These are some of the highlights from a wonderful interview in the The Guardian Wednesday November 7, 2007- and Wikepedia.
Ridley Scott didn't start making films until he was 40,
His new film American Gangster is released on the eve of his 70th birthday
"I'd rather not make too much of it," Ridley Scott says. "It's a youth-orientated business and I seem to be kicking butt more now than I ever was. I'll probably do three films now in 20 months, which is shocking. That's why I don't really want to ( talk about the milestone. Milestones don't really mean anything to me anyway."
He has just completed American Gangster, ; he is currently shooting Body of Lies in Morocco "with Leo [DiCaprio] and Russell [Crowe]; and he is planning Nottingham, a revisionist take on the Robin Hood story to be shot next year, with Crowe (who is becoming a Scott fixture) starring as the sheriff, upholding the law against a dubious bandit hiding out in the woods.
When he arrived in Hollywood to shoot Blade Runner in 1982, after making The Duellists and Alien in Britain, he was edgy and uncertain, he says, as well as ultra-competitive. The Blade Runner shoot was testy - the American crew gave the Limey newcomer a hard time, the studio panicked when the film previewed badly, and Scott allowed them to impose a disastrous voiceover.
It has taken him a quarter of a century to get back to his original conception of Blade Runner - a "final cut" is being released on DVD this month to mark the film's 25th anniversary.
Thelma and Louise
But he had learned an important lesson which he applied when the less-than-uproarious ending of Thelma and Louise - his heroines plunge to their death in the Grand Canyon - came up for discussion. "Laddy [studio boss Alan Ladd junior] said, 'Can you think of another ending?'" says Scott. "I said, 'No, can you?' He said, 'No.' I said, 'Fine.' He said, 'But they drive off the cliff.' I said, 'Do you like it?' He said, 'Yes.' I said, 'So what are you mucking about for?' He said, 'That car goes down, the hat comes off, it's really depressing.' I said, 'Tell you what, we'll freeze it.'"
On American Gangster, the true-life story of the 70s Harlem drug baron Frank Lucas and the cop who nails him and at the same time cleans up New York's corrupt police department, there was again an issue with the ending. Preview audiences loved the film, but questionnaires showed they would have loved it even more if the ending had been more redemptive - there was an implication in the original that Lucas would offend again. Scott allowed a tweak - the ending is now more neutral - but only, he says, because the test scores "rang a bell" in his head and alerted him to a doubt he already had. On the DVD, he says, the original ending will be included in the extras, so the audience can trace the evolution of the thought.
(This, was one of my criticisms of the movie. The following paragraph reads to me of a sellout rather than a true artist:)
Film can aspire to be art - Scott would make that claim for Blade Runner - but, equally, art must show awareness of its audience. "When a conductor stands in front of an orchestra, that's also entertainment," he says. Film critic David Thomson calls him a "crowd-pleaser", but Scott wants to be more than that. "The warhorses who are really running the Hollywood studios know what is good," he says, "but they also know that they have a bottom line, and they have to address the bottom line. They will, though, occasionally let someone like me go out and do [serious films], so I try to keep my head above water and keep the standard up. I mean it. That's serious. It's very important to me."
He has said he will carry on making films until he drops dead, and he tells me he can never go to sleep until he has watched a film. "
(Here is another odd observation:)
Scott is strangely inarticulate - or, rather, the articulacy comes and goes. He proceeds not through rounded sentences, but via shafts of verbal light.
He is a realiser of other people's words and worlds, moving effortlessly between genres. What other director could have made Alien, Blade Runner, Thelma and Louise, Gladiator, Hannibal and Matchstick Men?
Scott also paints,
- he studied graphic design at West Hartlepool College of Art and then the Royal College of Art before joining the BBC as a set designer. "I knew I wanted to be a director when I was about eight," he says, "but I didn't know how on earth I'd get there. Where did they come from? Did they land from Mars? I figured that by getting to be an art director I was halfway along the route, and once I became one I was staring at the reality of these insecure, four-packs-a-day, jugs-of-water-and-beer guys called 'director'. Not all of them were very good, but one or two of them were brilliant."
..Scott says he shot himself in the foot at an interview for a director's job on BBC2 by admitting he knew nothing about Shakespeare.
ADVERTISING
Commercials
* Bike Round for Hovis (1973)
* Chanel... Share the fantasy. for Chanel (1979)
* 1984 for Apple Computers (1984)
* The Choice of a New Generation for Pepsi (1986) (Starred Don Johnson and Glenn Frey)
.. he switched to advertising - "commercials were my film school" - building Ridley Scott Associates into a global player and marrying Hovis to Dvorak with award-winning results.
"1984" Apple Macintosh commercial
In 1984, Apple Computer launched the Macintosh. Its debut was announced by a single broadcast of the now famous $1.5 million commercial, based on George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, and directed by Ridley Scott (due to his work on Blade Runner). The commercial was broadcast during the 1984 Super Bowl XVIII. Steve Jobs' intention with the ad was to equate Big Brother with the IBM PC and a nameless female action hero, portrayed by Anya Major, with the Macintosh.
The commercial is frequently voted top in surveys of influential marketing campaigns. For example, Advertising Age named it the 1980s "Commercial of the Decade", and in 1999 the US TV Guide selected it as number one in their list of "50 Greatest Commercials of All Time".
The film resurfaced in the late 1990s when Apple made a QuickTime version of the commercial available for download from the Internet. It appeared numerous times on television commercial compilation specials, as well as on Nick-at-Nite during its "Retromercial" breaks. The making and presentation of this famous commercial formed the visual bookends for the docudrama Pirates of Silicon Valley. (Wikepedia)
Failures
He still trumpets his first film, The Duellists - "I knew it was a good film. It was criticised for being too pretty, but I didn't really give a shit" - and his second, Alien, was a monster hit that propelled him into the arms of Hollywood. There have been ups and downs since, but he's never gone away. "Life's a river," he says. "It has its bends and overflows; it comes back and shrinks. If you enjoy doing what you're doing, you've just got to keep doing it."
The downs have included several critical and/or commercial failures. Legend, starring Tom Cruise, proved an epic disaster in 1985, but as with Blade Runner, Scott has breathed DVD-inspired life into it by issuing a director's cut and releasing a version with the original score, which had been junked when it tested badly. "People said Legend didn't work," he says, "but I think it does work. I think it's kind of beautiful and spectacular. I just made it 25 years too soon. Now all these films which go under the banner of Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter [are like Legend]. I've gone away from that and I thought, 'Damn, I should have made that now.'"
Scott hit another rough patch after the success in 1991 of Thelma and Louise, which won him one of his three best-director Oscar nominations. His other three movies in that decade - 1492: Conquest of Paradise, White Squall and GI Jane - all under-performed. Some suggested that he was on the slide, but the monumental success in 2000 of Gladiator, which won the Oscar for best picture, changed his fortunes, restored the confidence of the studios, and made possible the startling film-a-year run he has enjoyed during this decade.
Gladiator also established his fruitful relationship with Crowe, though the pair got a mauling last year when they essayed the romantic comedy A Good Year. "We had some fun on A Good Year, and even though we got beaten up for it, I still think it's a good movie and I think Russell was excellent in it," says Scott. "He's one of the best, and we seem to know exactly what to do without much exchange now. The waltz is over. The waltz was on Gladiator. We've got the measure of each other now."
FAMILY LIFE
Personally, too, the river has not always flowed smoothly for Scott, with two marriages ending in divorce. He had two sons with his first wife and a daughter with his second; all three of his children - Jake, Luke and Jordan - are directors.
He is now married to the Costa Rican actress Giannina Facio, who played Mrs Maximus in Gladiator. She doesn't crop up in our conversation, but his younger brother Tony does, on several occasions. Tony, who is six years younger than Ridley, followed his big brother into commercials and then to Hollywood, breaking through with Top Gun in 1986. Tony is "still flying", according to Ridley, who is part admiring, part protective. It is an interesting relationship: highly competitive - "I'm kept on my toes because of Tony, and I know I'm competition for him. He's thinking, 'Holy shit, Ridley's doing another film in March'" - but also very close. They are partners in the film production company Scott Free, and Ridley has in the past described his brother as his first and best critic.
Trademarks
Although Scott is often known for his painterly directorial style, other trademarks include:
* Storyboarding his films extensively. These illustrations are often referred to as "Ridleygrams".
* Strong female characters.[14][15]
* Military and officer classes as characters reflecting his father's career, such as in G.I. Jane and Black Hawk Down.
* Extensive use of the two camera "V" set-up, allowing actors to perform more fluidly.
* Casts Giannina Facio, his partner in life, in all his movies since White Squall.
* Gets involved personally in the casting and prefers a more streamlined approach (just him and the casting director).
* Likes to work with actors who have a strong theatre background and/or drama school graduates.
* An admirer of Stanley Kubrick from early in his development. For his entry for the BBC traineeship Scott remade Paths of Glory as a short film.
* Like Stanley Kubrick, Scott is known for repeating the takes by the double digits. This was more evident on Blade Runner: the crew nicknamed the movie "Blood Runner" because of this.
* Often makes notable use of classical music (the Hovis advertisements, Someone to Watch Over Me). Worked intermittently on the project of a film adaptation of the opera Tristan und Isolde beginning in 1976.
* Extensive use of fans and fanlike objects (in Blade Runner and Black Rain). Fans are also used in Hannibal, but for the purposes of symbolism.
* Extensive use of smoke (in Alien, Blade Runner and Black Rain), for visual aesthetic purposes: Scott sometimes takes hours to set up one scene.
* Consistency in his choice of composers, using Jerry Goldsmith (Alien and Legend), Vangelis (Blade Runner and 1492: Conquest of Paradise) or Hans Zimmer (Black Rain, Thelma & Louise, Gladiator, Hannibal, Black Hawk Down and Matchstick Men). Scott has also twice used songs by Sting during the film credits ("Valparaiso" for White Squall and "Someone to Watch Over Me" for the movie of the same title).
* He is usually considered the "father" of the director's cut. Scott was one of the first to use the description for the 1992 re-release of Blade Runner (other such films existed, but were either small fan-oriented versions that carried the name "Special Edition" or were forcefully edited by the studio). The positive result of the Blade Runner DC has encouraged Scott to re-cut several of his movies that were flops at the time of their release (such as Legend and Kingdom of Heaven) with the same positive results. Today the practice is commonplace within the movie industry.
* In some of his movies there is a strong conflict between father and son that usually ends with the latter killing the former intentionally (Blade Runner, Gladiator) or accidentally (Black Hawk Down), or witnessing the event (Kingdom of Heaven). The Lord of Darkness in Legend also mentions his "father" on a few occasions. As part of the conflict between father and son there are some repetitive scenes: in Gladiator, the son hugs the father seemingly as an expression of love but this embrace turns into the suffocation and death of the father. There is a similar sequence in Blade Runner.
* In Gladiator, Blade Runner and Kingdom of Heaven, a son gets to know his father when he is grown up. Other common elements are that the mother is not seen, and that the son or father is seen performing his last actions. For example, Roy Batty is dying when he saves Deckard, Maximus dies after killing Commodus and Godfrey of Ibelin kills some enemies after he has been mortally wounded by an arrow. In addition, the hero is saved from death before attaining his greatest deeds: Deckard is saved by Rachel, Maximus is saved by a slave and Balian is saved by a Muslim enemy. Similar situations can be seen in Tony Scott's Man on Fire.
Released films
* B&W | 30mins | Drama Cast: Tony Scott ::Ridley Scott was still in his early 20s when he began making this, his very first short. The film tells the tale of a schoolboy enjoying a day’s truancy in the North Shields and includes his then teenage brother Tony Scott in the starring role.
Opening in Ridley’s own childhood bedroom the film follows a bicycle journey through a seaside town, where we visit a desolate beach and an empty funfair, whilst all the time listening to the boy’s thoughts, which range from fish shops to wax treatments for women with hairy legs. Boy and Bicycle (1965) Almost inpossible to find.
* The Duellists (1977)
* Alien (1979)
* Blade Runner (1982)
* Legend (1985)
* Someone to Watch Over Me (1987)
* Black Rain (1989)
* Thelma & Louise (1991)
* 1492: Conquest of Paradise (1992)
* White Squall (1996)
* G.I. Jane (1997)
* Gladiator (2000)
* Hannibal (2001)
* Black Hawk Down (2001)
* Matchstick Men (2003)
* Kingdom of Heaven (2005)
* All the Invisible Children, a.k.a. Take 7 (short Jonathan, with Jordan Scott) (2006)
* A Good Year (2006)
* American Gangster (2007)
The Guardian post can be found here:
http://film.guardian.co.uk/interview/interviewpages/0,,2206463,00.html
