Sadly, it took a divorce from Madonna to get Guy Ritchie to return to feature filmmaking full-force (we're not counting Swept Away). After the Snatch-esque RocknRolla proved he still had the right stuff, Ritchie jumped right into the director's chair on the big-budget period film, Sherlock Holmes.
The thinking-man's detective might seem like an odd fit for Ritchie, the king of hip, modern gangster movies, but Robert Downey Jr. (Holmes) thinks Ritchie was a perfect choice to direct:
I've been around and Guy really knows how to tell a story. He's done complex storytelling very well, and he's got a great visual sense. And, I think that between that stuff and Jude Law and I really, really becoming very close-knit in our preparation for this, and we've got Rachel McAdams playing the diva adventuress. We just had a great cast and we had a fantastic time shooting it.
McAdams plays the love interest in the movie, but at a recent press event she said that the real romance was between Holmes and Watson. Downey Jr. joked along, saying that Holmes and Watson shared "circumstantial homosexuality." He went on to say:
Before Jude said he was going to do the movie, before he said that he was available, before he said that he either did or didn't want to be courted, we just started talking like two serious actors about what would need to happen to make this work as a piece of straight drama.
We just became really close, really quickly, because we just rolled up our sleeves and started working from jump.