Guy Ritchie Snatches Pitt

ByABC News
January 21, 2001, 3:48 PM

January 19 -- Brad Pitt and director Guy Ritchie (Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels) are hardly yearning for quality female companionship they just married two of the world's most famous women (Jennifer Aniston and Madonna, respectively), and Pitt is consistently mobbed by hordes of screaming girls. So there's nothing too worrisome about the fact that the female species is virtually missing from their new, fast-paced caper film, Snatch.

And get your mind out of the gutter there's certainly none of that on display in the provocatively titled movie, which caused a few moments of discomfort for Sony studio execs.

According to Ritchie, "there was an argument that ensued that consisted of 'We don't want to call it Snatch. We're not going to call it Snatch.' And I said, 'Oh, go on, let's call it Snatch,' and they said, 'All right, then.' And that was it."

Smoking Barrels Actors 'Muck' With Movie StarsFor his sophomore effort a crisscross crime tale involving an 86-carat diamond (the item "snatched"), vicious London gangsters, corpse-eating pigs, inept stickup men, and a Rasputin-like ex-KGB agent who refuses to die Ritchie reassembled many of the lads he used in Smoking Barrels, his breakout film.

"I tried to incubate a stable, if you like, of original actors," the director said of blokes like soccer star Vinnie Jones and former sidewalk con man Jason Statham, neither of whom had acted before Ritchie recruited them for his first big film.

"At one point, I nearly used the entire cast of Lock, Stock again," confessed Ritchie, who also admitted that his two films do have strong aesthetic and thematic similarities.

"I had to look as though I was making a different film," he said, so he finally added some tried talent to his stable. Puerto Rican-born actor Benicio Del Toro plays a Hasidic Jew with a dangerous gambling addiction, and Get Shorty's Dennis Farina is his diamond-dealing boss.

And then there's the guy whom all the "birds" tried to tear apart at Snatch's London premiere, Brad Pitt, who plays a tattooed, mush-mouthed Irish gypsy boxer named "One Punch" Mickey.