Robert Downey Jr. says Guy Ritchie is a “really smart bad-a*s.”

The actor praised the director for his confident approach to working on Sherlock Holmes, in which the Iron Man star plays the titular fictional detective and says he always felt comfortable working with the filmmaker.

“We’re in the hands of a really smart bad-a*s. The best word to describe Guy is ‘confident.’ Confident in a way that you can’t pretend to be, because you only see it in the moment when it’s crunch time.”

Meanwhile, Guy says he decided to take on the project because he wanted to create an “intellectual action hero” that was radically different to his previous work. He told Britain’s FHM, “I’d been offered all sorts of other big studio films over the last ten, 12 years and none of them really appealed. Mostly because I thought I couldn’t do much with them. But I fancied this for all sorts of reasons. One is that I wanted to try something that’s completely different from anything I’ve done before. Another is that it’s a big studio movie and although, to a degree, it’s still in my genre, it’s a period piece, and it’s a stylish piece. But most of all I liked the idea of an intellectual superhero. An intellectual action hero, actually.”