Guy Ritchie Came Up With 85% Of His New Film In Ten Seconds

4 August 2015 | 12:06 pm | Brendan Telford

"You have to somehow keep the reins on essentially a wild animal while also letting things take their own unique course."

Not a stranger to taking on licensed and very much loved material and making it his own, British director Guy Ritchie has followed up his stylised mega-blockbuster Sherlock Holmes franchise with a revisionist take on the 1960s Cold War espionage show The Man From U.N.C.L.E. With the central focus on spies from either side of the Iron Curtain, American fugitive-cum-CIA wunderkind Napoleon Solo (Henry Cavill) and Soviet soldier Illya Kuryakin (Armie Hammer) form an unlikely alliance in the hunt for a missing Nazi nuclear scientist. Ritchie and writing partner Lionel Wigram have used a nostalgic authenticity to add to the Bonds and Bournes of the celluloid world while further exploring their own entertaining intertextual predilections.

"We felt the world of this film was occupying a place that no other film was [at this time], which is what we saw as the golden era of the spy thriller genre," Ritchie explains. "It feels like an amalgamation of those but with our unique view. There are so many things that you are subconsciously motivated by, so when hearing the title The Man From U.N.C.L.E. in about ten seconds you can cross-reference all the things you find inspiring and interesting. You are never sure how you can make it all work, but you have enough kernels of interest to get things firing. 'Americans, Russians, ooh the '60s! I like the cars and the costumes — not those costumes, get rid of them — the architecture is beautiful! How can I make it contemporary? The male relationship between the two spies!' When the cake goes into the oven, does it come out as something that I'd like to eat? I'd say that except for about 15% of the film, what you see now is what I came up with in the first ten-second idea two, three years ago."

"It really was a tightrope where sometimes Guy would walk in and say, 'You know what? Funny, but a little too smug."

"Because our film is set in the '60s, we feel that lends it an air of authenticity; when first approached about this we were asked to make it a contemporary version and we said no," Wigram continues. "We grew up in this world so there is a lot of knowledge that is innate, it felt very instinctive. Another thing that really sets this apart from every other spy film is that there are two spies rather than the lone James Bond, Jason Bourne agent. The idea of an American and a Russian, arch-enemies at the height of the Cold War, is such fertile creative territory."

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The constant headbutting between Solo and Kuryakin provides the lion's share of screen time in the film, as the debonair risk-taker Solo incessantly rubs the stoic and set-in-his-ways Kuryakin the wrong way. Cavill (a Brit playing an American) and Hammer (an American playing a Russian) had their work cut out for them from the beginning, but the repartee (Ritchie calls them "loose" and "straight" respectively) between the suave yet smug Solo and the fish-out-of-water Kuryakin lends the film its comedic gravitas.

"It really was a tightrope where sometimes Guy would walk in and say, 'You know what? Funny, but a little too smug,'" Cavill laughs. "You have to trust your director in those moments because it's hard to notice how you're coming across. You can walk away from something where it's in tone with how you are feeling, but not with the feeling of the movie, so that an audience could be sitting there and thinking you're a bit of a dick. It was harder than the stunts."

"I know — we have Superman over here sitting in the backseat of a car while I am running after it for hours," Hammer counters. "It's funny watching people put into situations that they simply aren't equipped to deal with, and that is all of Kuryakin's life outside of spying. To sell all of those moments, you had to find the truth in the situation, no matter how preposterous, otherwise it would become very slapstick. Even with my accent I just wanted to lend it that air of authenticity. If you go back and watch old spy films or '80s action movies, every Russian character is arch. They are Boris from Rocky & Bullwinkle. 'NATASHA!' That's not how Russians speak. Hollywood just wanted their bad guys to sound bad. I wanted to be as universally Russian as possible, and although I have Russian heritage through my uncle, I also listened to a lot of YouTube, which is seriously one of the actor's greatest research tools."

"We more or less did it in three takes: the straight way, the taking the piss way, then somewhere down the middle."

In many ways though The Man From U.N.C.L.E. is a three-hander, as the spies' link to the Nazi scientist is his niece Gaby Teller, an East German mechanic desperate to escape from behind the Wall. Rising star Alicia Vikander sees the strength of Teller as a somewhat blindsiding element, adding further dimensions to her character. "I didn't even see Gaby as a strong female character, I just saw it as a strong part, which goes to Guy and Lionel's writing," she says. "Gaby is fearless and yet there is this ambiguity there as to what her plans are throughout the film. She goes on a journey from behind the wall to then be a part of revolution and style. I was aware that audiences would come to the film with a certain idea on who I would be playing within the story, and those perceptions are likely to flip quite a few times. For Guy to have these elements in an action-comedy, and to inject it all with his sense of humour and style, it's quite special."

Rounding out the international carousel of players is the unlikely villain Victoria Vinciguerra, played by Australian Elizabeth Debicki. Vinciguerra is a woman who knows what she wants and knows how to get it. "I watched a lot of Fellini and [Catherine] Deneuve films, Italian '60s cinema, and a lot of that for me really helped shape Victoria," Debicki says. "I don't want to label her — she lacks empathy, shall we say — and yet there is a strength and pragmatic nature to her that helps steer it away from a straight-up master villain situation. She works the best when she really enjoys what she is doing. Like any businesswoman she achieves things with tenacity and gives herself a little pat on the back and moves on. She is so self-made, so self-aware, she knows exactly what image she is projecting right down to her choice of jewellery. Victoria is completely manicured and created, very precise, and when she achieves something she enjoys it, even if it is potential worldwide destruction."

The film itself is lusciously shot to evoke the period of the time, both historically and cinematically, with the use of filters to show both East Germany's supposedly cold nature compared to the warmth of Italy, and many soft-frame shots evoking Fellini and Buñuel. This, alongside the nature of the narrative, meant that Ritchie had to be very careful when walking the tightrope between comedy, nostalgia and parody — The Man From U.N.C.L.E. is no Get Smart.

"It was something we were very aware of and had a non-stop conversation about throughout the course of making the film, because we wanted to take it up to that line but once you cross it it's hard to recover from," Ritchie says. "It became an unspoken rule. We didn't set any parameters on what people could do because everyone knew what the line was; it was about getting as close as we could without crossing it. With comedy you're playing with your stakes and are constantly on thin ice. If you become a parody the stakes no longer mean anything; but I also don't like to take things too seriously, because in the end it's entertainment. So you have to somehow keep the reins on essentially a wild animal while also letting things take their own unique course. In the end we more or less did it in three takes: the straight way, the taking the piss way, then somewhere down the middle, because then you have some latitude on where to take things."