Jason Statham says Guy Ritchie is the 'perfect' choice to direct future 'Hobbs & Shaw' films (exclusive)

Jason Statham thinks Guy Ritchie would be a great choice to helm a Hobbs & Shaw sequel.

The actor launched his acting career with Ritchie in 1998’s Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, and later reunited with him for 2000’s Snatch and 20005’s Revolver but would love for the filmmaker to join the Fast & Furious franchise.

“He'd nail it,” Statham tells Yahoo Movies UK. “He'd give it his real fingerprint if you like. He's a superbly talented director, he's super-efficient, he doesn't dilly dally.

“He's a great physical martial artist, he fights every day, he understands action,” he continues. “He's the perfect guy who could strap this on and blow it through the ceiling.”

Deadpool 2’s David Leitch was on directing duties for this movie which sees Statham’s antihero Deckard Shaw team up with frenemy Luke Hobbs (Dawyne Johnson) in order to take down a superpowered villain Brixton (Idris Elba) and clear his sister Hattie Shaw’s (Vanessa Kriby) name.

The film is just as high-octane as the last few Fast & Furious movies and there’s more than a few great combat sequences to go with the car chases but Statham admits that the “most fun” he ever had on set was working with Ritchie.

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“You go to remember I did a Guy Ritchie movie 20 years ago and if you wanna have fun on a movie set that's the one you wanna talk about,” the actor says.

“It's almost incomprehensible to believe that you could have a group of lads that he'd assembled back then, it was just a riot. Not one day, every day.”

That’s not to say he didn’t have fun filming this film, written by Chris Morgan and Hotel Artemis filmmaker Drew Pearce.

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“I'm not gonna take anything away from the movie I did with Dwayne,” he clarifies, but you know we do have a laugh when we go to work. For me, the enjoyment of making movies is the ability to not take yourself serious and when you do it becomes far too boring.

“I've seen people who do take themselves seriously and it's quite sad when you see that, Statham adds. “At the end of the day we're only making films, int we?”

There are two more Fast & Furious movies on the way featuring Vin Diesel’s Dominic Torretto and his crew but despite hopes for Ritchie to board the franchise, Statham isn’t certain that a second Hobbs & Shaw film is on the way just yet.

”Who knows,” the actor admits. “The Fast universe is not my universe, it's a universe that existed way before I was invited to play on the playing field but what we found was Deckard Shaw was a great character and a lot of the fans sort of responded to him and what he was doing.

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“We just built out a little bit further with trying to open the curtain and peer into his world a little bit more and you never get a chance the chance to do that with these Fast films,” he continues.

“There are so many characters, so many stories that need to be addressed that you never get a chance to really focus down on Deckard Shaw, or Hobbs, so we did that within the two hours and we really get to understand a lot more about these two characters.”

Fast & Furious Presents Hobbs & Shaw is released in cinemas from 1 August