoming comic book series by Lionel Wigram, Ritchie was adamant that his Holmes will be more faithful than most people might expect.
“To a degree, we’re being as authentic as we can to the original books,” he told Empire. “He [Holmes] was more of an action man originally and I didn’t think it was possible to manifest in an efficient way previously in the productions they have. Now we have money and we have the technology so it seems like we should put it to the test. It was just a natural fit.”