BoxOffice® Pro - December 2011

BIG PICTURE > SHERLOCK HOLMES: A GAME OF SHADOWS
DESPERATELY
SEEKING
SUSAN
Behind one lucky actor
is the woman who’s
also his producer
Susan Downey is one of the most
recognizable female producers in
Hollywood, and not just because
she shares a last name with her
husband, Robert Downey Jr. The
Illinois valedictorian moved to Los
Angeles to be a producer and
had her first big theatrical credit
on the maritime horror Ghost
Ship before she was 29. Working
for Joel Silver and Robert Zemeckis’
Dark Castle Entertainment,
Downey was quickly promoted
through the hierarchy and on
her third film with the company—Gothika,
starring recent
Oscar-winner Halle Berry—she
was romanced by co-star Robert
Downey Jr., who quickly proposed
and then publicly credited
her for turning his life—and his
career—around. While working
on Guy Ritchie’s RocknRolla, she
heard the director was shopping
around a Sherlock Holmes reboot
and got her husband a meeting
to discuss the lead role. The rest
was elementary. Or was it? Susan
Downey gives us the scoop.
Did anything surprise you about the reaction
to the first film?
It wasn’t as much surprising as it was a nice
relief. I know a lot of people were wondering
how we were going to make this and
be true to the source material—to not piss
anyone off—but at the same time justify
making a big holiday movie.
Sherlock Holmes has been widely popular
ever since Arthur Conan Doyle started
the series, but in every incarnation,
he’s different—like he’s adapting to the
different audiences of the time.
The thing with Sherlock is since its incarnation,
it’s always been serialized. There were
multiple stories, multiple movies, the TV
show. And each audience was expecting
something different based on what they
were able to achieve at the time. What we
decided to do was go back to the original
stories and take the essence of the character,
the dynamic between Holmes and Watson,
and then also take the things that Conan
Doyle didn’t necessarily put on the page, but
were things he imagined these men to be.
With today and our incredible use of special
effects and stunts, we were able to bring it
to another level while still staying true to
Conan Doyle’s vision of these guys. We felt
it had to be smart and have a great mystery
at its core, but at the same time we wanted
to make sure it wasn’t stuffy and in one
room and all just talk. I don’t think the wide
audience we were looking for would have
embraced it that way.
Is that how you came up with Sherlock
Vision?
Originally, Lionel Wigram, who was one of
the original producers, brought the project
to Warner Bros. when he was an executive
and they didn’t quite see it—they still had
the old-fashioned vision in their heads. But
when he became a producer, he brought it
to a different exec, Dan Lin, and he’d spent a
bit of money and done a graphic novel as a
mock-up. It showed a bit more of the actionadventure
hero that Lionel always imagined
him to be when he was reading the stories as
a kid. From that, it evolved. And when Guy
came onboard, we really wanted to find the
marriage between Holmes the intellectual
I N T E R V I E W
hero and Holmes the action guy. And this
Holmes-a-vision, or Holmes-pre-viz—we
called it a couple different things—that we
felt was the perfect marriage to show how
he’s always one step ahead, yet can be a man
of action and was a highly skilled martial
artist. Which was something Conan Doyle
created, it wasn’t something we made up.
With these stories being serialized, how
did that shape the way you approached
your films, like say holding back Moriarty
in the first film and now having
him in the sequel?
It’s interesting, because you don’t want to
get too ahead of yourself. We didn’t have a
bigger plan from the get-go of how we were
going to lay out the stories, but we did, I
have to admit, have it in the back of our
mind that if people embraced the first film,
we knew some of the things we then wanted
to do. In the first one, for example, we wanted
to stay in London and we wanted to just
hint at Moriarty. And we felt if we had the
opportunity to do another one, we wanted
to get Holmes on the continent and get him
to explore a bit more of Europe and Moriarty.
And if this one works, we have ideas—
not to get too far ahead of ourselves—on
what we could do to keep the characters and
the story fresh, but still deliver on the things
people have been responding to.
Tell me about casting Jared Harris as
the evil Moriarty—is it because he’s a
redhead?
It has nothing to do with that, I can assure
you. [Laughs] Moriarty is this seminal
character in literature—he’s kind of the
first super villain—and it was important
to get someone who you could completely
believe in the role. When you go through
the casting process, especially for a big studio
movie, you throw around well known
names as well as just great actors. The
concern we had with someone who was
maybe a bit more well known to the audience
is that they wouldn’t lose themselves
to the character—that the audience would
be more aware they were watching an actor
portray Moriarty. With Jared, he’s able to
completely become Moriarty, and he possesses
two qualities that were essential to
whoever was going to play the role. On the
36 BOXOFFICE PRO DECEMBER 2011