Exclusive Interview: Sherlock Holmes and X-Men Writer Simon Kinberg (Part 1)

Exclusive Interview: Sherlock Holmes and X-Men
Writer Simon Kinberg (Part 1)

Share on Facebook posted 10-28-09 by John Freeman Gill

The rare breed of Hollywood screenwriters who perform production rewrites on big-budget movies are not terribly different from the gifted mutants in the popular X-Men films. Each has his own peculiar superpower: Some are great at punching up action; others are whizzes at making a scene funnier; still others are known for incisive dialogue. Simon Kinberg, a writer on the upcoming Robert Downey Jr. version of Sherlock Holmes and a producer on the much-anticipated X-Men: First Class, is that rarest of production-rewrite scribes: an action specialist with a broad array of mutant screenwriting powers. Parachuting onto films at their highest-pressure, highest-cost moments, when cast and crew are mobilized and any delay can cost the studio millions, Kinberg is often called upon to write well and fast to keep Hollywood blockbusters from grinding to an expensive halt.

Since making a name for himself with 2005′s Mr. & Mrs. Smith, the Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie vehicle that began as Kinberg’s thesis project at Columbia film school, Kinberg has earned a reputation as one of Hollywood’s most reliable go-to guys for tentpole action pictures. In addition to co-writing the phenomenally successful X-Men: The Last Stand as well as Jumper, Kinberg has done uncredited work on Fantastic Four, Charlie’s Angels 2, Elektra, and A Night at the Museum 2. In our exclusive multipart interview, Kinberg talks to 30 Ninjas Editor John Freeman Gill about Sherlock Holmes, X-Men: First Class, legendary action director John Woo, and Doug Liman’s upcoming Untitled Moon Project, starring Jake Gyllenhaal.

Sherlock Holmes, Superhero

30 NINJAS: What was your charge from [director] Guy Ritchie when you were brought onto the upcoming Sherlock Holmes film?

SIMON KINBERG: I came on initially for what was an action punch-up. It was going to be a few weeks, which turned into a few months, and turned into me moving my family and living in London for a little while and working really intensely on all aspects of the script. So I ended up writing a whole heck of a lot of the movie and being the writer who wrote the shooting draft. And one of the ways I approached it in my first meeting with Guy was that actually Sherlock Holmes for his era was a superhero. You know, he was a guy with heightened powers of perception. And in every aspect, whether it’s the action world or his emotional dramatic life, those heightened powers of perception needed to be strengths or weaknesses. Same way for a superhero: their superpower is almost always a strength and weakness, even if the only weakness is that they can’t tell someone about it. So to me it was like the movie had to revolve around a guy who sees the world more clearly than the rest of us, and that is his blessing and his curse. And it’s the reason that he is neurotic and compulsive and antisocial and uncomfortable in crowds. But it’s also the reason he can tell you, from across the room, what somebody whispered to somebody else and who’s sleeping with whom. My favorite scene in the movie is not an action scene at all. The emotional story of the movie is really that Watson is getting married and that Holmes is threatened by-

30 NINJAS: “Wedding bells are breaking up this old gang of mine …”

SK: Exactly, exactly that. And there’s a scene where Holmes meets Watson’s fiancée and uses his powers of perception on her, and it’s just a man at a dinner table, and the man who is his partner, and the woman who may take his partner away. And it’s, to me, as riveting and intense as any of the explosions or the fights or the chases in the movie. It’s just this guy turning a superpower on a stranger. And it’s cool. There’s a lot of scenes in the movie of just Holmes using that superpower inside of a room, to either figure out the people inside that room, or to figure out his way out of the room.

30 NINJAS: And in that case is there resistance from her? Is it a chess game?

SK: Yeah, that’s an exact perfect way to describe it. It’s a chess game that he wins.

30 NINJAS: It’s interesting, because you’re saying, if I understand you, that here are these superpowers being turned on in a social situation, so that elucidates his character rather than just the particular case he’s working on.

SK: Right. I mean, it’s a movie where you’re writing for and working with Robert Downey Jr., Jude Law, Rachel McAdams. You know, Jude’s been nominated for two Oscars, Robert’s been nominated for two Oscars, I think Rachel’s been nominated — they’re serious, serious actors, so whether they’re in action or not in action, they’re approaching it from the place of “What is this elucidating about my character?” Everything is an expression of character, and so Sherlock Holmes is a fantastically rich character. So is Watson, actually. And so there’s not a scene in the movie that’s not some expression or deepening of the Sherlock and Watson dynamic or characters.

Robert Downey Is Irrestible

30 NINJAS: Where were you in the sequence of writers who worked on Sherlock Holmes?

SK: I was brought onto the movie last summer. My initial job was simply that the action sequences needed punching up, which means make them broader — meaning bigger — make them more interesting, and add sequences. It was written much more as a Sherlock Holmes mystery story; it was muscular and it had action sequences in it — it had chases and fights — but the action was still sort of on-the-ground action, meaning fistfights and foot chases.

30 NINJAS: I just finished watching a 1939 Basil Rathbone film, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, and those films had that element already. People think of Sherlock Holmes as an egghead, but at least in the early movie versions, those were action films for those days. The characters were shooting, they were doing fisticuffs, there were bolos being hurled around, there were murders, and Holmes was physically active.

SK: Yeah, he was, and he was in the books, too. In the stories he actually is not an egghead; he’s somebody that’s trained in various martial arts and shoots a gun. Those books in their time were genre stories.

30 NINJAS: Yes, Holmes is a real Victorian kind of oddball aesthete, who’s interested in every little thing. Science wasn’t geeky then; science was about exploration and going to the edge of what we know already.

SK: Yes, at a time when it was both a physical edge and a sort of internal, a biological edge. He was somebody that was interested in both. He knew everything about the human body and the geography of the world. They called me up and said, “Will you do a few weeks on the film?,” and I said, “Sure.” I really liked Guy Ritchie’s movies, and I loved Sherlock Holmes as a kid, and I knew that Robert Downey was playing Holmes, which was kind of irresistible.

X-Men Fundamentalism

30 NINJAS: What did Downey want for his character?

SK: He wanted to be very loyal to the books, the stories, so he was very protective of the stories and the Sherlock legacy.

30 NINJAS: But as one of the writers of X-Men: The Last Stand, you’re used to that. It’s like an X-Men geek telling you that you have to stay true to the comic book canon.

SK: Well, believe me, there’s nobody more religious in the world than a comic book fan. Nobody. I mean, there’s nobody more aggressive, there’s nobody more — it’s a religion. Probably only religious fundamentalists can approach that level of fervor, you know? I was at Comic-Con one year on a panel after X-Men: The Last Stand where somebody stood up and said, “Why did you kill Cyclops?” I was like, “I didn’t kill him.” “Yes, you did! You killed him! Why’d you kill him?” Literally, like I’d killed that person’s brother.

30 NINJAS: I’ll tell you, one of the staff members on 30 Ninjas is a comic books geek, which I am not, so I asked him what the fans would want to know about the new X-Men, and one of his questions was: “They killed Cyclops! For God’s sake, why?!”

SK: I can answer the question if you want me to answer it.

Read Part 2! Kinberg Reveals Why He Personally Murdered Cyclops in Cold Blood, As Well as More on Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law, an Over-the-Top Sherlock Action Sequence That Was Never Shot, and the Surprising Advice Legendary Action Director John Woo Gave Kinberg About Pacing an Action Film! Read it Now!