Guy Ritchie’s Reacts To ‘The Gentlemen’ Lawsuit

Guy Ritchie’s had enough.

Guy Ritchie, the director of Snatch, has reacted to a lawsuit accusing him of stealing concepts for The Gentlemen from a writer buddy.

According to Variety, Ritchie denied hiring Mickey de Hara to write the long-awaited sequel to another of his films, RocknRolla, or basing it on his life in a document he submitted earlier this week to London's High Court. Following a court order to give the parties time to discuss and settle out of court, Ritchie's defence filing was postponed.

According to De Hara's assertion, which first surfaced a few months ago, Ritchie took parts of his sequel script and the narrative from his life, and this ultimately had an impact on The Gentlemen, which directly duplicates the characters and particular plot points from the original film. His legal case centred on instances of plot point duplication.

According to Ritchie's assertion, he paid de Hara £25,000 ($31,900) in 2006 to "act as a sounding board" and supply "anecdotes" when he was scripting the RocknRolla sequel. Ritchie made it clear, however, that the sequel was never completed since he thought the era of gangster films was ended. He added that he had contemplated making RocknRolla a trilogy with de Hara and another author, Martin Askew, but they had never come to an agreement.

When composing The Gentlemen, Ritchie stated that he had "some use" of the screenplay for the RocknRolla sequel but refuted de Hara's assertion that it was a "reproduction of a substantial part" of the former.

The Gentlemen, starring Matthew McConaughey, Charlie Hunnam, and Jeremy Strong, follows an American expat who was seeking to liquidate his enormously lucrative marijuana empire in London in a manner reminiscent of Guy Ritchie's earlier action comedies. A decade before, RocknRolla chronicled the struggles of a crime boss.