Sarah Greenwood

AS: Is the second Sherlock in a similar color palette, with a similar feel?
SG: What we’re not doing is we don’t stay in London quite so much. We move to Europe. And as opposed to the first Sherlock where we stay in London and we kept coming back to Baker Street on this next one we are constantly moving forward. You know, we go to Paris, then we go to Germany, and we end up in the Alps, and so down and dirty industrial London doesn’t feature as much. You obviously get a sense of it but it’s not part of the story as much. As far as the feel goes, in some parts we go quite light in colors. We end up in the Alps at the top of a mountain at a fortress which we had to build. We shot in Strasbourg about three days but the rest of it we shot in the UK. The rest of the journey across Europe, I’m not joking, we shot within twenty-five miles of London. In fact this weekend they’re up in Wales. It worries me extremely that they’re up in Wales shooting a sequence that’s supposed to take them from Paris to Germany! You’ve got to keep off the hill because otherwise it will look like Wales.

AS: Nowadays, because of tax incentives in the States, Louisiana is doubling for many other locations that look nothing like Louisiana.
SG: When I was over in LA working on the Soloist with Joe I remember I was having an argument with an accountant about how we have to go to Cleveland to shoot a small sequence in Cleveland. I was saying, We have to go to Cleveland because it’s so different from LA and they were arguing with me saying, Well, you’ll go where we tell you to shoot.

And I go, Well, hang on a minute, since when has that happened? On Sherlock we could have afforded to go to Paris and Germany and everything but the whole thing was we only had Robert for a very limited amount of time and we didn’t have the time in the schedule to be doing him traveling. And the risks of traveling in the snow –either having no snow or getting snowed in. So you really have to think hard about how you can make it work doing it in London. I’m really interested to see how it turns out.

AS: How is it to work in London compared to other places you’ve worked like Prague and Finland and Morocco and now Russia?
SG: From my point of view London is fantastic because it’s home. It still has a very strong kind of film structure here. At the moment we are swamped with too much work. And last year was the same. You know, finding studio space, fighting for crew. When you go to all the prop-houses you know you’re constantly doing deals with colleagues working on other films. If you get that back in time we’ll give you this if you give us that. It is a like a kind of bartering system. London is fantastic for film making. England as a whole is very good for film making -there’s an incredible variety of landscapes and architecture.

AS: When you go abroad do you bring crews or use local people?
SG: We brought British crews to Morocco and to Finland as well. We used German crews in Berlin. We were out of Babelsberg Studios, which, between you and I, was not a marriage made in heaven for me.