20 Things You Didn't Know About Layer Cake

Though eventually directed by Matthew Vaughn in his directorial debut, Layer Cake was originally pitched to gangster film extraordinaire Guy Ritchie.

Ultimately, however, scheduling conflicts with Ritchie's own movie Revolver caused him to drop out, though it's easy to see how the film's script played so thoroughly to his sensibilities.

In the end, Revolver was a critical and commercial disaster while Layer Cake won over critics and was a modest financial success. Of the decision to hire Vaughn, writer J. J. Connolly said:

"It was meant to be a Guy Ritchie film, but he was off doing Revolver. Matthew [Vaughan] worked with me on the screenplay so he started to see it shot by shot, and we'd talk about who'd play various characters, so a lot of the work a director would do, Matthew had already started doing.

I think it would've been hard for him to give it over to someone else at that point. Then I went up to Matthew's house, this big Elizabethan place up in Suffolk, and over dinner his wife Claudia [Schiffer] said 'well why don't you direct it?' I think he just needed someone to say that to him."