Sherlock s02e00 Episode Script

And mark it.
B marker.
We're just excited to be back.
Genuinely, properly, thinking, "Well, look, everybody loves it, we know that everybody loves it.
" And it's a different feeling, because the first time we did it, nobody cared or knew about us.
It was a surprise, the level of response, the positive response we got was a real wonderful surprise, and just utter confirmation that the hard work had paid off.
And, yeah, it's been a thrill.
The amount of millions of people in this country who watched it and who raved about it, and the amount of critics who raved about it, and then internationally how well it did.
This has become such an enormous international hit it's sort of preposterous.
It's our vanity project, it's our hobby, and everybody's joined in.
It's certainly changed from this series from the last series.
Last series, nobody really knew who Benedict was, he wasn't a household name.
It's a very different world this time.
You know, if we're outside 221, there's a whole row of people just standing there.
Now that I look at Benedict and Martin capering around on set, I think, "Those are famous images.
"This room that we're in, 221B Baker Street, is incredibly famous, "those two men are now so famous throughout the world in those roles.
" It's a very sudden, very big change.
It's nerve-wracking, when you're a hit, to keep the quality going, but I think you therefore try even harder and push it even further.
We're tackling the three biggest stories in the canon, well, the ones that have the most amount of resonance when people mention Sherlock Holmes.
Let's do the three big things, and the three big things are the Hound, the Woman and the Professor.
It's love, horror and thriller.
In episode one, A Scandal in Belgravia, we have to finish the swimming pool scene, obviously.
The last season ended on a cliffhanger, so nobody knew.
Hopefully what we've achieved is that you're just like, "Oh, my God," and then the story moves on quite quickly.
Say that again! I will find you and I will skin you.
What they want is to have the threat of Moriarty to remain for the rest of the series.
In A Scandal in Belgravia, which is based on A Scandal in Bohemia, he encounters the only woman in the original stories that he really pays any attention to at all.
Holmes faces one of his deadliest enemies in the shape of love, and it comes in the form of Irene Adler, who's this extraordinary dominatrix, this incredibly daring professional woman who's utterly independent, fiercely smart and very resourceful.
Oh, you're rather good.
You're not so bad.
Him meeting a sort of version of himself or someone who is his equal.
Steve immediately had this idea that she should be a dominatrix.
And so that's interesting, doing that, 'cause again you didn't want to do this cliché of a dominatrix, didn't want it to be like a sort of Ann Summers party gone wrong or something.
So we tried our best to keep it classy and fun.
Well, now, have you been wicked, Your Highness? It's not very often you're standing there in next to nothing with a leather whip in your hand, having a go at Benedict Cumberbatch.
Drop it.
I said drop it! I did say at every opportunity, "Do you need me to ease off?" And he was like, "No, go for it, go for it.
" My employer has a problem.
A matter has come to light of an extremely delicate and potentially criminal nature and in this hour of need, dear brother, your name has arisen.
In the first instance, it's actually to cover up a royal scandal, it's to try and put to bed, no pun intended, some photographs which are salacious and ruining in their content.
What do you know about this woman? Irene Adler.
And I assume this Adler woman has some compromising photographs? - You're very quick, Mr Holmes.
- Hardly a difficult deduction.
Generally, Sherlock knows he's the cleverest person in the room, and so when he meets Irene, he kind of He might not be the cleverest person in the room and that's upsetting.
And they're clearly absolutely made for each other, so that's a fascinating thing to play with.
It's a negative, in his book, it's something that is basically going to undermine his ability to do his job, to concentrate and focus and apply logic.
I like detective stories.
And detectives.
Brainy is the new sexy.
Position of the car Uh, the position of the car relative to the hiker at the time of the backfire, that and the fact that the death blow was to the back of the head, that's all you need to know.
In Hound of the Baskervilles, or, as it has now become, The Hounds of Baskerville, he comes face to face with the idea of real, deranging terror.
Maybe we should just look for whoever's got a big dog.
- Henry's right.
- What? I saw it, too.
When Sherlock thinks he has seen a gigantic hound, then he's really terrified, because he knows that he can't trust the evidence of his own eyes.
He is not above that, he's not incapable of experiencing absolute terror, and he tries to rationalise it away.
But he goes out on that moor and he sees the Hound, and he's frightened.
- What? - I saw it, too, John.
- Just Just a minute.
You saw what? - A hound.
Out there in the Hollow.
A gigantic hound.
It's the most filmed, it's the one that everyone knows I think the best and therefore I felt more of an obligation to include certain things.
There are so many huge, iconic moments that people expect.
There's a dog, there's fog, there's Dartmoor, there's stuff you'd better deliver.
Even the best versions, in the end, the dog, of course, is a fake.
And I thought, "Well, I'm not doing that.
"I've got to do something different.
" Trying to work that out almost killed me.
In fact, I took to saying that Hound wasn't a hound at all, it was a bitch.
It's based around a military institution, a military base, where strange sightings are seen and memories of things that didn't quite happen 30 years ago still kind of haunt people.
There is a Hound.
There is And it's down to Sherlock to get to the bottom of what it really is.
And Sherlock, he saw it, too.
No matter what he says.
He saw it.
In the final one, in The Reichenbach Fall, it's kind of almost the moment where he becomes a hero, really.
Up until now he's been this disquieting, dangerous, maybe potentially amoral man.
This is the one where he is faced with Moriarty.
It's a brilliant, very fast-paced thriller.
It starts by Jim going into the Tower of London, attempting to steal the Crown Jewels, which was, I have to say, one of the most fun days of filming I've ever had.
There was a sort of a soundtrack of classical music in the background, which I had to sort of dance along to.
Well, I didn't have to.
I did.
Moriarty, in a way, is what comes to define Sherlock Holmes as a hero, he realises his place in the world.
Ah, Moriarty's smart.
You can't kill an idea, can you? Not once it's made a home there.
We don't think of these as episodes, we think of them as films, we think of them as movies, 'cause they're 90 minutes long and if you just do them as episodes of a TV series, they'll seem very slow and very long.
They have to have the size and weight of a movie.
You can do whatever you want in Sherlock, there's no I think we've shown the audience that you might expect to see anything.
Well, in this one, it even goes further and further.
Series 2 has still got all the on-screen text and things like that, but there's just new ways of doing things.
- It's the title.
- What does it need a title for? Yeah, we had a lot of toys in this one.
We had Phantom cameras, which are really high-speed cameras that give you that very, very slow, slow, slow, slow motion.
You can only shoot about 17 seconds I think per go, then the whole thing has to be calmed down and put in a corner and given a cup of tea and then wound up again.
And that was the sequence where I disarm Nielson and clock him on the back of the head, having opened the safe and it explodes.
Vatican cameos.
And I had to do that incredibly quickly, but it's all sort of slowed down with this John Woo effect and the heads going whoo-whoo.
And I grab hold of the gun, disarm him and clock 'em all off, all in one move.
That was great fun to do.
Sherlock Series 2, for me, as a Special Effects Supervisor, has kept me very busy.
There's a few more bangs, a few more bullet hits, a few more atmospherics, so, yeah, this year is pretty full-on.
- Are we here? - Two streets away, but this'll do.
I've had a great deal of fun doing the stunts.
You know, me and Ben know each other reasonably well now, so I feel comfortable doing stuff with him, and so, yeah, things like the fight stuff or physical stuff.
Punch me in the face.
But I had to let him punch me, that was part of the deal this time around.
Punch you? Yes, punch me in the face.
Didn't you hear me? I always hear "punch me in the face" when you're speaking, - but it's usually subtext.
- Oh, for God's sakes.
There was no way I was not going to pass up an opportunity to even nearly punch Benedict in the face.
There's no way I was going to pass that up.
However much the stunt man might have wanted to get in there, that's my gig.
Punch me in the face.
Punch you? I said punch me in the face.
Didn't you hear me? I always hear "punch me in the face" when you're speaking, - but it's usually subtext.
- Oh, for God's sakes.
Ow! Ah! Thank you.
That was It's the only way that he would get away with it otherwise.
I think we're done now, John.
You may not remember, Sherlock, I was a soldier.
I killed people.
- You were a doctor! - I had bad days! Doing the fall in Reichenbach Fall was really exciting.
That's me.
That's me up on a roof.
That's not me jumping off the roof, but it's me jumping off a smaller roof onto a lower roof, which is about four feet, and then that cuts to me on a wire, dropping 70 feet, I think, onto a massive inflated bag.
Sher Fast.
Not terminal velocity but there's a tiny brake on it, 'cause they need to slow you down before the end so obviously if they did that the last bit of it would look weird, 'cause you'd be braking like that.
So this, it's fast, fast, fast, fast, slow.
But it's pretty bloody fast.
There's a brilliant kind of montage where Sherlock starts to describe a murder investigation.
Two men, a car, nobody else.
And basically it was so that Benedict could take her along with him and they share this I guess it's a part of the love story, if you like.
And the hiker's taking a moment, looking at the sky.
Watching the birds? Any moment now, something's going to happen.
What? The hiker's going to die.
So, Steven had written the scene which goes between the house and the field and we wanted the transitions between the two, so Paul McGuigan said to Arwel, the designer, "I want bits of the room in the field.
" We just replicated the wall of the living room here and put it on the side of a road next to the car, to start with, and then in a field, to help with those transitions, and then took it away again.
Which doesn't sound too complicated, until you're talking about a house of this scale where the one wall is four metres high by six metres wide, with a fireplace in it.
We had this huge bit of wall, just wandering down the road, going into the field, and a hydraulic bed, which just worked perfectly, I think.
There's a transition from when he's actually in bed and kind of starting to come out of this dream sequence, and he's in the field and then has to actually appear in bed.
And Sherlock's getting really, really tired, and then out of nowhere appears a bed.
Paul, the director, talked about having a bed flipping up into shot.
I did exactly that and made a bed on a pneumatic piston, which means it's a piston by using air, and I press a button and it flipped the bed.
Then he picks up a sheet, then he just lies there, and it looks like he's lying down.
And in the next shot, we're in Baker Street from the exact same shot we matched, and we pull up and we see he's back in Baker Street.
That was wonderful because I did that moment and in the rehearsal people were going, "Oh, my God!" They were watching, like, ten people just getting ecstatic about it, which is quite a rare thing, to get an immediate audience response on television.
A lot of times, people will just put it down to, "Well, they've CGI'd that.
That's easy.
" Erm, yeah, I'm upstaged by a bed, an electronic bed.
I can't believe it.
One of the things that Paul wanted to bring to it was the idea that Sherlock Holmes sees the world in an extraordinary way, so in a way it's incumbent on us to visualise the world in an extraordinary way, like Sherlock Holmes is behind the camera as well.
It's one of the best examples of the camera helping to tell the story of any television I've ever seen, actually, I think, 'cause what happens in camera I think is extraordinary on this show.
You can show the scene, a dead body lying there, and then suddenly you can do it from another point of view, or several points of view, and then you can dissect that, and you dissect it in a visual way, so that you're letting your audience understand how Sherlock thinks.
Maybe two ideas.
And then we looked at how Sherlock sees things, so we use the 5 D with the stills images to go closer into things.
And then we'll shoot the same scene but we'll shoot it from a different point of view for Sherlock, so if he does walk in the room, we shoot it from his point of view.
So that the fist time you see the scene, you'd never notice that Sherlock's actually scanning the whole place or looking.
I know exactly where I'm going.
Because I didn't want him to be going, you know, having, like, Six Million Dollar Man vision or something.
So we just wanted it to feel very natural to this character, and then explain a little bit about how he does it.
And also, you know, Benedict is fantastic at just reeling off these incredible words that Steven and Mark have given him.
- Can I have a box of matches? - I'm sorry? Or your cigarette lighter, either will do.
- I don't smoke.
- No, I know you don't, but your employer does.
The deductions are They're fantastic, they're sort of show-stoppy pieces.
They are hell to do because you However well you learn them, you have to deliver them faster than you can think.
- How? - The same way that I know the victim was an excellent sportsman, recently returned from foreign travel and that the photographs I'm looking for are in this room.
Everything just comes out as one linear thought and it's a stream of consciousness, almost.
Hmm.
It's very, very, very hard to deliver, and your mind knows the minute it's used a wrong preposition or an incorrect pronoun or an utterly wrong name, which has happened on a couple of occasions.
Heaviest oil deposit is always on the first key used, that's quite clearly a three, but after that the sequence is almost impossible to read.
I'd say from the make that it's a six-digit code.
Can't be your birthday, no disrespect, but clearly you were born in the '80s.
There's a huge deduction Sherlock has by the fireside, and I just put brackets, "Sorry, Benedict.
" Because, you know, they're monstrous.
You want me to prove it, yes? We've done some scenes on this episode where I just point the camera at Benedict and I say, "OK, there's no pressure, "but this six-page monologue, I want you to do it without any cuts.
" We're looking for a dog, yes? A great big dog.
That's your brilliant theory.
Cherchez le chien! Good.
Excellent.
Yes! Where shall we start? How about them? He thinks and talks in those moments faster than I can talk at my fastest talking moments, which is quite fast.
Look at the jumper he's wearing, hardly worn.
Clearly he's uncomfortable in it.
Maybe it's because of the material, more likely the hideous pattern.
Suggests it's a present.
Probably Christmas.
Partly because we've committed this huge heresy of updating it, we sort of want to say to everyone who knows the originals, "Look, everything else is incredibly authentic.
" In fact, you'll never see a more obsessively authentic version of Sherlock Holmes than this one because it is being motored by a couple of geeks.
There's lots and lots of nods in there that Steven and Mark wanted, and they just get so excited when they walk around the set and they see all these things.
"Oh, look, there's so-and-so, so-and-so.
" And it's like kids with toys, it's lovely.
Have you got the bartitsu? Erm, yes, now, you really stitched me up on that one.
Well, Conan Doyle made it up.
When you meet people like Steven and Mark, who kind of know it probably better than they know their own family, that's a whole other level of knowledge about a writer and their work.
This is a man who can straighten a bent poker.
The scale of the stories means that we are We've got to the death of Sherlock Holmes within six episodes, they're big stories, and the big themes of love and fear and death.
We want to see them going through the fire together.
Let me come through, please.
No, he's my friend.
And that doesn't mean that by the end of this they've reached the end of their possibilities.
These are still the formative years of Sherlock Holmes.
The most important thing about this series is not that it's updated, it's the fact that those two men are still young and they're still at the beginning of what they don't yet know is going to be a lifelong partnership.