Guy Ritchie‘s films have showcased some of the most prominent movie stars globally. In his debut film, Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, Vinnie Jones and Jason Statham made their debuts, while the success of the film led to Brad Pitt joining the cast for Ritchie’s subsequent movie, Snatch, alongside Benicio del Toro and Mike Reid.
From there, Ritchie worked with his ex-wife Madonna on the critical abomination Swept Away, with Ray Liotta on Revolver, and Gerard Butler, Mark Strong and Idris Elba on RocknRolla. But how does the director keep such big cinema names in check? Well, he learnt an order-keeping system during his early days as a filmmaker.
“When we first started making music videos and short films and commercials, I found the most efficient way of making sure things got done was to fine people,” Ritchie once explained whilst discussing Snatch. “It was a humorous kind of idea, to keep a sort of jolly spirit to keeping everyone motivated and focused.”
In the video below, we see clips of Ritchie fining his cast and crew, even going so far as to call out the person who’s meant to be doing the fining. “I’m gonna fine you every day that you don’t have a sheet of fines,” he tells the poor bloke. “Okay? Ten pounds a day.”
“So I would charge people if they didn’t meet their deadlines, a fiver or a tenner,” Ritchie noted. “And that took on momentum, and it also made the day fun. And by the way, we still have a fining system that occasionally pops up on different productions now.”
The director continued, “Then it became a game because if you were caught with a phone on set, and your phone went off on set, then you really ended up in trouble. So people would be slipping phones into people’s pockets and, of course, calling them and that sort of nonsense.”
It seemed like it wasn’t just newbies that got caught out by Ritchie’s fining system, though, because we even see a clip of Jason Statham cocking up and letting his phone go off during filming. “So sorry,” he then says, “I feel fucking terrible.” A crew member comes over and brilliantly says, “What’s your name?” He replies, “Statham.”
“I imagine in the end, the fining system turned against me in the end. No matter how much I fined people, I found that they started applying the same rules to me,” Ritchie concluded. “So there were lots of booby traps. In the end, the fining system just turned into a hoax and a reason to have a laugh.”
Watch Snatch on Netflix now.
