Guy Ritchie on movies, marriage… and BBQs
FIGHTING, FEUDING AND FATHERHOOD... HOW THE HOLLYWOOD HIT-MAKER GREW UP THE HARD WAY
Guy Ritchie’s eyes narrow in laughter as he admits to his obsession with barbecues – owning more than 30. Always one in his car, five in his London house, plus two clay ovens. ‘I adore them. There’s just something about them,’ he says, and his face creases in mildly embarrassed hilarity, mostly at himself. ‘I’m a caveman in many ways – going under the heading, “likes to cook raw steak on a barbecue.”’
But a feminine side also pops out. ‘I’m very into my interiors and my textiles,’ he confesses. Hang on, though, isn’t ‘gangster cool’ almost his trademark in all those movies – Lock, Stock And Two
Smoking Barrels, Snatch, Rocknrolla and even Sherlock Holmes? ‘It is, but I’m also a bit of a pussycat,’ he adds with a grin.
So to get this straight: this fast-talking geezer, a Brazilian jiu-jitsu black belt, whose face is scarred by 50 stitches from street fights, likes to talk swatches, cornices, paint colours and lamp shades? ‘Yes, I’ve got an entire office downstairs with cloths of different colours,’ he confesses.
On his third cup of coffee, he sits in his cavernous London house to talk about the release of his new film, King Arthur: Legend Of The Sword. In the past two years Ritchie gathered 10,000 people to make the medieval epic, including vast teams of special-effects techies. It’s all so different from his small-budget indie movies – and Guy Ritchie is loving being a Hollywood big spender.
His new film is a macho morality tale – punchy, poignant and fast with stinging one-liners, flicks of gangster wit and eye-watering combat scenes. His Arthur is a wide-boy scoundrel with a heart of gold who shows a healthy disdain for the ruling class as he rises to the top. Not unlike Ritchie’s own rise from school dropout with a penchant for street fights to one of the most powerful directors in Hollywood.
King Arthur has a cast of hundreds, epic scenes of marauders and besieged castles, charging mammoths and flaming parapets in a heart-stopping story of a boy who escapes from a street brothel to become king at the famous court of the Round Table. Ritchie’s inner ‘caveman’ and ‘pussycat’ personas played equally in his role as director. He ordered 1,100 costumes, as well as choreographed scenes gory enough to turn stomachs, especially one where a man’s ear is severed. ‘The detail that goes into making the film is staggering. Everything – shirts, gloves, bits of wall, armour – all is micromanaged,’ he says.
Ritchie is hard to pigeonhole. He has been a sewer worker, antiques delivery man and film runner. His father, a former advertising executive, made the celebrated Hamlet TV commercials. He is a product of a broken home who has had his own taste of a bitter marriage split. ‘My dad worked most of his life in advertising and was in the army before that. All he ever knew was work. He took two days off in 50
years. I went to minor public schools and some state schools and fell into the kind of murky world of the uneducated middle class.’
Bizarrely, the critic AA Gill was his nanny. Today, aged 48, Ritchie is a father of five, contented husband, stately home owner, brewer, and always Madonna’s ex, just as Arthur Miller never quite lost the label of being Mr Marilyn Monroe. More of Madge, adoption, divorce and his puppyish adoration for his new wife later.
As a teenager, Ritchie lived in London with his father while being bundled from one school to another. ‘It was a suspicion on my parents’ part that if they kept moving me, somehow I’d fit better in the new school and, of course, I never did. There were 13 I went to,’ he says. Film was to be his ‘get out of jail’ card, almost literally, when he was surviving dyslexia, failure at school, drugs, street violence and divorcing parents.
‘Films just spoke to me from the off. I was completely focused on them, whereas in everything else I was terribly distracted. So I embarked upon a great enthusiasm. I remember watching For A Few
Dollars More at home – I would rewind and go, “That’s interesting” and then watch it again. I could watch it 15 times on the bounce.
‘I had a bit of a love affair with the first King Arthur film
[Excalibur] directed by John Boorman. I watched it hundreds of times. On our one VHS machine downstairs in the sitting room it was rewind and then rewind more. Sometimes 12 times in a sitting. I could do the whole day or whole night, again and again. I had a crush, a brief and dirty affair, with Boorman’s Arthur. I was smitten and it left its mark on me.’
But his own entry into the film industry started low. ‘I became a runner late in the day because from the age of 15 till 25 I did practically every menial job known to man.’ He dug trenches for sewer pipes in Greece. For a brief time drugs were a serious diversion. ‘Hallucinogens was what I was interested in, so mushrooms, LSD, and smoking a lot of weed. But it runs its course and then one day I was all done. By the age of 19 I was finished with drugs. ‘It was a shift in consciousness. Everyone’s got a bucket that can accommodate a certain amount of filth and eventually my bucket got filled. They were things I began to find repugnant for the soul and the psyche. I could no longer entertain anyone who was up to some form of shenanigans. It’s a world full of people having to dodge the law but my intolerance of filth now is so unambiguous and for that I’m grateful.’ He took the same attitude when his 16-year-old son Rocco was arrested for taking drugs. ‘It’s simple: I don’t condone anything that’s illegal or dangerous. If you live in one of the busiest, most sophisticated cities in the world there is an endless deluge of opportunities and temptations. Everyone has to go on their own journey to navigate their way past that gauntlet.’ That is all he will say on the coverage of his son in the media. In the past year he and Madonna have fought publicly in the courts over the custody of Rocco. ‘You can only guide your kids by the experience you’ve had,’ he says. ‘I am informed in certain esoteric fields and that has its advantages.’ Ritchie likes answers that have a philosophical edge. For instance, his life message: ‘You have your own mind but it is surprising how easily it’s seduced into not being independent. And we’re all at war with that.’ The films he makes reflect that. ‘They are about transcendence of self. There’s a low point and then ascension out of it.’ In other words, a tension between good and evil. ‘Yes, with my films it is the backbone of narrative.’ There is a sprinkling of
psychobabble when he explains how he and his films are all about ‘narratives’ to find the ‘essence of life’. Perhaps partly explained by the fact that he is a hungry, selftaught scholar.
Also, he has privately been making documentary films on the nature of psychology and psychiatry, a quest to understand life’s purpose and explore the self. They have never been shown but the subject affects his language and thinking.
Leaving school at 15 did not diminish his hunger for learning. ‘I’ve spent a lot of time studying narrative. It’s all the same, particularly Shakespeare – pushing through the small mind into a more independent mind. You’re a slave to the opinion of others or your environment, so the question is how you liberate yourself. In
Arthur it’s a boy on the street and his evolution through great acts of selflessness to become king.’
And for himself? ‘There was no well-trodden-path for a completely unqualified 15year-old with no conspicuous skill set. I had to find my path. As long as I was working, my dad was happy,’ he recalls. So how did he emerge as a streetwise London toughie?
‘I was completely aware that I was born and raised in a middle-class family with a posh dad but the street where we lived was essentially working class.’
Class always fascinated Ritchie, but mainly the upper and lower ends where behaviour is more extreme. ‘It’s informed everything that I’m interested in, the subcultures of the bottom and the top. I also had a new love affair with London when I married an American lady. I became a tour guide and saw London through the eyes of a foreigner. It looked different and fresh to me.’
Violence, too, has long been a feature of his life and work. Part of Ritchie’s films fitting in with his definition of life: ‘Life is violent and narrative is violent. It’s impossible to avoid it or rather it is in the films that I make.
‘There’s conflict and where that is, always push turns into shove.’ In his case literally. Aged 18 in a nightclub, he was slashed across the left cheek with a Stanley knife. Ritchie almost blithely sees it as just part of the normal rite of passage of his teen years.
‘Everyone I knew then was getting in a fight. It was nothing, we were in a different world. That was it. But I did hear a shocking story the other day: the person who cut me hanged himself.’
So how did he get into such violent situations? ‘It’s all down to your environment. I never think about the fights I was in. There were tons of them that went on the whole time.’ Well, the history of his fights is still staring out from his face. There are 50 stitches. ‘But you know, I adore fighting,’ he says. ‘I did karate for years and now do Brazilian jiu-jitsu, which is sort of like wrestling.’ Is he ever scared? ‘I suffer from the normal set of fears, like being judged by others or not having enough money.’
You still worry about money? ‘Okay. No not really. We all to an extent spend time scratching around for fears and if I did I would find them but the truth is I don’t need to confront them.’
The truth is that he is rather at ease with himself both on set and at home and also as the man who loves to shop. He loves antiques, nosing around junk shops or auction houses, surfing the web for old stuff. ‘I’m a bit of an old lady like that. Cue more of his laughter. I love Georgian toffery.’
That gentler side gave rise to Ritchie the country squire. He and Madonna bought Ashcombe, Cecil Beaton’s idyllic Wiltshire estate in England’s southwest shortly after they were married. ‘I thought the only way I could sustain my partner’s interest was if I got a house that was exciting enough. It was and she loved it.’ Famously she was photographed there for Vogue. Nowadays, he now just wants a peaceful time with his ex, hoping their very public fight over custody of their son is over. Ritchie is very careful what he says. He does not want to antagonise or say insincere syrupy things about the woman who once insisted on dropping the name Madonna to be called Mrs Ritchie. Clearly there have been difficulties.
When asked about her he says: ‘She’s a wonderful mother and has been very good to the kids and her new kids, the twins, will have a wonderful education and receive lots of love. No one could say anything negative about that.’
But he admits divorce hits hard: ‘A marriage breakdown is a death. Now I just want to say positive things about her. I don’t regret being married to her, I don’t, you know, not in the slightest.’
But what is evident is that he is even happier married to his second wife Jacqui, a former model and mother to their three children. ‘We are on the same frequency and the harmony is complete. She finishes my sentences and I finish hers. I find her tremendously kind. Kindness as a quality is so important, the opposite to the bucket of filth I was talking about earlier. What rubs away the filth is kindness. You want your partner to be kind. I couldn’t love anyone more than I love my wife.’
Can this really be Ritchie the street toughie we hear talking – the quintessential bloke’s bloke?
‘I am that and as I said I’m a bit of a pussycat in other ways, you know. I am just lucky in love. We couldn’t be happier.’
Home life with their children is mainly in Wiltshire and their London house, where Rocco and Ritchie’s adopted son David also come when they can. It is not such a long step from Camelot: grand living, some conflicts but seeking to find a path that leads to the right and happy ending. King Arthur: Legend Of The Sword is out on May 19
‘A marriage breakdown is a death but I don’t regret being married to her [Madonna]. I don’t, not in the slightest’