Etan Cohen (Idiocracy, Tropic Thunder) spoke to MTV about Sherlock Holmes, the new movie he’s writing that will star Sacha Baron Cohen as the classic titular figure and Will Ferrell as his sidekick Dr. Watson.
This is a project that’s coming along parallel to another Sherlock Holmes project being done by Guy Ritchie and starring Robert Downey Jr. and it seemed pretty obvious that the latter would be actiony and the former would be really funny.
While Guy Ritchie’s film is being called “James Bond in 1891,” it seems that the Ferrell/Baron-Cohen movie might not be all-comedy all-the-time like we assumed.
Etan Cohen stated:
What’s been exciting is to do a giant comedy but at the same time try to be true to the mechanics of a Sherlock Holmes story like using the Victorian forensics that Conan Doyle used. It’s a cool opportunity to write a good mystery that also gets to be a giant comedy. Fortunately a lot of the stories are public domain now. We can actually draw on a lot of the situations and language of many of the original stories.
While both projects sound entertaining enough to me, I had every digit crossed that the Ferrell/Baron-Cohen comedy would be set in that Victorian time frame and not a modernization of the character, so this news is fantastic. We went from having a Sherlock Holmes comedy starring two of the biggest names in the genre to a Sherlock Holmes comedy/mystery/period piece starring two comedy stars!
