In any case, Ritchie's hyperverbal street dilettantes seem better suited to post-Tarantino American independent movies than to fusty British crime capers like The Long Good Friday or The Italian Job. Just as Tarantino added surf music, ebonics, and California color to Chinese gangster plots, Ritchie has Anglicized Tarantino's mid-nineties gestalt. Ritchie even subtitles one particularly slangy scene, giving viewers a hand with lines like "an Aristotle of the most ting-tong piddly in the pub" (a request for hard liquor). The movie's sepia-toned underworld and incessant existential banter bear an uncanny resemblance to Tarantino's 1992 hit Reservoir Dogs -- still the height of chic in London, where it draws sellout audiences to midnight showings. Ritchie insists he has never watched the movie to conclusion.

Indeed, he has his own surprisingly conventional ideas about cinematic success. His dream for the future: "To make movies like Jerry Bruckheimer's." One of his biggest champions: Tom Cruise, who yelled "This movie rocks!" at an L.A. screening. His favorite movie of recent vintage: Meet Joe Black, which he praises as "wonderful. So American!"

What about that old-world British reserve, that soigné cool? The social miniatures of Mike Leigh, the passion plays of Neil Jordan, the phantasmagorias of Terry Gilliam? Bollocks! says Ritchie. "What British filmmakers do you respect? Only a handful of them that are any good at all, and none of them makes any money."

Lock, Stock has benefited from an intercontinental feedback loop, wherein trumped-up reports of British-hit status (while more profitable than most domestic movies in England, the film actually opened to mixed reviews) fed U.S. ardor, which fed British buzz, and so on. "In Britain, none of those media geezers even know my name," he complains. A long line of distributors, including Miramax, passed on the movie when Ritchie initially approached them ("People were saying it was absolute shit," he admits), though the film's soundtrack -- a mix of James Brown, the Stone Roses, and Skanga -- was immediately snapped up by Madonna's Maverick label.

It wasn't until Ritchie's 27-year-old producer, Matthew Vaughn, approached his godfather, Hard Rock Cafe owner Peter Morton, that $1.6 million was raised to shoot the feature in the first place. Morton roped in additional funding from Steve Tisch (producer of Forrest Gump, Risky Business, and The Postman) and Trudie Styler (who convinced her husband, Sting, to consent to a cameo). "I had the best time of my life with these guys: drinking, carousing, just being boys," says Tisch. "It didn't stop when the camera stopped rolling. I love this 'lad' phenomenon."

So, apparently, does Ritchie. "In London, we're all killing ourselves working for nothing," says the director, relaxing in a plush suite at the Four Seasons. Before Lock, Stock, he never earned more than £5,000 from any project. A lifetime of relative poverty has helped him reorder his priorities, he says: "All I care about is putting food on my table, bringing home the bacon. I admit it. I'm utterly bourgeois."

Related:

• Archive: “Features”
• Articles by Vanessa Grigoriadis
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