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Sherlock: filming the way Holmes faked his death for The Empty Hearse.
Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman offer clues to how Sherlock faked his death as they film The Empty Hearse.
On a grey, rainy day in the middle of April, Benedict Cumberbatch put on a long, heavy coat, climbed on to the roof of Barts hospital in London, and jumped off. He had done this before, of course. Indeed, the red phone box outside the hospital is plastered with tributes mourning his character Sherlock Holmes, who appeared to jump to his death here in the last episode of the BBC series Sherlock.
Shown in January 2012, the end-of-series cliffhanger saw the detective’s reputation destroyed by his brilliant and barking-mad nemesis, the arch-villain Moriarty. Trapped on the hospital roof, Holmes was given a stark choice: die, or see the few people he really cared about die instead. He launched himself off the building as a horrified Dr John Watson – played by Martin Freeman – watched from below.
After killing off his creation in 1893, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle made his fans wait 10 years before revealing that Holmes had only faked his death, reuniting him with his friend Watson for further adventures. Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat, the creators of this new, modern-day Holmes, have made their fans wait two years to find out what happened after he appeared to hit the pavement, and this recreation of the jump will presumably explain all. In the meantime, the question that has fired up the internet is not whether he faked his death, but how.
Cumberbatch performs the fall from the side of Barts hospital on to an airbag below. Photo: Robert Viglasky
I should immediately make it clear that I don’t know the answer, and that you can read on without fear of your enjoyment being spoilt. Although I saw a sсript of the first episode – which is brilliant, and will not disappoint viewers in the 180 countries where Sherlock is now shown – the pages explaining exactly how he pulled off his vanishing trick were blanked out. As for the filming at Barts, Moffat and Gatiss were well aware it would attract attention, and they made it all deliberately confusing in order to stop spoilers appearing on the many Sherlock fan sites, or in the media.
An actor who was greatly respected but not widely known before Sherlock catapulted him to worldwide stardom, Cumberbatch is struggling with this scrutiny a little, especially while working. On the first day at Barts, he had spent quite some time hanging in a harness so that the cameras could capture him mid-fall.
Between takes, he had an umbrella to stop him getting so wet that it ruined the shot, leading to a string of 'Sherlock Poppins’ headlines when the photo appeared in the tabloids the following day. 'It means you can have a lot less fun on location,’ he says. 'Before, I might have pretended to swim while I was hanging up there, or played about more between takes, but now you’re very aware that you’re always being watched.’
Normally at a shoot like this there will be a few bystanders, people who happen to walk by and are curious to see what is going on. But the second day at Barts is gloriously sunny, and as well as the paparazzi there are about 300 fans making a day of it, standing behind crash barriers and watching avidly, even though much of the time the most exciting thing happening is the crew hosing down pavements to make them look as wet as the day before.
The crowd is too far back to hear any dialogue, but this still feels like street theatre. Gatiss appears in the hospital’s arched entrance, dressed for his role as Sherlock’s brother, Mycroft. 'Aaah!’ goes the crowd. Then the hypnotist Derren Brown makes a brief appearance, and there’s an audible intake of breath.
Almost instantly, pictures of all this appear on Twitter, along with speculation as to what it means. The producer Sue Vertue has to be constantly vigilant for spoilers, interacting with the more obsessed fans to ask them not to leak too much information. 'But mostly, they’re terribly charming and polite,’ she says. 'They’re self-policing, really.’
Among the onlookers is David Mather from Sherlockology – a fan site with a million followers across the various social media networks and more than 500,000 visitors a month, even when Sherlock isn’t on air. He knows the name of almost everyone on location that day, from Gatiss’s partner and dog to Moffat and Vertue’s children (they met at a television conference in 1996, and have been a couple ever since).
There’s also a group of fans from China, and two girls from the US and Japan who manage their long-distance relationship by meeting in London – and timing their visits to coincide with the Sherlock shooting schedules, which they find posted on fan sites.
With so many people posting their theories on how Sherlock faked his death, there are bound to be some that come close, Moffat tells me later, but that’s not the point. Conan Doyle’s Watson merely fainted when his friend appeared from the dead, then carried on with their friendship seemingly unperturbed that his friend had not only faked his death, but had failed to let him in on the secret.
Having watched his friend die, attended his funeral, and been left to mourn for two years, the contemporary Watson won’t be anywhere near as accepting. 'What people really want is to see John’s face when Sherlock turns up,’ Moffat says. 'That’s what the episode is about. And that’s what John says. “I don’t care how you did it, it’s just that you did it!” Which in real life would be your reaction.’
A 90-minute episode of Sherlock usually takes 22 days to shoot, and the packed schedules of all the main participants means that the three new shows have been made in 11-day blocks, throughout the year. By mid-July, work is well under way on episode two, so I visit the production’s main base in Wales to meet some of the team.
The studio is located in an anonymous warehouse on a dull industrial estate a few miles outside Cardiff that looks grim and cheap enough to give even the most grudging of BBC licence payers nothing to complain about. The same lack of glamour continues inside, where the general ambience has all the glitz and glitter of a staff canteen at B&Q. Cumberbatch refers to it as 'the box factory’, but says he doesn’t mind it, particularly. 'My world shrinks anyway when I’m doing this, so it doesn’t really matter where I’m doing it.’
Freeman is more forthright. 'If it were me, I would make it something a little less like a punishment block from a stalag,’ he says. 'We have a great British way don’t we? Even the poshest show on television feels like you are being punished for something when you go in there! But it’s kind of home. And I like the set, I like being in the studio, the actual working environment.’
It is, he says, the kind of role that comes along rarely in a lifetime, beautifully written, designed and shot. 'I could live to 100 and not do many things better than this.’
So when Freeman was first offered the title role in Peter Jackson’s sprawling Hobbit trilogy, he turned it down because the schedule clashed with Sherlock. It was not an easy decision, he says. 'I didn’t want to. It wasn’t me being saintly, it was Sherlock going, “No we are not moving!”’ Jackson understood, and instead moved his schedule, filming The Hobbit in blocks with breaks so that Freeman could fly back from New Zealand to play Watson.
Before shooting starts, the production designer Arwel Wyn Jones walks me round the Baker Street set. He points out details: the death mask in the bedroom that was actually cast from one of the set painters; the mocked-up photograph of Sherlock and Mycroft on the beach as children; a print showing the anatomy of the bee, because in the Conan Doyle books Holmes eventually retires and keeps bees; a periodic table because he was a chemistry graduate; and the sabre he won in a fencing contest at college. Fans send things in, too, and one or two – an early edition of Goethe’s Faust in German, for instance – have made it into the mix.
I ask Jones what he’s most proud of, and he says the wallpaper. There are whole pages on fan sites dedicated to the wallpaper in the Baker Street flat. (For the record, the design on the living room wall is by Zoffany. It’s the Navarre print in dark chocolate, yours for £104 a roll.) 'Loads of people were shaking their heads asking me if I knew what I was doing with that, and now it’s on the official Sherlock website, people have it as a background on web pages everywhere, and it’s become a kind of iconic image of the show.’
He loved the Conan Doyle stories as a child, he says, but rarely refers to them for Sherlock. 'You don’t have to,’ he smiles, 'because you have walking versions of them in Mark and Steven.’
Sitting down with Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss later, I see what he means. They are passionate about Conan Doyle, full of anecdotes about his life and praise for his writing. Both of them quote whole passages to me: bits they love, bits they’ve used, bits they’re hoping to use in the future.
They deliberately got some of the best-loved stories out of the way in the second series, and are now mining the lesser-known ones for ideas, deductions, snippets of dialogue. 'There are stories in there that have never been touched by any adaptor at all,’ Gatiss enthuses.
The idea of a contemporary version of the stories came through their conversations on the train to Cardiff when they were working on Dr Who (Moffat has been the lead writer and executive producer of the series for four years; Gatiss is also a regular writer). 'Holmes is too good to keep in Victorian London,’ Moffat explains. 'He should be living in your London, too. We extend this courtesy to James Bond without even thinking about it. Bond is a Cold War spy from the 1950s who became a commander in the Second World War, yet it doesn’t bother us that Daniel Craig is playing him in the modern day.’
So their Holmes uses contemporary technology such as smartphones to solve his mysteries. He is young and fit, while Watson is also a man of action, bored with civilian life after a tour of duty in Afghanistan and longing for adventure. These updates seemed heretical to those of us who grew up watching the Basil Rathbone films and the many subsequent TV adaptations, which invariably have Holmes as middle-aged and Watson as his bumbling sidekick.
But read the original stories – which are every bit as good as Moffat and Gatiss say – and you’ll find theirs are the more accurate. And like Conan Doyle, they know the real appeal is not just the deductions and Holmes’s sheer brilliance, but also the relationship between the two men.
'It’s not a remake or a reimagining, it’s a restoration,’ Gatiss says. 'What we’ve tried to do is get back to the relationship we read in those books as kids, where Sherlock is always gently taking the piss out of Dr Watson who is actually cleverer than he’s often depicted, but still not that bright when compared to him. We took pains to make Martin’s version a serious grown-up, and it pays dividends. It also makes Sherlock funnier for being more like a kid.’
'We can’t say the things we really want to say about people in real life,’ Cumberbatch adds. 'So it’s fun to vicariously enjoy someone else being rude and Sherlock carving his way through life creating all the havoc that John very often has to patch up behind him. It always goes back to their relationship, and that is very much what the first new episode is all about. There is a mystery in there, but it’s more about whether they are going to get back together. Because it’s not an easy thing [for Watson] to overcome – two years of grieving.’
I watch him and Freeman record a scene that is both extremely funny and rather poignant, and the crew gathered around the monitor are all laughing along with me. What’s unusual is that we are all still laughing three takes later, because they’ve played it different each time.
'Watching them work together is quite special,’ says Una Stubbs, who plays Holmes’s landlady Mrs Hudson, a sweet, motherly lady with a well-hidden touch of steel. 'They’re an extraordinary combination. It’s quite nerve-racking at first, because the standard is so high and you don’t want to be the weak link.
'But I just love it! We all do. It was phenomenal the success they had. You just hope that it doesn’t change them, and it hasn't. It sits really well on their shoulders. They’re just lovely, lovely boys.’
In the summer, when they were filming some scenes for the second episode in Bristol, Gatiss said he suddenly noticed it was hard to pass a bus shelter or indeed bus without seeing an ad for Cumberbatch in Star Trek or Freeman in The Hobbit. 'When we first met, they were just that bloke who used to be in The Office, and that bloke nobody knew,’ he marvels. 'Within the industry Ben was regarded as somebody who was going to ignite some day but nobody knew when or where.’
There have been only six episodes of Sherlock so far, three in 2010 and three more two years later, but the impact has been phenomenal. Lara Pulver appeared in one episode as Irene Adler, the only woman to outwit Sherlock, but it was a career-defining moment, while Andrew Scott’s virtuoso turn as Moriarty made him famous overnight.
This new series may well do the same for Amanda Abbington – Freeman’s partner in real life – who takes on the role of Mary, Watson’s fiancée, and the Danish actor Lars Mikkelsen, who will already be familiar to fans of The Killing and Borgen, but should reach a whole new audience as the new villain, Charles Augustus Magnussen.
'He takes over brilliantly from Andrew,’ Freeman says. 'There’s a similar kind of excitement working with him because he is so good. He is so scary! As Moriarty, Andrew was just barking, bouncing around mentally and emotionally like an evil Tigger. Whereas Lars is described in the sсript as a shark, and he plays it like a Great White. He is dead: no anger, no passion, just a powerful feeling that he can and will kill you if he chooses to.’
'His weapon is the most devastating thing Sherlock has come up against,’ Cumberbatch adds. 'And I am not going to say anything more!’
Even the clothes in Sherlock have a cult following. Holmes’s signature long coat is by Belstaff, which stopped producing it some time ago and which has showed no inclination to bring it back despite the demand. For the show, this presents a problem. The coats are virtually impossible to buy second-hand now, and the costume department has only three left, one of which was altered to fit Lara Pulver in the second series, and another that is on loan from Cumberbatch, who received it from Gatiss as a gift after the first series wrapped. 'I think I maybe wore it once, before Sherlock came out,’ Cumberbatch says. 'And sadly that was it. I can’t be seen in public swanning around in that thing now.’
He jokes that when the coats eventually wear out he’ll insist on a cagoule instead. 'It’s so hot, that coat! If Steven writes another November scene to act out in an airless box factory in the middle of August I will burn it, I will actually take a flame to my flame-retardant coat and burn it!’
Perhaps the biggest achievement of all with Sherlock is that it is done on such a tight budget. The three new 90-minute episodes will cost about £5 million. This sounds like an awful lot of money until you consider that the second in the successful Robert Downey/Jude Law film franchise, 2011’s Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, had a budget of just over £77 million for its 129 minutes.
There are constant compromises. In one of the new scripts, for instance, Gatiss wrote the direction 'a throng of armed policeman’. Sue Vertue’s response was, 'Don’t you mean two?’ She laughs, and offers me a list of words she, as the person who holds the purse strings, has learnt to hate: 'throng; masses; swarm; montage’.
To run at 90 minutes, Gatiss says, the scale of the story in Sherlock has to be grand. 'But that can be on an emotional scale. The episode we’re doing now – in which John and Mary get married – is funny, delightful and different, but its emotional heart is devastating. And that’s a movie. That’s scale. It’s not about having to crash a truck into a mountainside.’
There is plenty of money on offer elsewhere, these days, to all of Sherlock’s main creatives. Vertue says both Moffat and Gatiss get calls from their agents saying, 'Shall I tell you what I’ve turned down this week?’ Yet here they all sit, at a shabby table in a depressing warehouse in Wales, looking astonishingly cheerful. 'The temptation to go to Hollywood doesn’t exist for me because I don’t like LA, particularly,’ Moffat says with a shrug. 'It’s a lifestyle choice.’
'This is what we’ve been thinking about since we were eight,’ Gatiss adds happily. 'And now we’re doing it. It’s amazing!’