Filming 'The Gentlemen' Was A Nightmare For Hugh Grant, Here's Why
Working with Guy Ritchie can be both liberating and frustrating. Kind of like how it is working for Mickey Pearson.
There's a process that needs to be followed; otherwise, things go up Schitt's Creek or the Thames in this case.
Working with Madonna's ex-husband twice now, Charlie Hunnam and Hugh Grant know what it's like. According to Hunnam, he's kept his directorial process "eccentric, wonderful, and consistent," but whether or not he does it on purpose, he keeps his cast and crew on their toes. While Ritchie allows his actors to play around with their characters, he can also be really specific with what he wants at the same time. Everything needs to go through the "Ritchie filter."
So while some days can fly using the script, there are also days when the script is thrown out the window when Ritchie, all of a sudden, thinks it doesn't work after he sees it through the camera lens. This was either a really good or bad thing, especially for Hugh Grant because he had a tiny time frame to nail his scenes.
Here's how Grant's short time on The Gentlemen was a nightmare.
Buenos Tardes, Raymondo
With how complicatedly messy The Gentlemen is, who'd think that Ritchie would have had to stick to his script or else risk losing a handle on the plot. This is not the case in the slightest. Ritchie had this story carefully planned in his head for years.
It's a film that has about a million subplots and layers going at once, yet they're all connected in some way. The main plot follows Matthew McConaughey's Mickey Pearson, king of London's "sticky bush" empire, his wife Rosalind, and Pearson's right-hand man, Raymond, who carries out any insidious deed Pearson needs doing. Outside that story bubble is Fletcher, Hugh Grant's character and a private investigator hired by Big Dave, a tabloid editor who Pearson snubs at the film's beginning.
After his investigation, Fletcher (Easter egg: his first name's Peter) compiles all of his findings on Pearson into a screenplay called Bush, which he intends to sell to Miramax (the same studio that made The Gentlemen) unless he can blackmail Raymond with it for 20 million pounds. Fletcher, therefore, narrates the entire film as he tells Raymond what he found. But the real twist is that Raymond had been investigating Fletcher all along as he was investigating Pearson. So he knew everything apart from the Russian guys trying to come and kill them, but even that was handled by Coach and his group of amateur MMA fighters, The Toddlers.
In the end, all the loose ends are gone, Raymond carts off Fletcher, and Pearson doesn't sell his sticky bush empire.
But just like his own character, Grant had to stay on his toes filming his scenes because he had to shoot over 40 pages of dialogue in the four to five days they allocated for him to shoot Fletcher's monologue-heavy scenes.
To help him remember his lines, which are some of the best in the film ("Yes, mummy." "Just pay up and watch me recede into the sunset blowing kisses, yes?"), he made himself a little cheat sheet. Remember, he basically narrates the entire film.
But the night before he was scheduled to shoot, his car was broken into, and the thieves stole his script and his cheat sheet, leaving him with virtually nothing to go by concerning his lines.
But we don't really know how much his script or his cheat sheet would have helped him anyway with the way Ritchie works.
Grant Doesn't Think Ritchie Even Have A Concrete Script
This was Grant's second time working with Ritchie (they worked together on The Man from U.N.C.L.E.), so he had to know the director's maddening process.
Ritchie pushed Grant to go for the role even though he was hesitant about playing "this guy completely from the other side of the tracks with a full-on London accent." But he drew inspiration for the character from his experience of being phone hacked by reporters.
Any of the cast members who received at least some sort of script from Ritchie thought it was short. McConaughey told Express that Guy Ritchie is "very good with dialogue on the day" and can make a "three-hour movie with a 20-page script."
Grant told the Mirrorhe doesn't even think Ritchie had a script. "[Guy] directs sort of on the hoof, and I’m not entirely sure he had a script!"
"He’d turn up on the day and say, 'So what are we filming today?' and someone would say 'Well, we’re doing this scene?' And he’d take a look at it on the monitor, and there was I, emoting and doing my best, long speeches which I’d carefully learned, and he’d go 'Yeah, I don’t like any of that. Alright, let’s re-write that.'
"And it was rather depressing, but in the end, he’s sort of right because the camera likes things which are brand new, fresh, and not pre-rehearsed, so the whole thing is slightly improvised on the day."
Hunnam said it was extraordinary watching Grant film his lines, given the circumstances. "It's remarkable, right? He brought the thunder, as they say." Grant kept it humble, even though Ritchie put him through the wringer more than anyone else on set. It was all worth it for one film, or is it technically two films? The Gentlemen is too meta we don't even really know. You definitely have to smoke that sticky bush to understand it.
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