Guy Ritchie - 'It's time to get off my butt'

He's been 'Mr Madonna' for quite a while, but now Guy Ritchie is reasserting his directing credentials, he tells Alistair Harkness

IT'S a sunny afternoon in central London and Guy Ritchie is holding court in an artfully dilapidated warehouse space behind the Oxo Tower on the Embankment. The location is all rusted girders, crumbling brickwork and paint-flecked walls, most of which have been adorned with pre-crumpled posters for his latest film, RocknRolla. The highly-stylised "gutter chic" ambience is in keeping with the look of the new film, a breezy crime caper starring Gerard Butler, Thandie Newton and Tom Wilkinson that sees the about-to-turn-40 writer/director returning to the swaggering "mockney" underworld of Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch. It's not a moment too soon either. Having appeared to commit career suicide with Swept Away and Revolver, new work RocknRolla is his best film to date and should aid his reputation as a director rather than simply being known as Mr Madonna.

Or maybe not – one of the reasons the latter image has been allowed to take root has been Ritchie's unwillingness to say much in interviews. There's good reason for this though. In the packed press conference that takes place earlier in the day, he's subjected to a barrage of embarrassingly coy inquiries from the tabloids, which he deflects with the kind of boring brevity that prevents his answers from becoming front-page news. It's a neat trick, except that later, facing a smaller group of journalists interviewing him about his films, he's not actually much more expansive.

He's unfailingly polite, sure, but he's also vague, distracted, forgetful even. Ask him about his future projects, for instance, and he'll reel off a list of things he'd perhaps like to do – a children's film, a war movie, a couple of sequels to RocknRolla (part two is written and ready to go should this film prove successful) – but he neglects to mention that he's about to start shooting a Sherlock Holmes film starring Robert Downey Jnr. "Oh yeah, forgot about that one. So yeah, Sherlock Holmes."

At times Ritchie comes across as more Boris Johnson than Quentin Tarantino, rambling on about his love of Irish ballads but struggling to string a sentence together when asked about his favourite gangster films. He's also prone to retracting things he's just said. Ask him to elaborate on what he meant at the press conference when he said he "was hungrier now than he was ten years ago" and he confesses he's not sure he got that right. "I think what I probably meant was that I'm more focused now. I think I was pretty hungry ten years ago. Now I'm just really enthusiastic about making as many decent films as I can so I can have a body of work to reflect on."

Given the critical pasting his previous two films took – Swept Away because of its Madonna casting; Revolver because of its utter incomprehensibility – he's surprisingly philosophical when reflecting on the two works. "I think it did knock my confidence at the time," he says, "but I think when it comes to triumph and disaster, the reaction lasts the same amount of time for both. You're applauded and the enthusiasm from that lasts for a finite period and when you're … what's the opposite of being applauded?"

Derided? Denigrated?

"Yeah, when you're denigrated that only lasts for a finite amount of time as well and then you get up and move on."

He still stands by those movies, particularly the metaphysical conceits of Revolver. "If you don't get the premise, it just remains a closed book and it's actually a load of bollocks. But it's tremendously ambitious, some say pretentious, in its aspirations, so it's got a finite audience. Whereas this (RocknRolla] is easy. That doesn't mean I shouldn't do the other kind of a thing, it's just that, to stay in business, you can't keep doing that kind of thing."

And therein lies the rub: success attracts success; failure doesn't. His cast praise Ritchie's proficiency and efficiency on set, but none of them refer to Swept Away or Revolver. Ask Gerard Butler if he was a Ritchie fan before making RocknRolla and the conspiratorial smile that flashes across his face at the loaded nature of the question speaks volumes. "Yeah, erm, Lock, Stock… and Snatch were, eh, fantastic…" He pauses then roars with laughter. "No, they were really fantastic, so it was exciting when he came to me with a script. It was even more exciting when I read that script and realised that it was Guy Ritchie getting back to his roots … no-one makes films in this country quite like him."

That's true enough. Plenty of people have tried of course. His early success bred a raft of thoroughly awful bandwagon-jumpers such as Circus and Love, Honour and Obey, and tempting though it is to knock Ritchie for this, it's not really fair. As he says, "You can't blame me for films I didn't make", and the fact remains that Lock, Stock… and Snatch were the only post-Trainspotting Brit films that could hold their own against Hollywood.

And not just here either: in America even his star-less debut played in multiplexes alongside The Matrix. "I remember being impressed by it," says Joel Silver, producer of the Matrix trilogy and now RocknRolla. "The Wachowski brothers had gone to great lengths to create the visuals for The Matrix and then I saw that Guy had covered similar ground with a movie that probably cost the same as the catering budget for our movie."

Idris Elba, who plays Mumbles in RocknRolla, reckons Ritchie's films are "hugely celebrated in America. He is the equivalent to Tarantino in a way. And he doesn't water them down for the American market. If (the audience] don't know what a geezer is, they'll look it up."

However, Snatch may have earned back its budget many times over in the US, but that was eight years ago and in the interim Ritchie's cinematic stock appears to have fallen, with Warner Bros president Alan Horn telling the LA Times recently that the studio might not give RocknRolla a big push in the US because it's "very English" and "not broadly commercial".

Silver is optimistic: "I hope it gets as many theatres as I think it needs, but it would be a good step to do really well here (in the UK] first."

That seems likely, since RocknRolla delivers exactly what it promises on the tin. It's also worth remembering that even if it doesn't "perform" Stateside, Ritchie is by no means out of the game. The Sherlock Holmes film he's about to start will actually be his first proper big-budget studio feature. Is there a reason he didn't capitalise on his first flush of success by doing one of those earlier?

"I didn't want to," he says. "The truth is, I made rather a lot of money with those first two films, so I was lucky enough to sit back and think about things for a little while. That's one of the reasons why I feel more focused. Now I feel like it's time to get off my butt and manifest some things."

• RocknRolla is out today and is reviewed here