Timing, as you may have heard, is everything. While I would never imply that a married couple would get divorced simply to publicize a movie, it can’t hurt the box office potential of Guy Ritchie’s new RocknRolla to be mentioned in every one of the far too numerous tabloid stories about his recently announced breakup with his unimonikered wife.

Guy Ritchie

Of course, it helps even more that this is a return to the kind of movie that made Ritchie’s reputation in the first place, a rambunctious crime thriller with a large cast of characters all fighting over the same treasure. In the mode of Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch, RocknRolla (the word is the Brit equivalent of “playa”) relishes every detail of the London crime scene and the international players it attracts, captured with a gleeful ear for the latest slang and a camera eager to be everywhere at once.

After the ill-considered remake of Lina Wertmuller’s Swept Away, starring the missus, the ambitious but barely released Revolver, and a TV pilot that didn’t get picked up, Ritchie is happy to be back in the good graces of critics and audiences. RocknRolla had its North American premiere last month at the Toronto International Film Festival, on the heels of a well-reviewed British opening.

“For a while there I was on the sharp end of the stick,” he told the reporters at an invitation-only press conference. “It’s nice to feel a bit of love in the house, as they say!”

Aside from a Latin American reporter who tried to bring up the subject by asking if Mrs. Ritchie had any input into the film’s eclectic soundtrack, questions about Madonna were lacking on this September morning. Perhaps any such notions were dashed by the director’s shy manner—as the British used to say, It just isn’t done.

Instead, here’s some of what Ritchie did talk about:

AV: The bad guys in RockNRolla cover a wider social strata than your previous films. Is this a reflection of your own life now that you’re a successful filmmaker?

Ritchie: I suppose the movie was inspired by the fact that London has become the new Wild West. It’s changed so much over the last 10 years. And where it’s really changed is in the upper echelons of society. So I wanted to make some kind of a humorous commentary on that. The story is an amalgamation of narratives. Ultimately I suppose the main character in this film is the environment itself, is London.

AV: The slang is so pervasive and unknown, especially to American ears. How did you try to keep it clear?

Ritchie: I suppose it’s more attitudinal than anything else. I like the fact that street speak has an attitude and a poety. In the middle classes our language becomes rather prosaic. So it’s just another element of entertainment for the narrative, it’s the language itself. I’m not sure you need to understand it specifically but rather in terms of its attitude.

AV: How did you pick the Russians to be the villains of the story?

Ritchie: It isn’t unique to one international group having vast amounts of money. There’s a vast amalgamation of international characters who have descended on London—One Hyde Park [the hugely expensive new residential building owned by the Foreign Minister of Qatar] is a very good illustration. There’s a credit crunch going on in the UK, but in the upper echelon of that culture there’s no reflection of any crunch at all—there’s still an evolution in the price of property, which is quite insane. I picked the Russians I suppose as a metaphor for foreign investment in the UK.

AV: Why are you drawn to gangster characters?

Ritchie: I think because I’ve lived in London for 40 years I’ve come in contact with all sort of nefarious characters. I don’t think it’s so much an intellectual process as it is a visceral one—for some reason I’m entertained by that world, not quite sure why that is. I suppose the film is a commentary that nefarious activity takes place at any rung on the ladder of the social spectrum. The human condition is the human condition. We’re just looking at crime from a different perspective.

AV: A lot of the movie seems to have been created in the editing room. Do you plan out all the scenes to be cross-cut in advance?

Ritchie: That’s an interesting question. Because it’s true, I don’t really know what I’m doing. But I have a sense that something can work, so I try to stick as many ideas as I can into a pot, and then I’m pretty sure that in the editing room we can make something out of that. This is where [producer] Joel [Silver] really came into his own. For a while there I was a bit lost. Then I showed him an early cut of the move, and he came up with five great ideas that were just what I was looking for, they did nothing but make the film tangibly entertaining. So it was a harmonious creative relationship in that respect. Joel let me get on with it until it was worth his getting involved, and when he did it was very useful.

AV: The end credits promise a sequel. Are you already working on one?

Ritchie: Sure. We had so much spillage over from the first story that rather than make a three-hour movie, we had to keep it to 1:40. But there was so much going on that Joel thought we should stick it into another film.

AV: And when will we see that?

Ritchie: As soon as you lot give me enough money to make it!