(IN DISTINCT CONVERSATIONS)
I always remember Vic and Bob on Saturday Superstore, someone rang in
and said, "Where do you get your ideas from?" And Vic Reeves said,
"Out of our minds."
"Is it Sherlock Holmes you want? 'Cause I haven't seen him in ages."
What I like most about Sherlock, I suppose,
is the initial thing of receiving scripts,
where you get to say and play and react to things that are...
that you don't get to do all the time.
(ALL LAUGHING)
BENEDICT CUMBERBATCH: We get that thrill when we read a script
that the audience does when they first watch,
it's that coalface realisation of...
And literally, sometimes, literally, if not figuratively,
between me and Martin, of reading it, looking up and going,
"Oh, my God."
You are never going to make anything next to great
or next to brilliant without a very, very good script.
-"It's a tiny bit sexy." -"I know."
FREEMAN: Amanda is in the show and Amanda is,
for those who don't know, my real-life partner.
I just always turn to her and go, "This is amazing. It's brilliant."
It's such a good script, isn't it?
I mean, it's just... You're misled as an audience
and I think that's lovely.
We were looking, really, for an obvious arc to a third series.
What presents itself straightaway
is the incredible drama of him coming back from the dead.
MOFFAT: We work together in a variety of ways.
Most of the time, we're off writing separately, but not always.
The really important stuff is when we sit in a room together
and work out what the series is going to be.
GATISS: That's, in a way, the most fun, isn't it?
- MOFFAT: 0h, yeah. -Throwing it all into a pot and saying,
"Well, here's a general shape,
"and here's a story I'd love to do.
"What if Sherlock was a best man?
"What if... What if we put him in here?" It's like picking...
Picking him up and putting him into an unusual situation.
It's the sort of thing that can lead to all kinds of exciting possibilities.
It's an object lesson in why you must only work on things you love,
because these conversations are never a chore.
We used to have these conversations anyway.
-(LAUGHING) Yes. - We did them anyway,
without them resulting in a TV show.
SUE VERTUE : You never quite know what's going to happen with Sherlock.
When I read the scripts... 'Cause Steven and Mark
will tell me certain things and then not tell me...
You know, Steven won't tell me a lot when he's writing it.
And he also sometimes delivers in chunks, which is quite interesting,
'cause he just keeps doing cliffhanger after cliffhanger.
You keep going... (GASPING)
(CROWD CH CHEERING)
I kind of think the pressure of having a huge, enthusiastic fan base
is not pressure, it's rather nice. (CHUCKLING)
But it's also not a thing where you can respond
to the fact that it has a massive international audience.
Shows go off the rails if you start trying to direct it towards
what you think people will like or what you think they might fear.
We just have to make it for ourselves.
(VIOLIN PLAYING)
GATISS: It's a hundred-year-old spoiler,
but Dr Watson does marry Mary Morstan.
And you get that sort of slightly miffed,
"You're not allowed to do this, you'll spoil it."
But it's our show.
And I dare say, what happens is when the episodes are revealed,
you will see that we don't spoil it,
because we don't want to.
CUMBERBATCH: I got told about the idea of bringing in Mary Watson
and I thought, "Well, okay, what's that going to do
"to the dynamic of them and how is she going to figure?
"Is she going to be a third cog in the wheel
"or is she going to be something separate?"
She kind of gets in between the two of them,
but she wants them to be together as well.
So you see them, in Episode 2
they're sort of not fighting crimes or solving things at the moment,
so she sort of says, "Well, look, why don't you sort out a case for him?"
And then, "Why don't you sort out a case for him?"
And then she kind of pushes them together
because she can see that they kind of miss each other.
I think for John and us, you know, in real life,
it could never just be, "There's now three of them."
Amanda didn't want there to be three of them
because she didn't want to be hated, for a start.
(LAUGHING) Do you know what I mean?
Like the person who comes in and kind of ruins the dynamic
of the two most famous people in detective literature.
John?
The reunion of john and Sherlock, it makes my hair stand on end.
It's just the... It's so beautifully played.
Martin, the complex emotions
you see of astonishment and grief and rage,
all flickering through his eyes.
And then Sherlock, like an exposed little kid, going,
"I think I might have misjudged this one."
(LAUGHING) It's a joy.
Well, the short version,
not dead.
What you don't expect from the books, where it's just...
"Oh, good God. You're alive! Wonderful.
"Let's get on and have another adventure."
...is the fact that in reality, if you've grieved someone for two years
that's going to put you in a hell of a hole.
We were all wondering when we got the script,
like, how are they going to deal with that?
And I think it's...
I hope we do it well but I think it's potentially very good.
MOFFAT: One of the themes of this series,
which wasn't stated at the beginning,
but I think has emerged in what we've done,
is Sherlock Holmes versus the real world.
He does sort of get involved in real-life things
like going to a wedding, having possibly a girlfriend,
all those things.
Updating Sherlock Holmes means putting him in our world
and seeing what he makes of it, that's what it really means.
Pray silence for the best man.
We play a sort of parlour game of
"What would Sherlock be like in..."
And the great thrill and revelation of that was, well,
he'd be the best man, wouldn't he?
And what would Sherlock Holmes's best man speech be like?
A train wreck?
Or what if he was brilliant at it?
Reading the stories and Dr Watson gets married between stories
and I remember as a kid just thinking,
"Well, Sherlock Holmes must have been the best man."
There was no other option.
Because Dr Watson had exactly one friend.
And thinking, "I wish we'd seen it."
Well, now we get to see it.
And we had a long discussion about not caricaturing and not being silly.
What would Sherlock Holmes do as a best man?
Well, he's a genius. He's an accomplished genius.
He's a suave, accomplished genius and knows how to dress well.
He'd be very, very good at it.
But he'd still be Sherlock Holmes.
- He'd treat it as a problem. - Yes.
"How can I do the world's best best man's speech?"
So, it's actually both a train wreck and a masterpiece.
Right, um...
-(CLEARING THROAT) - Mmm.
In Episode 3, which is based on Charles Augustus Milverton,
and in the original story
he does become engaged to Milverton's maid,
heartlessly,
which Steven has extrapolated into this thing and it's amazing.
John Watson's reaction is like...
It's our reaction, it's the audience's, it's like...
"But you're behaving like a human being here."
- And it is... - And it's so funny.
We should have you two over for dinner
-really soon. -SHERLOCK: Yeah.
My place though, not the scuzz dump.
Great, yeah.
Dinner! Yeah.
You think, "Oh, it's nice he's become humanised."
"He understands how to do all that now." And you realise
-he exploits it to terrible ends. - Yes.
It's devastatingly cruel what he does.
He inveigles his way back into her life
and impresses her and turns his ability onto a single focus.
He's suddenly capable of doing a whole lot of things
that he couldn't dare do in the past.
But it doesn't necessarily make him nicer.
Did you just get engaged to break into an office?
Yeah. Stroke of luck
meeting her at your wedding. You can take some of the credit.
Je... Jesus, Sherlock, she loves you.
Yes. Like I said, human error.
Charles Augustus Milverton, and in our one Magnussen,
is a true, sort of a repugnant human being.
He's not evil, necessarily.
He doesn't have plans for sort of
Hitlerian world domination but he is just sort of
completely amoral.
I mean, absolutely amoral.
He's created sort of another line of moral ethics.
CUMBERBATCH: This man, who as he says,
preys on people who are different
and bullies them, basically.
Lars Mikkelsen is incredible in the part.
But it's brilliant that he's not just another Moriarty.
I've dealt with murderers, psychopaths, terrorists, serial killers.
None of them can turn my stomach like Charles Augustus Magnussen.
This is one of the very few occasions
we get Sherlock Holmes expressing hatred.
Why does Sherlock hate him above a murderer?
What Charles Augustus M does
is he exploits people who are different
and exploits people who have secrets
and there's something in Sherlock Holmes
that rises like a tiger in the face of it.
"I cannot bear you doing that."
He's a great, great villain.
And he's being played flipping brilliantly.
GATISS: Lars is a fantastically respected actor.
People know him from The Killing but I think this is a...
I really believe this is another star-making part,
because he's immaculate.
It's chilling because of how real he is, how normal he is.
How he might be someone we have in our midst, in our lives all the time.
That's what I'm trying to do, you know, not make him too big
but suck in the attention.
(CHURCH BELLS RINGING)
PHOTOGRAPHER: Congratulations!
Okay, hold it there, I want to get this shot...
MOFFAT". An episode needs to be about something in their lives.
It's not enough for it to be a mystery.
It's a series about a detective, it's not a detective series.
The story of the week is as nothing
compared to the relationship between those two characters
and their increasingly large family of characters.
That's the real heart of it and that's why it's a success.
SHERLOCK: Get down, john!
MOFFAT". We laugh a great deal when we're planning Sherlock.
One of the things about Sherlock Holmes that quite often gets missed...
No, it wasn't missed by Billy Wilder, it wasn't missed by Rathbone and Bruce,
but missed a lot is how funny those stories are.
They're funny. Sherlock Holmes is a funny character.
Dr Watson is a funny character.
They're designed... They're genuinely a comedy double-act.
And our version of this show is full of laughs.
Some of the more earnest Sherlocks over the years
missed the point in that sense,
they treat it like Holy Writ,
which is exactly the opposite of how Doyle treated his own creation.
- Sherlock? - Hmm?
Talk to john.
I've tried talking to him. He made his position quite clear.
(SIGHING) just relax, Mr Summerson.
- What did he say? - F...
- Cough. - Oh, dear.
It's exhausting. It's really hard work
but it's the best kind of hard work you could ever wish for as an actor.
Let's do deductions.
Client left this while I was out, what do you reckon?
- Deductions are hard. - The deductions are the hardest part.
As Doyle himself knew, and there's a reason
why they sort of fade out in the original stories quite quickly.
Because they're just very difficult.
Every now and then, something just occurs to you.
(SNIFFING)
- I always win. - Which is why you can't resist.
I find nothing irresistible in the hat of a well-travelled, anxious,
sentimental, unfit creature of habit with appalling halitosis.
Damn!
Doyle used to work backwards and sort of put soil over something.
And then like a magician, you don't reveal your workings
and then it looks like a brilliant revelation.
But they are bloody hard.
Long-term relationship. Compulsive cheat.
- Seriously? - Waterproof cover on the smartphone.
Yet his complexion doesn't indicate outdoor work.
Suggests he's in the habit of taking his phone into the shower with him,
which means he often receives texts and emails he'd rather went unseen.
It stretches my brain.
I don't know. The concise crossword may be a bit easier, just a bit.
Well, you're exercising
the grey matter in an area and a vein
and a speed that I am certainly not accustomed to every day.
I have to speed up a lot to play him.
And it's exhausting.
And it's very nice to be slow and stupid and go home and...
have a cup of tea, or not, have some decaffeinated drink and sleep.
(IN DISTINCT CONVERSATIONS)
GATISS: To get this level of adoration
for our show and for...
For our leads and everything,
you have to pinch yourself slightly sometimes.
I know so many people who are fans of it,
who are just like, "What's going to happen?"
It was successful instantly.
Benedict went from being
a hugely respected but basically unknown actor
to being a star one Sunday evening.
I never really chased for fame or a high level of exposure.
I was just about doing my job, really.
I knew, because he was an iconic character,
that I would get a lot of focus on me for it.
Because it's such a, you know, phenomenon,
it just means that
you get recognised in the most odd place.
But it's not really about that.
It just opens lots and lots of doors.
It's the gift that keeps on giving.
And I know that it's been good to, like, everybody who's been involved with it.
In three short years, really,
we've got to the stage now
where actually making three years is quite difficult
because both of our leads are such international film stars.
My fear was that they'd come back after two years and...
You know, being in The Hobbit
and Star Trek and all these things and be sort of...
don't know, tricky.
But they weren't. I mean, it's lovely and we've had a great time doing it.
GATISS: After the end of the second series,
these pictures just started appearing everywhere.
Literally across the world.
When we go to shoot at Bart's,
we have to clear away all the campaign posters
-for "Sherlock was innocent". - Yeah.
Which might reasonably have happened in the story
but we thought that would be over the top.
Well, yes. We sort of had a telescoped version
of what happened to Doyle when he killed off Sherlock.
Doyle was attacked in the street, wasn't he?
Young men of fashion took to wearing black crepe
in their top hats and stuff like that.
Even though we were very kind
and only actually killed him for five minutes...
Yeah, yeah. He did it for, like, 10 years.
It's weird, 'cause when we first started shooting Sherlock,
we were filming around Trafalgar Square and Piccadilly Circus
and we could film and nobody would even notice us there at all.
We've just recently been to North Gower Street
and we reckon there was between about 600 and 1,000 people turned up.
The cast pull up and there's a huge round of applause
and they get out and they're all very quiet when we do a take.
Then they would applaud again when we finished.
It's slightly strange. There's a bubble of near kind of
adrenaline panic that goes through you like there is with live theatre
because you are suddenly in front of a live audience.
SUE VERTUE: I got a letter from somebody the other day,
one of the fans handed me a letter.
And they were just saying that they loved to be there
and the fact that they see a bit of filming is fine.
They've just made firm friends
from all different countries that they wouldn't normally have met
and they meet up now and then and have drinks and...
It seems to have kind of facilitated people's friendships.
It's extraordinary, though, isn't it?
We can sit in our rooms and come up with stuff
that has this happening round the world.
We did this as possibly the biggest sustained act of fan fiction.
And as a result, there's fan fiction about our fan fiction.
And I do think that's where storytelling comes from.
It's that lovely thing of generating new content around it.
It's the sort of thing that got us into writing.
In the third series we've got the return,
we've got john and Mary's wedding,
we've got this colossal revelation,
plus a clash with an incredible world-class baddie.
What we want to do for a fourth series
is match that.
But it's not a question of saying, "Well, we need a baddie on that scale."
It's about trying to find stories that have that kind of scale to them.
The show has to keep evolving. It has to move on at a pace, I think.
GATISS: We are fans of Sherlock Holmes that's why this show exists,
and I dare say I think why it's a success
is because we live and breathe and love it.
And every single bit of it is about loving the characters.
We've done the thing of starting them early.
The idea, if we could,
of finding Martin and Benedict in these chairs aged 50,
sort of like the age that Holmes and Watson are usually portrayed,
-is sensational. - Yeah.
It would be lovely to feel we could do that.
Thanks for such an amazing series.
I love Sherlock!
I came from Germany and I've been here 12 hours.
- I like... I like your cheekbones. - Yeah.
Eight hours was worth the wait.
ALL: Thank you!