'I much prefer talking to being photographed,’ states the film director, producer and screenwriter Guy Ritchie. We’re sitting on two large sofas facing each other in the Studio — once used by Cecil Beaton, Rex Whistler and Salvador Dalí — which was converted from the former stables in the 1930s, a few hundred yards from the red-brick Georgian manor house at Ashcombe, his Wiltshire estate.

As it turns out, this will be the least surprising observation that Guy makes all day, because the 57-year-old is a man with much to say on a variety of topics. ‘Don’t get me talking about country life,’ he warns. ‘I could bang on forever.’

Not that this was always the case. ‘In my youth, I was an urbanite, born and raised in London,’ he clarifies. ‘However, I used to go fishing with my father on the Ri

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