Sherlock Holmes
England - 2008
Despite being booted off Fred Claus Warner Bros still hired me to cover Sherlock Holmes being made. It was a wholly different experience as all involved were comfortable with being documented. I knew that director Guy Ritchie would be accessible as I had worked on 'Rock'n'Rolla' and he was fine on that one. But he was in the throes of his divorce with Madonna so I was cautious about what might happen. He was remarkably relaxed throughout the shoot and would often sit at the monitor in-between setups playing chords on a classical guitar. I have never in 25 years seen a director so laid back especially when you consider this was probably the biggest budget movie Guy had ever undertaken.
I had not seen Robert Downey, Jr., since Air America and I reminded him about dangling over Northern Thailand on the end of a rope and told him about what went on inside the helicopter. He remembered the day but no one had told him why we cut the filming short. It helped break the ice for shooting on Sherlock, as he was of course now a firmly established movie star. I needn't worry, as he was absolutely fine with my filming during production. I also told Jude Law that I had made the press kit for, 'Shopping', the first film he ever made when he was just 19. I remember that at the end of filming on 'Shopping' I turned to my crew and sarcastically said, “Well, we'll never see him again” How wrong could I be!
The film was good fun as director and actors all just seemed to be enjoying the process and I had no need to deploy 'burkavision'. I also like the fact it was shot almost entirely on location in the UK. We went to Liverpool to shoot at the docks, to Manchester Town Hall, to Chatham Docks in Kent and of course many locations in London. I was amazed to see during the bare knuckle fight Robert has in the Punch Bowl bar that they really were hitting each other; Robert insisted it looked real and wanted to be punched hard! Amazing. It was also amusing to see Guy Ritchie join in playing a banjo and singing along for the recording of the Irish folk song you hear over that sequence.
The only grumble I had on what was otherwise a gift of a movie to work on was that I was often on my own doing everything, shooting the stuff doing sound and even conducting impromptu interviews with Guy who preferred to do three or four questions periodically rather than the usual sit down EPK interview. So I would have to clip a mic on him, shoot and ask him a few questions that I also had to devise. The publicist was neither use nor ornament when it came to doing these. It would appear this multitasking was the slide into compromise production companies were driving towards and it just drained much of the enjoyment from the process. So Perhaps through the grumpiness of age or the changes in the industry I just could not rekindle continued enthusiasm for the work anymore and going back on another film failed to fill me with any great passion so Sherlock proved to be a parting shot.
Thankfully there are far more Sigourney Weaver and Harrison Ford types in movies than the mercurial and quite frankly unpleasant Vince Vaughn to make the work hugely rewarding. The Unit Publicist, Rob Harris, made a very good observation in his book, ‘Unexposed Film: A Year on Location’, that we are in effect documenting movie history, an archive of how films are made and what the talent involved are like when the camera is not rolling. I’m sure they don’t see it that way, but will spin a shameless volt-face when the celebratory documentary is made about them in the autumn of their careers?
I thought it only right to mention here the key people who helped propel my career along the path it took. Firstly Les Mayfield, the Californian 'behind the scenes' director I originally met on Roger Rabbit and who gave me my first break as cameraman, Tom Grane, a marketing executive at 20th Century Fox who entrusted me with Alien3 solely off the back of a letter I wrote to him about the project, Ian Atkins, a British documentary film maker who thoughtfully introduced me to an Egyptian commercials director, Sherif Sabri with whom I worked for over eight years on television adverts for the Middle East, mostly in Egypt and Lebanon, Teri Boggess, a marketing executive at Warner Bros who got me involved in the Potter movies and many more Warner projects, and last but by no means least, John Pattyson, the guy who made many of the 'behind the scenes' promotions I worked on from Cliffhanger to Gladiator. John made the work immensely enjoyable and I continue to regard him as a true friend.