[IMG:L]The last thing director Guy Ritchie wants his fans to do, is walk into Revolver expecting the “Jason and Guy Show.” His latest collaboration with top action actor Jason Statham “ain’t light and it ain’t funny,” explains Ritchie. “There is a temptation for people to give it a brand that people are familiar with and I am desperate for that not to happen.”
Moving away from the humor and sarcasm, Ritchie unveils a psychological thriller about Jake Green (Statham), a conman and gambler just released from prison after seven years. Using an unbeatable formula at the casinos, Jake is ready to go head to head with Dorothy Macha (Ray Liotta) the man who turned him in. To complicate matters a pair of criminals [Andre Benjamin and Vincent Pastore] offer Jake protection from Dorothy and against his better judgment he accepts. Soon he realizes the only conman he really needs to worry about is in his own head.
Ritchie admits the film has been an uphill battle since the original UK release back in 2005 saying, “I found that people got so pissed off about the fact that they don’t understand it that they weren’t interested in it as a gangster movie.”
“The film is tremendously simple,” he insists. “It is simply that the only thing or entity you are battling is an eternal one. It is that voice that when you are running keeps telling you to stop just when you start getting tired. It is the ubiquitous voice that stops you from enjoying your life essentially and tricks you and seduces you…It is not more complicated than that.”
Ritchie confesses both he and Statham initially struggled with the concept as well, but when they finally got it, they wanted to run with it.
“I had a conversation with Jason, I said ‘Listen, try to get your head around this’ and he didn’t get his head around it and then he called me back two days later,” Ritchie remembers. “If you speak to him about it now, two years later, now it is his favorite film because gradually the concept percolates and when it does you go ‘Hello! This is interesting,’ because it is a ubiquitous concept that affects every aspect of your life, because there is no doubt that this conceptualized self or whatever it is that you want to call it, exists now, it exists it just depends on what you want to call it.”
To help the audience sift through Jake’s constant cat and mouse game with Dorothy, his forced servitude to the criminals protecting him and the mental battle raging within his own mind, Ritchie and his team made changes to the film prior to bringing it to the U.S. audience.
“This is a slightly different cut than the one we released a few years ago, because… I expected some people to understand what the theme was about and there weren’t many that did so we thought, well what we’ll do is put a bunch of psychiatrists at the end who could explain that it was about something.”
Further removing the film from Ritchie’s past work is a cast of new players including Benjamin, Pastore and Liotta.
“They are all guys that at some point or another I’ve seen them do something that I was attracted to and I thought they were all relatively fresh and hadn’t done this kind of a thing,” he says of casting the team. “So for all those reasons that’s really how I most conspired this collection of actors.”
Of course Ritchie “always likes working with Jason” and the two came up with a whole new look this time around.
“The funny thing about Jason is that Jason actually has hair, but he makes himself look bald,” Ritchie says with a laugh. “So I actually let his natural hair grow out!”
Revolver opens wide Dec. 7, 2007
