In The Grey Director Guy Ritchie Talks Raising The Stakes In Latest Spy Thriller: 'It's An Odd Dynamic'

Guy Ritchie is upping the ante for his newly released spy thriller, In The Grey. Ritchie is an experienced filmmaker who has directed many films across several genres. His filmography includes mysteries such as the Robert Downey Jr-led Sherlock Holmes films, a fantasy movie with King Arthur: Legend of the Sword, a war movie with The Covenant, and a musical with the live-action Aladdin.

However, his early films, like Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch, established himself as a filmmaker who excelled in directing engaging crime and spy action thrillers. He returned to the genre many times, with films like RocknRolla, The Man from U.N.C.L.E, The Gentlemen, and Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre.

His latest film, In The Grey, stars Jake Gyllenhaal and Henry Cavill as a pair of extraction specialists who are hired to retrieve a billion-dollar debt from a dangerous man. The movie also stars Eiza González, Rosamund Pike, Carlos Bardem, and Fisher Stevens. Ritchie reunites with several cast members, like Gyllenhaal, who starred in The Covenant, and Cavill and González, who starred in The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare.

In The Grey is another spy thriller from Ritchie, who continues to find different stories to explore within this genre. He recently shared how he continues to change things up, and how he raised the stakes for his characters in his latest film.

Guy Ritchie Is Finding New Stories To Tell Within The Spy Thriller Genre

Jake Gyllenhaal & Henry Cavill watching Eiza Gonzalez in In The Grey

Spy thrillers are often highly engaging films with explosive action and surprising twists. However, they still need to have stories that feel fresh to avoid being stale. Ritchie has found new stories to tell within this genre by exploring new characters within different settings.

For example, The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare depicts an intriguing story during World War II and Operation Fortune is set in modern day and follows a team on an assignment for the British government. Speaking with ScreenRant, Ritchie revealed why he chooses new stories within this genre, and why he settled on the world for In The Grey.

I’m trying to entertain myself as much as I am trying to entertain an audience. This world I stumbled into, which I found to be provocative and interesting, is one where there’s an illegal world behind the legal world. You’ve got legally trained people exercising their skills in a world of moral ambiguity, and that became good nutrition for a story. That’s principally why I was interested in this particular story.

For Ritchie, Stakes Can Be High, Even If They’re More Personal

Henry Cavill is looking to the side in In the Grey

In In The Grey, Cavill and Gyllenhaal’s characters are in a dangerous situation while trying to obtain a large sum of money. It’s high stakes, but Ritchie explains that stakes can often feel large, even if they’re small. He states that “personal stakes can mean more than global stakes sometimes,” and movies don’t need to have world-ending problems to make the stakes feel significant.

That’s quite an interesting question, actually, because stakes can be very small. You can have global stakes, but then you can have personal stakes.

It’s strange, because you’ll be surprised by how personal stakes can mean more than global stakes sometimes, as long as the audience can relate to those personal stakes. It’s a bit like public speaking. Public speaking in front of 50 people is really the same as speaking in front of 50,000 people. It’s a weird thing, as you would’ve thought there would be an exponential challenge when it came to numbers. But funny enough, there isn’t.

Movie stakes operate in a very similar way. You think you need to turn up the volume on the stakes, and in some films, you need that. Even if it’s a hyperbole in order to illustrate a point, you go, “The world will end!” But then you find out someone’s cat’s going to die, and sometimes the cat dying can have more stakes to it than the world dying. It’s an odd dynamic about the human condition.

So, it just depends on how you can manipulate those stakes into a world that feels plausible and appropriate.

As Ritchie explains, some personal stakes can feel just as massive as something that could affect the whole world. In The Grey is currently in theaters, and audiences can see how the director raises the stakes in his latest film.