Ridley Scott: ‘People want to be entertained and eat fucking popcorn’

“I used to live in the BFI as a student at the Royal College of Art,” says Ridley Scott, grinning over a video call in late August. “I’d take a pack of cigarettes and a bottle of beer, sit in a room, and watch all of Bergman and Kurosawa. Bergman was particularly stonkingly straight-forward, realistic, and mostly sexy. Cries and Whispers was a masterpiece, because he made a movie with five women who had been either married to him or were his mistresses. I thought that was genius.”

I tell Scott that I detect the Swedish auteur’s influence on his work – not so much the mistresses aspect, but the painterly approach to framing landscapes. Even The Martian looks a little like Fårö Island. “My films tend to be visually led, because I was born with a good eye,” says Scott. “I learned to draw from comic strips.” He lists influences ranging from The Beano to Moebius. “Getting into the Royal College of Arts is like getting into the peak of Mount Everest. It’s the best art school in the world. Before I made commercials, I was a graphic designer and painter. I had three careers before I made my first film.”

Scott didn’t direct a full-length feature before the age of 40. Now 87, the English auteur has 29 movies to his name. With his aforementioned “good eye”, Scott has crafted ambitious sci-fi visions (Alien, Blade Runner, Prometheus), gripping crime-dramas (The Counsellor, American Gangster), lush period epics (The Duellists, Gladiator), gritty feminist thrillers (Thelma and Louise, GI Jane), bouncy comedies (A Good Year, Matchstick Men), and grim explorations of mankind’s cruelty (The Last Duel, Hannibal).

In September and October, Scott’s genre-hopping will be evident in a BFI season titled “Ridley Scott: Building Cinematic Worlds”. Showing at BFI Southbank and BFI IMAX will be hits, rarities, 35mm prints, shorts, talks, and a free exhibition displaying his storyboards. “Time passes, and provided you love what you’re doing, you don’t notice it,” says Scott. “I’m very grateful and honoured, because [the BFI] didn’t give me the money to make my first movie [Boy and Bicycle in 1965]. The Royal College did. It was only £65!”

Nowadays, Scott is known for his efficiency. In the last four years, he’s released The Last Duel, House of Gucci, Napoleon, and Gladiator II. On All the Money in the World, he famously replaced Kevin Spacey with Christopher Plummer mere weeks before the theatrical release. In his 20s and 30s, Scott was already a prolific director, just in commercials. “I was 39 and it dawned on me: ‘My God, I’m never going to make a movie. I’m nearly 40!’”

Described by Scott as “a western with sabers”, The Duellists is such an assured film, it’s hard to believe it’s a debut. The director’s art background is evident: the whole film feels as if it was painted onto a canvas. “It won a prize at Cannes. Alan Ladd at 20th Century Fox was looking for a director for Alien, and thought I’d suit it. How the hell he worked that out, I don’t know.”

It isn’t just that Scott’s second and third films were sci-fi landmarks in Alien and Blade Runner. It’s that both films retained the painterly qualities of The Duellists and, pacing-wise, stubbornly challenged the audience. In a futuristic setting, Scott’s films could oscillate between beauty and repulsion depending on the angle of the shadows. By then, Scott was already drawing his own meticulous storyboards. “Now my boards are literally shot for shot,” he says. “I will draw the scene.”

He recalls an early gig with the BBC that involved shooting a live drama with six cameras. “I learned to literally make a fucking decision. My career has been based on just making a fucking decision.” He explains that Napoleon and Gladiator II were shot in, respectively, 48 and 51 days; films of that size typically take 100 days. “The one I just finished, The Dog Stars, is 34 days. It’s the speed of a TV show but maybe my best movie.”

What makes it his best movie? “Every movie is a discovery of who you are, and making choices about actors. Before I speak to anybody, I look at everything they’ve done. I cast Jacob Elordi, Margaret Qualley, Guy Pearce, and Josh Brolin. Frequently, the biggest thing I’m good at is casting. If they’re available, normally I get them.”

Scott points towards The Counselor, an existential thriller that starred Michael Fassbender, Penélope Cruz, Javier Bardem, Brad Pitt, and Cameron Diaz. Despite bombing at the box-office and with critics in 2013, it’s been reappraised as a modern classic. “The basic audience just wants to be entertained. A lesser part of them wants to be educated. And if it’s at all highbrow? Forget it. So there’s three categories. I always go for what fascinates me. I’m not saying I’m highbrow, but I guess I am. I’ve won some and lost some. I’ve never regretted anything at all, because they all landed eventually – which is frustrating. If they’d landed immediately, then I’d be seeing money.”

Written by Cormac McCarthy, The Counselor is a sinister, slow-burn thriller with gory murders, perplexing monologues, and Diaz fornicating with a car windshield. “It’s the best dialogue I’ve ever read,” says Scott. “The doom factor put people off. They want to be entertained and eat fucking popcorn.”

During a career-spanning conversation, Scott reveals plans for another Gladiator sequel (“it’s at a conference room level – without a doubt, we’ll go for Gladiator III”) and insists I watch his “fucking majestic” 1492: Conquest of Paradise. He explains that his visual aesthetic originates from his years as a camera operator on commercials. “I don’t want to negotiate what I want things to look like. I think, ‘That’s what I want.’”

Scott is an anomaly amongst directors for his love of multiple cameras. He recalls asking the late Harris Savides to be his cinematographer on American Gangster. “Harris said, ‘But you use more than one camera.’ I said, ‘Stop buggering about.’ One day, I heard him say to the gaffer, ‘I can’t stand this.’ The gaffer said, ‘Actually, I really love it.’ But Harris did a fabulous job.”

Scott explains that, with single-camera shoots, actors get bored. “You turn the camera around, and the other guy, who’s been saying it off-camera, has to do it on-camera. By then, they’re half-dead.” Isn’t The Dog Stars lensed by Erik Messerschmidt, who’s used to doing 100-plus takes for David Fincher? “Yeah. We did eight cameras. I think he quite liked it.”

Not so keen is John Mathieson, the cinematographer on six of Scott’s features. After working on Gladiator II, Mathieson told The DocFix Documentary Storytelling Podcast that Scott’s use of multiple cameras is “really lazy”, “impatient”, and “not very good for cinematography”. Mathieson has since apologised and claimed he was unfairly edited. Would Scott work with him again? “He said something really extraordinary on a podcast. I thought, ‘What?! WHAT!!! And that was it. Sorry, dude. That’s it.” He laughs. “Maybe he’d had a few pints.”

As for Scott maintaining the same excitement for The Dog Stars that he had for The Duellists, he says, “You’re born with it, or you’re not. I don’t soul-search. I’ve got three films written, ready to go. What I’m hoping will be next is [a biopic about] the Bee Gees. Then I’ve got a great western called Freewalkers. And then I’ve got a First World War film based on John Harris’s Covenant with Death.” Scott describes the book to me, which he’s adored for 50 years. “It’s a marvellous narrative that I’ve never seen before in a war film. It’s funny and class-conscious, because you’ve got miners mixing with middle-class men. You discover: one guy dies, just like anybody else.”

So these films need to be added to the next BFI retrospective? “Well, yeah,” says Scott. “That’s the next three years. I better stay alive.”

Ridley Scott: Building Cinematic Worlds runs at BFI Southbank and BFI IMAX from 1 September to 8 October.