‘You forget what country you’re in’: How Natalie Portman managed the ‘vibe’ on Guy Ritchie’s film set

A Guy Ritchie set is not like any other, according to Natalie Portman. “He is a vibe,” she says, doing a little dance in her chair to suggest the gyrations of a genie. “He’s got his trailer tricked out with everything he likes, he’s got his food that he makes for everybody. Everything always smells like meat cooking; I’m a vegan but it actually smells really good!”

Most days, she adds, there is a meeting in the morning where he abandons the written script and comes up with new ideas for that day’s scene, including new lines he dictates to the actors on the spot. For newcomers to the Ritchie method, it feels like chaos.

Sometimes those new lines are just noises. Portman mimics a foxy sound, between a yowl and a growl, that Ritchie told her to make during a fight scene with her co-star John Krasinski. They play a brother and sister with plenty of complex past, grudges and opposing world views that are about to boil over.

John Krasinski (left), Domhnall Gleeson and Natalie Portman are searching for a mysterious elixir in Fountain of Youth.

Did she really have to growl? “I was confused,” she says. “But then I saw the playback. And it brings a weird character that makes them feel like people. You don’t usually get that in movies like this. It defines his unique style. You can always tell a Guy Ritchie movie.”

Ritchie came to fame making geezer gangster films, with his best-known work still being his punchy, sweary 1998 feature debut Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. The new film, Fountain of Youth, is a proudly old-fashioned swashbuckling adventure involving a search for an elixir that promises eternal life. Luke and Charlotte Purdue, brother and sister thrillseekers, go from Thailand to Vienna to Egypt, following codes hidden in ancient libraries and inscribed on sunken treasure, obstructed by various foes who either want to beat them to the prize or ensure this Pandora’s box never gets opened.

When Portman refers to “movies like this”, she’s talking about the films she watched as preparation: The Da Vinci Code and all the Indiana Jones films, which loom so large over the action you could swear you hear Indy’s whip cracking in the distance. Ritchie says he has made a point, with each new film, of trying to make a film in a genre he hasn’t tried before. “We’re quite busy because there’s quite a lot of genres.”

One visitor to the set says that this looks like old-school James Bond. “Well, we’re under the pyramids here,” Ritchie says drily. “And they’re 5000 years old.”

Guy Ritchie (left) and John Krasinski behind the scenes on Fountain of Youth, which was filmed in locations such as England, Egypt and Austria.

Fountain of Youth was, in fact, the first film to be shot at the pyramids in 50 years. Right now, however, we are in a studio complex on the outskirts of London. The shadowy labyrinth within a pyramid has been constructed here; so has a ship with its decks covered in puddles and seaweed, mounted on pylons in an outside lot. Krasinski and Portman are action veterans: he has starred in four series of Jack Ryan, while she has done her share in the Avengers and Star Wars blockbusters. This is very different, she says, because they are working with real things.

“Usually when I’m doing Thor or Star Wars, it’s green screen,” she says. “To have a physical environment to engage with is extraordinary. It also means that sometimes you’re cold or wet or both, but it’s been really fun to have that because you can lose yourself in the wonder of the worlds that we’re filming.”

Natalie Portman is an old hand at action films, having appeared in Star Wars movies, as well as with Chris Hemsworth in Thor: Love and Thunder (pictured).

She and Krasinski almost mist over as they recall the underwater scene shot in a tank. “That tank was very special!” she says. “But I’ve seen footage of us in there and we’re just laughing. ‘Aaaahhh, we’re so freezing!’ That’s what kept us warm.”

What attracted him to this film, says Krasinski – apart from the prospect of working with Ritchie and Portman – was the fact the central relationship in the film was between adult siblings. “I loved that it wasn’t about a love story and everything being about whether or not they were going to fall in love at the end,” he says. “It was about two people who could really fill in the blanks for each other. Family is this thing that we often forget about, and it might be the treasure that we’re all really seeing in our lives.” Which, he adds, is something Indiana Jones didn’t have.

Natalie Portman and John Krasinski play thrill-seeking siblings Charlotte and Luke Purdue in Fountain of Youth.

There is also plenty of sibling grievance. The Purdues’ father was a treasure hunter who had no compunction about exposing his children to peril; Luke caught the bug and is more reckless than ever, while his old playmate Charlotte retreated into respectability, determined to give her son Thomas (Benjamin Chivers) – a piano prodigy – the stable home life she never had. They drifted apart, to the point of estrangement. “And then Luke pops back into her life and tries to get her to go on this excursion with him,” says Portman.

The quest is being funded by Owen (Domhnall Gleeson), an enigmatic techbro with his own morbid reasons for trying to find the grail of immortality. Eiza Gonzalez, in her third role with Ritchie, plays an enigmatic seductress who pursues the party, occasionally trying to assassinate them. “It’s unclear where she comes from and what are her real intentions,” says Gonzalez. “We think she’s sort of a villain in a way.”

Her experience with the Ritchie method, says Krasinski, helped set the tone for everyone else. “To have a fight scene that turns out to be flirty: that’s a very difficult tone to pull off,” he says. “And she pulled it off so well. She was just a great dance partner to have … and she had this ability to be silly.”

Krasinski and Portman have also travelled the world for their jobs, albeit rather more comfortably than Luke and Charlotte do. Krasinski says he keeps reminding himself never to take that for granted; they are already on an adventure. “But this movie felt on just a different level, in terms of where we went and how we went about it,” he says. Portman says she loved being in Vienna, with its ubiquitous art and music. “Normally on location you have to deal with background noise of ambulances’ sirens or trucks,” she says. “There you have classical music playing in the street. Could someone get that piano to stop? It was fantastic. And then Cairo was just crazy.”

Crazy, yes. “There’s only so much time you can stay in Cairo,” says Ritchie with a wry grimace. Of course, working within an arm’s reach of the pyramids was extraordinary. “But the funny thing is you forget you’re in the pyramids because in film you’re used to building things, and we were there for quite a long time, so it gets to the point where you’re not sure whether you built them. You forget which country you’re in, then it dawns on you. But you can start taking even the pyramids for granted.”

What he doesn’t take for granted is work. That is his adventure. On the morning we visit, he says he is struggling to stay awake: there aren’t enough problems to keep him buzzing. “The hard stuff came at the beginning of yesterday, when we worked out what we were going to do,” he says, one eye on the monitor as the actors creep into the bowels of a burial chamber. “I’m redundant until it’s all mocked up. The biggest challenge is that I love challenges.”

For Krasinski, who is also a much-admired director of A Quiet Place, this is a kind of cinematic heroism. Ritchie’s restless appetite for experiment – new angles, new lines, new tech toys – creates its own energy zone. “And the confidence he has in shot choices is also really interesting. There’s a constant anxiety when you’re directing. ‘Did I get exactly what I wanted? Or should I have done this other thing?’

“And he really doesn’t seem to have that. He has one vision and this is the way it’s going to go. And he loves making movies. If you offered him $10 billion he would still be here tomorrow. In this day and age, to have real filmmakers still loving making movies is an inspiration.”

Fountain of Youth streams on Apple TV+ from May 23.

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