ROBERT Downey Jr talks about playing Sherlock Holmes in the new film being directed by Guy Ritchie and produced by Joel Silver and why he thinks he’s perfectly suited to the part (though not necessarily wearing tweed!).

Sherlock Holmes is a Warner Bros film that is due to start shooting in London ready for a release in autumn 2009.

Q. How did you get involved with Sherlock Holmes?
Robert Downey Jr: Joel [Silver] started my career 25 years ago with a movie called Weird Science. And then I met my wife working for Joel again. And in case you’re unaware, I’ve had a hell of a summer [smiles, in reference to box office smashes Iron Man and Tropic Thunder] and it’s made me much more viable to play a lead role like this. I thought the idea of Guy [Ritchie] and his directing style and strengths with a very iconoclastic, period idea like this was just kind of a no lose situation. And then having the likes of Mark [Strong], Rachel [McAdams], Kelly [Reilly] and Mr Jude Law in the cast… it was the kind of thing you just couldn’t turn down. I’m so excited about doing a fresh take on this, which is kind of returning a little bit more to what the stories always had in them. The scale of them and the canvas is so huge, I just don’t think they’ve ever had the budget that Warner Bros and the Joel Silver take on this can afford us to actually fully be able to tell the story in a really big, fun way.

Q. We’re promised a Sherlock Holmes like he’s never been portrayed before. What exactly have you got planned?
Robert Downey Jr: Well, clearly, I guess I’m gonna do it better than it’s ever been done [laughs]! Honestly, unlike certain of my cohorts here I wasn’t familiar with the stories much at all. But I had a similar reaction to when I was going to play Chaplin in that the more I read about him, the more kind of overwhelmed I was by the weight of it, and the amount of people who’ll be watching to see if it’s been done right.

Here’s kind of what happened. I called Guy because I’d seen RocknRolla and clearly I was between jobs. I might be wrong but at the time I think he said: “You might be a little old for it!” But like I said, I had a hell of a summer and had a very stern conversation with him… But as it turns out, I think we’re really well suited to work together. Looking into the books, the more I looked, the more fantastic it is… the fact that he is a student of some kind of nebulous martial arts. He’s just such a weirdo. As a matter of fact, Mrs Downey said that when you read the description of the guy… as quirky and nuts as it is, it could be a description of me on some days. But I’m gonna do it better than it’s ever been done before.

Q. Are you saying you’re not a fan of some of the previous productions?
Robert Downey Jr: Yeah, I watched some of them in research and stuff and it’s all great. My family remember waking up and watching the serials, with Basil Rathbone or Jeremy Brett supposedly is great. But I’m not one of those people who’ll say: “I don’t want to watch those because I don’t want to be influenced [performance-wise].” I love taking it all in, but really the best source of material is the books themselves and it seems really like there’s this new rush of activity and interest separate from even just us making this movie. There’s new encyclopaedias and stuff.

I just want to clarify something, too. There’s such a wide variety of nemeses, and stories… these cases have more to do with Sherlock’s relationship with Watson. This one is the one where Irene Adler appears, who’s this kind of adventurous great lady. One of the stories is where Mary [Kelly Reilly] is one of the people that Holmes and Watson are working on with this case and, by the end, Watson admits, as the storyteller to Conan Doyle, that he’s actually in love with her. And some of it’s kind of foggy. So, in trying to condense all of that, including all the great guys he goes up against, certain characters don’t appear in the canon by name. Mark Strong’s character is more of an amalgam… an appropriate kind of person to match wits with and figure out what’s going on. So, some of the things are condensed, but not because we figure we could do any better than the stories ever did… only just for the sake of we’re trying to do something that’s viewable for a mass audience. So, that would be the exception to being absolutely correct in the canon.

Q. Sherlock Holmes is the ultimate English repressed, opium-taking guy. Can’t help noticing your accent isn’t quite English…
Robert Downey Jr: My English pronunciation is, I’m told, rather adept. I did a movie, you might have heard of, called Chaplin, for which I won your Bafta award several years ago. So, I hope that gives you an indication of my ability to do accents but, hey, it remains to be seen. Well, the interesting thing about Holmes is… or rather I think what Conan Doyle did so aptly, and what’s so engaging about this character is that while he represents an aspect of Victorian England, he’s very much on the fringe. He’s very bohemian, he’s a patriot but he doesn’t necessarily believe he has to operate within the guidelines that Scotland Yard would say. He kind of has his own laws. A lot of this goes back to what affected the detective movies and noir of the time… I was actually reading as part of my research that he actually has 13 of the 22 characteristics of the hero. I don’t think there’s anything repressed about him, save for the fact his logic tends to get in the way of him being able to feel that emotion can be part of what helps him solve a case. He feels he should be devoid of emotion.

But then, of course, because we’re making a movie about relationships and people, and trying to make it real, we have the lovely Rachel McAdams as Irene Adler, whom Holmes refers to as “the woman”, and the woman who bested him, who kind of could get him all crossed up, so he wouldn’t be able to catch her or know what he was doing because she stirred these feelings in him. So, I guess there’ll be some of that. This is certainly not a stodgy, Victorian piece, depicting Brits as repressed people in 1891. I think it’s somewhat more inclusive than that.

Q. Can you tell us more about your relationship with Watson?
Robert Downey Jr: Well, the purists will say that the way Watson has been depicted previously is not accurate… kind of a bumbling guy with one of his feet in a waste paper basket kind of thing. I think, for the time, when those series were out, there were more references for that – there was the guy who had his act together… there was Abbot and there was Costello. But Watson was a doctor, an army surgeon in fact. He’s a veteran and somewhat of a bad ass himself but in a more reserved way. The way that Guy has put it forward, is that he has kind of a co-dependent relationship where he’s trying to ground Holmes, because he’s all flighty and very much living in his head and the case, and yet – as in the stories too – he [Watson] also has this yearning to have a real life with Mary. So, there’s a bit of conflict.

We also really want to get some elements of that Butch and Sundance thing in too. There should be an opportunity for Holmes to be saying to Watson: “You shouldn’t be with Mary because don’t you love the thrill of the macabre and what we do together?” And then there’s also Watson being able to comment on the fact that the only woman that Holmes calls “the woman” is somebody who you don’t know is going to sit there sweetly, or cut you apart with her stiletto. This is out of the canon. So, it’s very ripe in what I think are very modern, complex relationships. So, even though it’s a “period piece”, I totally get what they’re talking about. Literally, our focus is to make a really, really solid piece of entertainment and to take it real seriously because I think audiences are too savvy… I think they’ll get pissed off if we come and announce this great movie and then we don’t really deliver, or dig to see how far we could have gone.

Find out more about Jude Law as Watson

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