Robert Crampton talks to Mr Madonna
He is simply not quite what you expect. Not the posh public schoolboy turned geezer-bloke, and not truly the macho man, despite his interest in karate, hunting, and shooting gangster movies. Robert Crampton talks to Mr Madonna about super-string theory and life with the missus.
The brutal truth about Guy Ritchie is that he is interesting, mostly, because of who he’s married to. This causes a bit of internal tension when you meet him. Your inner voice is saying, “How soon is it OK to ask about his wife?”, while your actual, heard voice is saying something like, “So, let’s start by talking about your new film.”
Ritchie must be aware of this. Perhaps that’s why he looks nervous, hunted even. Or maybe he’s shy. Certainly, he hasn’t given many interviews over the past few years. But then, since Snatch, his second film five years ago, he hasn’t had much to publicise, only the much derided Swept Away, which starred his wife. “I don’t think it’s a great film but I don’t think it’s a bad film,” he says. “We were due the pair of us for something of a dousing.”
Back in July, standing before a small audience of journalists and film people who had just watched a 15-minute montage of clips of his new, fourth film in a screening room in Soho, Ritchie looked awkward. His attendance at several expensive schools is well known, but none of them made him either smooth or articulate.
Perhaps he was embarrassed because the film wasn’t yet finished, though the excerpts (guns, blood, casino chips being thrown in slow motion) gave the impression that Revolver is a return to the territory of colour-soaked violence on which he made his name with Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels in 1998.
Whether it’s a return to the same level of form as that film I can’t say. There wasn’t a lot of humour in it, though. Also, Ritchie said the film was late because “I kept arsing around [with it] because, conceptually, there’s so much room to manipulate. I kept experimenting.” That doesn’t sound promising.
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That remark, with its mixture of the demotic and the overblown, is typical of Ritchie’s peculiar mode of speech. He’s very fond of the verbs “manifest”, “transpire” and “warrant”. He makes bold, quasi-epigrammatic statements, such as, “Social evolution means there will eventually be no such thing as an Englishman.” And he has the autodidact’s habit of overanalysing. For instance, I ask him if it’s significant that he is so keen, exclusively so, as far as I can judge, on very male pursuits. “I’m not sure what ‘very male’ means,” he says earnestly, brows knitting.
Well, hunting, I say, and shooting and karate and making films about gangsters… “That’s the disposition, I suppose,” he says at length, “that I was born with. The fact is, I like chap stuff.”
Ritchie’s questing, complicating, long-winded verbal style is revealing. His formal education was not a success, due in part to his (then undiagnosed) dyslexia. “I detested school,” he says, making no distinction between the ten, state and private, he attended, leaving the last one at 15 with one GCSE. “It was usually to do with learning difficulties, and it was only at the latter stage I became a truculent pain in the arse.” He is 36 now, and has employed a tutor at home to fill in the gaps left by his lack of schooling. “For a number of years I had a man who informed me of the classical body of wisdom.”
Obviously (rather like his wife) he wants to be taken seriously as a person of intellectual substance. In among the gunshots in his new film, there are quotes from, inter alia, Julius Caesar and Machiavelli. Clearly there’s some sort of concept to the film, but I don’t know what it is. I’m not sure that Ritchie knows, either. “It’s based on the formula of the con,” he says, “and I suppose it’s about trying to manifest that formula, which transpired to be much trickier than I had previously imagined it to have been.”
After the screening, the two of us talked at the Charlotte Street Hotel. Apart from who he’s married to, the other thing people know (or think they know) about Guy Ritchie is that he’s pretending to be something he’s not, that he’s a public schoolboy who decided to slum it with a Mockney accent and an adopted geezer persona. That’s what I thought before I met him. After an hour in his company, however, it seemed to me that this view of Ritchie isn’t entirely fair. He doesn’t play the hard man at all. His voice isn’t really Mockney, it is recognisably middle class. He has a London accent, but then he is a Londoner, albeit one from Fulham who now lives in Knightsbridge (when not in Los Angeles or on his broad acres in Wiltshire). He attended boarding schools in the West Country, but also state schools in the capital. “London is a melting-pot of race and class,” he argues. “You can’t wag the class finger in the way you could 30 years ago.”
I ask why he refers to his wife as “the missus” and “a top bird” and he says, “It’s kitsch. I’d like to think I’m taking the piss. It’s obvious what I am. I am a middle-class lad who has been exposed to various aspects of the English class system. I happen to be in the middle, but the bottom end interests me and the top end interests me because that’s where the characters are. My home-grown stuff is not full of characters.” That sells his family a little short, surely, given that his father was an advertising executive (who made the celebrated Hamlet commercials), his mother was a model, his stepfather a baronet with an ancestral pile in Shropshire (where Ritchie lived between the ages of 6 and 11), and his stepmother the voluble Tory activist and Michael Portillo pal Shireen Ritchie. That’s hardly middle-class humdrummery as most of us know it.
In addition, his mother had divorced twice before he was a teenager and he’d been sent away to school at six. “It seems f****** stupid to send your kid away at the age of six. I wouldn’t do that with my own kid.”
I asked if he gets on well with his mother. “Not fantastically well.” So the intimacy is with his father? (He went to live with his father in Fulham after his mother’s divorce from her second husband, the one with the stately home). “Not predominantly, no.” So, with neither of them?
“I’d like to think I’m as warm and intimate with the pair of them.” An ambiguous answer if ever there were one. “I can’t grumble about my childhood,” he says, anxious, I think, not to be seen as a whinger. “I don’t think it was any more tumultuous than your average middle-class boy.”
I should have asked about Madonna at that point, but instead I thought it polite to talk a little about the Kabbalah, about which Ritchie is making a documentary. This proves to be the least fruitful part of the interview, partly because Ritchie’s sentences become even more opaque, and partly because my knowledge of (and, I have to say, interest in) this body of medieval Jewish mysticism currently occupying various celebrities is vanishingly close to nonexistent.
“I’m cautious to answer certain questions because it’s nothing that can be articulated simply,” he says. “So many people think they know what Kabbalah is. I don’t know what Kabbalah is.”
I ask what his involvement is on a day-to-day basis. “I’m not sure that Kabbalah means you need to do something different on a daily basis.” He does not pray or meditate or go to meetings. Instead, it seems that he reads, and ponders. He seems most drawn to the way the Kabbalah has influenced other, more mainstream systems of thought. “I don’t know what you know about super-string theory,” he says, “but there isn’t such a thing as a fact… Kabbalah consistently makes you ask questions and encourages thought.”
Given that his interest is primarily academic, why not just study this stuff, I ask, why become a follower? “What’s the difference?” Well, I’m interested in Christianity, I say, but I don’t go to church, whereas there was a picture of you in a white suit, in Tel Aviv, I think, being given the bumps on your birthday by a bunch of other people in white suits, and I thought, that’s a funny thing for an Englishman to be doing. “I’m not quite sure what an Englishman is,” he says. Well, traditionally, I say, we are reserved and sceptical, the English, and indeed, a lot of the humour in your first two films was based on these national characteristics, so how did you…? “How did I end up getting the bumps in Israel on my birthday?” he interrupts. In a white suit, yes. “It’s a fair question and one that warrants a fair answer… I’m an Englishman like yourself and I fancy the idea that I’m sceptical and suspicious, and I like to think that I haven’t had my pants pulled down. Maybe at some point I have had my pants pulled down.”
Eventually, we approach the subject of his marriage. He’d talked about still having some of the same “chums” he used to do karate with when he was seven, about how he loved the democracy of the pub, listening to the “poetry of a few paddies laying bricks”. I say that must form quite a contrast with his otherwise stellar social life, dinner with Bill Clinton and the like. “I’m not sure what a stellar social life is,” he answers, in by now familiar fashion. Having dinner with very famous people, I say. “I’m not sure what ‘having dinner with very famous people’ entails,” he says, “exactly what does it all mean in terms of, all of it, if you know what I mean?” No, I don’t really, I say, getting a little exasperated. Having dinner with a very famous person isn’t a complicated proposition. You’re sitting there eating some food and the person you’re eating it with is known to lots of other people.
“Yeah, but who’s very famous?” he asks. “Is Jeremy Clarkson? Is George Bush?” Well, obviously George Bush is more famous than Jeremy Clarkson, I say, and if you’re married to Madonna and you’re only having dinner with Jeremy Clarkson, that’s pathetic. He laughs. “That’s my point. I don’t know who is very famous and who is not.”
His wife’s fame doesn’t trouble him, beyond “making it difficult to go on holiday”. The “money issue” hasn’t been an issue because, “I’ve never been particularly financially motivated, and incidentally neither has she. Other than the fact that I like a country house, I can’t think of anything I’d want to spend my money on.”
They go to pubs a lot, he says, because he likes them and because, “You never have a paparazzi issue if you go to the pub.” They argue a bit, he says, “normal man and wife stuff. Relationships are about eating humble pie. We are not unique. We’re quite volatile as individuals, but that doesn’t work exponentially when we are together.”
Will they have more children? (His stepdaughter Lourdes is 8, his son Rocco, 5.) “I’d like to think we would.” He’d like more? “Yes, I would. I love it. I love fatherhood. I could bang on about kids for ever.”
Had he been a Madonna fan before they met? (at a dinner party given by Trudi Styler, Sting’s wife, seven years ago). “I think I’d got Erotica,” he sniggers. How come he fell for her? “She is a manifester.” A what? “She has an idea and can then manifest that idea.” Make things happen? “Yeah.” But lots of people are like that. “No, they’re not. The world is divided between those that waffle and those that do.” And finally (I should have got on to this a lot earlier, all his hesitancy was falling away. It turned out he was much more comfortable talking about his wife than either his work, his background, or his beliefs), what does he think Madonna saw in him? “Well… genius,” he says.
Careful with the irony, I say, it doesn’t translate into print. “No, I know.” His brow furrows once more and he comes up with another complicated and yet also, on this occasion, cogent and I think revealing sentence. “I think she likes the fact that I’m thinking,” he says, “or I like to think that I’m thinking, and I think she likes to think that I’m thinking.”
Source: Times Online