Page 19 - Fujifilm Exposure_14 Snatch_ok

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DIAMOND GEEZERS
Writer-director Guy Ritchie follows up
Lock Stock with a new 84-carat comedy thriller
A fter making his feature film debut with a hip
gangster thriller which went on to gross more than £18 million at the British box office, expec- tations couldn’t be
greater for Guy Ritchie’s follow-up. Not, repeat not, a sequel to the
low-budget Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels, Snatch – bigger-bud- geted but hardly inflationary - con- tains, nevertheless many of Ritchie’s now trademark elements: rich dia- logue, dark comedy, explosive vio- lence and a line-up of often outra- geously colourful characters.
Along with Lock Stock “old boys”, Jason Statham, Vinnie Jones, Jason Flemying and Alan Ford – all in new guises – is a heavyweight international cast, including Benicio Del Toro, Dennis Farina, Rade Serbedzija and Eastenders’ Mike Reid. Not to mention a certain Brad Pitt.
According to producer Matthew Vaughn, Ritchie’s longtime partner in SKA Films: “The film is more than just a gangster madcap. It is a diamond heist gone wrong, fixed boxing match- es, a New York Mafia boss, and an Irish gypsy-turned-prizefighter, fighting only to win his mother a new caravan. Plus, a temperamental dog. It’s a film full of helter-skelter twists.”
Adds Ritchie: “What started as a blood-rich thriller, ended up as a gang- ster-comedy on set. Fast-paced, move it quick and with no fat on it whatso- ever. I loved playing around with dia- logue, so this film has some of the material I wanted to put into my first film but couldn’t get in.”
For Vaughn, casting was key: “Guy began to write it before Lock Stock was released so he was still liv- ing and breathing the genre of hard men characters. It took us a long time to find the right faces – we had to see hundreds.
“Guy has such strong visual refer- ences that he wanted people not only to look the part but to deliver maxi- mum authenticity with minimum the- atrical technique.”
Says Ritchie: “The cast jelled togeth- er so well. Each one is such a character – on and off screen – and they brought a life of their own to the original script I wrote. The roles needed coarseness as well as credibility. It’s no good getting Shakespearean actors to play violent Cockney gang members.”
So how did Brad Pitt fit in? After attending Lock Stock’s US premiere, Pitt apparently begged to be cast in Ritchie’s next film. “We were shocked at first,” says Vaughn, “thinking ‘God, there’s nothing in it for him’. Then Guy came up with the idea of casting him as the Irish gypsy. He normally gets $20m a film, but he agreed to a much smaller fee for Snatch – and the same size trailer as everyone else.”
Like Lock Stock, Snatch is also characterised by a very stylish, often breathlessly kinetic, “look”.
Once again Ritchie turned to cine- matographer Tim Maurice-Jones and the pair, together with camera operator Peter Wignall, spent six weeks – that’s a generous fortnight longer than Lock Stock – story-boarding the whole film.
Maurice-Jones recalls his “brief”: “Obviously it’s a gangster movie so it must look tough but because of the risk of similarities we wanted to try and make it an entirely different ‘look’ than Lock Stock, which was shot on 16mm, blown up then given a bleach by-pass so it was very grainy. We then gave it a sepia tint.
“This time round, I still wanted the toughness so I sorted the bleach pass to get the strength into the picture, but instead of doing a sepia tint over the whole thing I gave each location its own colour.
“I got together with production designer Hugo Luczyc-Wyhowski
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Photo: Brad Pitt as the Irish gypsy in Guy Richie’s Snatch