How to Be So Creative It Feels ILLEGAL (No Overthinking Needed) | Guy Ritchie

You must be the master of your own kingdom. As long as you enjoy your job, then it's not work. If you don't let your mind get in the way too much, then things seem to sort of run smoothly.

Need motivation? Watch a top 10 with Believe Nation. What's up, it's Evan. My one word is believe, and I believe in you. I believe you have an amazing gift inside you that I want to see explode out onto the world. So let's get your motivation to a 10 and get you believing in you. Grab a snack and chew on Learn today's lessons from a man who went from being dyslexic and expelled from high school at age 15 to becoming a filmmaker and creating films like Sherlock Holmes and Snatch. He's Guy Ritchie, and here's my take on his top 10 rules of success. Enjoy! Alright, let's kick things off with rule #1, my personal favorite: Own the game.

If you don't own something, you're not the boss. You have to take full responsibility for everything that you do. Why be subservient? You must be the master of your own kingdom. I feel you. Makes a lot of sense. You've got to own that. You can't just walk into things with your eyes half open. You'll walk into things with your eyes fully open. You got to know what you're getting into. You have to take possession of your life. Is this a thought process that you have to constantly reaffirm, or is this something that you do? It's exactly that. It's exactly that. You drift on this point. Right. And it is whatever form of meditation or mantra that you decide to espouse, there needs to be some period in your day where you remember that there's a world out there trying to tell you who you are, and there's a world in here that's trying to tell you who you are. Now, where do you want to put your eggs? Because the world outside is very noisy and very tempting and has all the razzmatazz, has all the tinsel and all the glitter. It's got all the toys. But that's because you don't think you're enough in the first place. Ah, you don't think you're enough in the first place. The whole idea of the world to sell you stuff is, first of all, they have to make you feel bad about yourself, less than in some way. And I don't resent this system, by the way. It is the system. But what's the expression about? Don't hate the player, hate the game. Don't hate the game. Love the game because you're in it, mate. So own the game, accept the rules, and move on into the rules. So the world will try and tell you who you are, and you have to tell yourself who you are. And there's this ongoing battle. And somehow there needs to be a reconciliation between the two. But in the end, you've got to have all the eggs in your basket.

Rule number 2 is survive failure.

I made a film called Swept Away, which I got annihilated for. And then I did Revolver, which I got— that was the second barrel. The first barrel, they took me out with Swept Away, and then the second barrel, Revolver. And I tell you, that was nearly the end of my career. Well, I was naive, and part of the process about becoming a filmmaker is find out how naive you are. So, I mean, I love Revolver. However, I do appreciate it's relatively esoteric to understand. And I like Swept Away. So I don't regret either of them. But if you were the sort of— the thing is, is who knows what's the best way to play your cards? I have no idea, really. You play the cards that you play. And then in the end, you sort of summarize, were they played in the right place? And I'd have to say that they probably were, you know. The question is, is can you sustain confidence while you're taking a kicking? I mean, it's like— Did you? No, no, you lose your confidence. And then you start again and you try and build it up again. But, you know, that's the human story. Isn't it? I mean, it's all our stories, really.

Rule number 3: Enjoy your job.

I had a Norwegian actor with you, Kalle Henney. He was playing one of the Vikings. Yeah, he's a big guy. Yes. He said you're the nicest person on set, and as a director too, you're so nice. So how do you keep your cool all the time when you have all these, you know, all these people that you have to tell what to do? Well, I've got a lot of people to keep my cool for. For me, really. I think as long as you enjoy your job, then it's not work. So I don't find it particularly taxing doing my job. And I'm there for— we were there for 5 months or whatever it was we were making this movie for. So I think if you lose your temper once, you're likely to lose it twice. But I'd rather enjoy my day So I make a conscious effort to have a positive mental attitude. And then that picks up momentum, you know? And then you just gotta set a tone and then you stick to that tone.

Rule number 4, realize your own value.

So there's a father, he has 2 sons, an older son, a younger son. And he says to them, who wants to spend their inheritance? The younger son says, me, Dad, I'll go and spend it. And the younger son takes all the dough and he runs off and sniffs Kokov's stripper's tits for a number of years until he realizes, this is getting pretty boring and I'm in a lot of trouble. He ends up feeding, throwing food to pigs. That's his job. And he can't even eat the food that he gives to the pigs, at which point he says, Dad, will you take me back? Dad then goes to— they don't meet. This somehow happens not through telephones, it just happens. At which point Dad goes to the fatty calf, says kill the fatty calf. Older son says, hold on, Dad, what's going on? I've stayed with you since the beginning. I've been loyal to you. And I hear the stories of my younger brother coming back who's been sniffing coke off strippers' tits for the last, God knows how many years. And you're prepared to kill the fatty calf? What's the SP, Dad? I want to know the story. He says, you're right, son. Don't worry about that. You take a little side, a little step to the side. You'll always be with me. You're a good boy. At which point he goes out to meet the prodigal son, the wasteful son. The wasteful son returns and he says, you were lost and now you're found. That's the end of the story. It's quite hard to make sense of that in a literal sense. You go, oh, Dad was a bit unfair. He should have been kind to the oldest son because he never ran off and did anything. But the essence of the story is that you are the father. You are enough. Your older son is your intellect. He says, oh, don't do this, don't do that. He's trying to reconcile, make sense of a prosaic and material world. The younger son, being the wild, feral entity that he is, wants to go out in the world and find out what it's all about. So in his recklessness and sense of adventure, he finds that he can't escape himself, so he has to return to himself, and at which point he has to accept who he is, which point the intellect is left out of the equation pretty much as the older brother, because he can't understand the significance of the journey of the Wasteful brother. In the end, you have to leave yourself to understand the value of yourself. You have to lose stuff before you realize that all the stuff that you're losing is ephemeral and transitory. It's not yours. You're enough. You're always enough. But you've got to somehow prostitute yourself before you realize your own value. That is the essence of all stories.

Rule number 5: Always commit fully. Do you have moments on the set, even as you've done it 3, 4 times now, movies with budgets like this, where you look around and you think back to the days on Lock, Stock, where you look around and you say, "How did Lock, Stock take me here?" Yes and no.

It's a funny thing because zeros, some terribly clever person explained zeros are zeros because they ultimately amount to zero. And there's some truth in that. That a creative job is a creative job. And I think you probably spend as much time on a job that costs $10,000 as you do on a job that costs $10 million. Because it's just— you commit to the job, and once you've committed to it, the zeros are irrelevant. And I still find that now. So I'm not intimidated by zeros, funny enough. I probably would be when it comes to, you know, lots of people looking at you. The more people that you're having an interview in front of becomes intimidating. But money and films, it's not intimidating.

Rule number 6: Be your own audience.

The film I pitched, I think, was not the film we ended up with. We have a theory on this that films pretty much set their own pace at a certain point. My job is to steer the head of the tiger. And after a couple of weeks, you start feeling out out what the nature of it is, and then it tells you what it's going to be. So the first film we shot was 3.5 hours long, and then halfway through it, I fell asleep, um, and I realized I had to do some work.

And that wasn't one of my scenes, just, uh, I had a Cliff Note in there.

And so I realized there's a bit of work that needed to be done, and, um, inevitably ended up being almost half that time. And because of that, it, it does take on an energy, but that energy was really is there to sustain my interest as much as it is anyone else's. I know if I'm entertained, then I suspect other people will be. There's nothing worse than watching a film going, "Ooh, that's a good scene, but I don't care." And there was a little bit of that that went on, so we truncated it, and then bish, bash, bosh, wonky donkey, we got it working.

Rule number 7: Only do things you're interested in.

If there is a script that's unauthorized biopic, there's a slew of them happening right now, is that something that people can bring as a director? Do you bring it to a film I can only get excited by things I can get excited by, and really I think that takes place unconsciously. So if someone went King Arthur, it depends when they're gonna catch me, but if it's King Arthur and I've just seen a commercial or some incarnation in this genre, you go, oh, there's bits of that I quite like, and I think I could do a job on that. That's really what happens. So by the time this came out, a few people had been talking about King Arthur. I was a big fan of King Arthur. I saw a couple of things and went, "Oh, right. If I can do that, that, that, that and create the tone, then we're off to the races, and I think I can do a job with that." Rule number 8: Get your mind out of the way. In sport, as soon as you start thinking about what it is that you're doing, all goes tits up. But if you don't let your mind get in the way too much, then— things seem to sort of run smoothly. And I think the creative process is very much like that. Initially, you need to sort of define what your creative barriers are going to be, and then you've just got to forget it. And then intuitively let it roll, so to speak.

Rule number 9, find your creative process.

I was in the theater last night, and I was freaking out when he finally takes that sword and does the slow-mo scenes taking down the bad guys. I'm just curious, as a filmmaker, how that is filmed. What he looks like when he's shooting it? Are you going around him in like a 360? How do you shoot those moments?

Yeah, I mean, that scene particularly was— I walked into that with my eyes blind because I wasn't really sure exactly what I was going to do once he pulled the sword. We had all sorts of different ideas about what was going to happen. But the truth was, everything that we'd come up with before, you know, it wasn't really working. So I cobbled it together bit by bit. which I do in quite a lot of my filmmaking— is that you have an idea of what's going to work. You're just not sure exactly what's going to work. So you throw enough energy, give it enough information, and something— stick it in the oven— and something always comes out. So it was really sort of an amalgam of ideas. And then, like I say, you sort of sieve them. And then really these things, they make themselves. My job is to sort of be a bit of a chef and try and get the components in the Yeah, in English there's a lot of metaphors going on there.

So, and rule number 10, the last one before the bonus clip, is have fun.

What was the funniest kind of moment on set? And I feel like Charlie was the, like, the goofball on set, but like, if, like, who was where? Yeah, Charlie, over to you.

Oh, thank you very much. I'm not actually the goofball. I tend to be very, very earnest and serious about my process with acting, and Guy recognized this very early, and I think it made him quite nervous. And he said, "All right, sunshine, that's this whatever you're doing, Daniel Day-Lewis impersonation or whatever it is, you can put that to the side, 'cause we have to have fun every day, and if we're having fun and making each other laugh, then the audience will have fun and we'll be making them laugh." So that was his main direction to me, was just stop taking yourself so seriously and have a bit of fun.

The Random Guy Richie Gieser Name Generator is a unique physical characteristic about yourself and your dad's first name. Now, I'll give you mine. I get trigger finger, right? It's weird. Wake up with a finger down like that every morning. And my dad's called Will, so I'm finger trigger Will. Now, Charlie went with 12-inch Billy. Yeah. Yeah. That was predictable and silly. I was just going to call myself massive fucking dick. John. No, that wrong. Sorry. Yeah, but that's— he went 12-inch Billy, so you can't both— you can't both have the same physical characteristic. Or if you do, you're on the same— we're on the same frequency. Clearly, clearly quite a childish one. So you have to have another one because I won't be able to play. All right, okay. Something else you got? Big ear? Have you got— what's your ear? Uh, a bit collie by ears. Perfect. All right, so let's go. So we go collie-eared And then I find my dad's Christian poor name. No, no, just his first name. Oh, John. Or Vivian, is it?

John Vivian.

John Vivian, yeah. Let's go for a Vivian, I quite like Vivian. Collier Vivian. Well, mate, Collier, John Collier. John Collier. Wow, that's, yeah. It sounds a bit sort of boring now. It's not as good as Bullet Tooth Tony, is it? Come on, we can do better than this. Yeah, come on. You've got a beard, go with that. Go with stubble, stubble-faced John. There you go, that's poo. Do you know what I do have? What do you have? I have different colored eyes. Brilliant, all right. One's green, one's brown. Right, blue-brown John. Not bad. Blue-brown Vivienne, because that means you wouldn't know if it's a woman or a man. I quite like that. All right, I quite like that. Blue Brown Vivian. Blue Brown Vivian. Vivian. Blue Brown Vivian. There you go. I prefer Massive Fuck John myself.

Now I've got a special bonus Guy Ritchie clip on challenging yourself, but before that, my question of the day. I want to have a little bit of fun with you guys. Go back to the last clip, rule number 10, and have fun. I want to know what your geezer name would be. Leave it down in the comments below. I'm excited to to see what you have to say. Thank you guys so much for watching. I believe in you. I hope you continue to believe in yourself and whatever your one word is. Much love. I'll see you soon. And enjoy the bonus clip.

I've sort of built up a momentum of enjoying challenges which previously I would have found too intimidating. And I've sort of built up a bit of— Directing is mostly about confidence. And I built up sort of a confidence that, "Oh, I don't know how to do that genre. Can I have a go at that genre? I don't know how to do that genre. Can I have a go at that genre?" And that's really what's happened because I could, you know, I was weaned on urban London small gangster stuff, and I was comfortable in that world, and to try and get out of that is hard, and, you know, with the Sherlock, what happened was someone presented I said, because I was being too fussy about what I was trying to do, I thought, "Hold on, my mind's getting in the way here too much." And I said, "The next script that turns up on my desk, I'm gonna make it." And the next script that turned up was Sherlock Holmes. So I thought, "Oh, how is this gonna— How much of a challenge is this gonna provide?" I did like Sherlock Holmes as a kid, which was advantageous, but it was a completely new world for me. But after I made that, I could see the correlations between that which I was familiar with and how much you could do that was unfamiliar but was exciting and you didn't overstretch. And then, well, I thought after I did that, I thought, well, why don't we take a sojourn into the '60s with Man from UNCLE? And now, you know, you feel quite confident there and then, well, why not now go back to the 8th century and have a go at King Arthur? So, as I say, that's really confidence. Raise your standard. Apple, at the core, its core value is that we believe that people with passion can change the world for the better. Not one drop of my self-worth depends on your acceptance of me. I don't ever give up. I'd have to be dead or completely incapacitated.

Hey, Believe Nation, if you want to see my all-time favorite top 10 rules of success, I have a very special secret video for you. These are the individual clips that I have personally learned the most from and applied to my life and my business. Check the link in the description for details.