Guy Ritchie Wrote His Best Movie By Hand On A Pile Of Napkins
Spoiler alert: the film is not "Swept Away."
Given the filmmaking tear that Guy Ritchie has been on of late (in terms of quantity, not so much quality), the notion of scribbling out screenplays on napkins isn't terribly wild. Since 2021, he's plopped four movies in theaters, with a fifth on the way in 2025 ("In the Grey" starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Henry Cavill, and, oh yeah, he's currently shooting a heist movie starring Natalie Portman). Okay, guys like Steven Spielberg and Woody Allen have worked at a similarly furious clip for stretches of their careers, but Ritchie's flurry of films is peculiar because they're the kinds of star-studded B-movies that Hollywood doesn't make anymore (at least, not for theatrical release). And he seems to be having a ball making them ... though audiences aren't exactly turning out in droves to watch them.
While Ritchie, like the vast majority of screenwriters, prefers to bang out his scripts on a computer, there was a time when he employed a less conventional approach. He wasn't as prolific at this point of his career, and there was a very good reason for this.
Guy Ritchie's writing journey, from napkins to maths books to a computer
In an interview with Alex Shin, Ritchie revealed that he has "spectacular dyslexia," which, as a young man, led him to write screenplays in a manner that, to an extent, only he could really understand. As he told Shin:
"[M]y writing, my spelling hasn't improved since I was 12. I know it's not going to improve, but there are some people who think that it's an unconscious addiction to looking like you can't spell. So, yeah. ['Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels'] was, I wrote on napkins and so on. And then I eventually wrote it in one of those sort of maths books, you know?"
If you've ever read a Quentin Tarantino screenplay, you know Ritchie is not alone in being a less-than-stellar speller. But the napkin-to-maths-books transition is certainly unique. Fortunately for his collaborators, he hired "some clever so-and-so" to put "Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels" in an industry-accepted script format, which saved Jason Flemyng and Jason Statham from having to learn their lines on misspelled graph paper or whatever. And Ritchie did everyone a huge favor by learning how to type via the popular "Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing" software.
As for the spelling aspect, that seems like a lost cause. "Actually, I type rather well," said Ritchie, "Though I spell very badly. I can belt words out without looking at computers. This is one of those things that I'm quite smug about, is that I can actually type."
Now if only he could type out a screenplay as good as "Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels" again. (Actually, Ritchie's output has been pretty solid throughout his career. And I'll go on record as an unabashed fan of "Swept Away.")