Ridley Scott Quotes
Film Producer, Director
Life isn't black and white. It's a million gray areas, don't you find?
It doesn't matter how much faith you have or don't have. I just don't buy the idea that we're alone. There's got to be some form of life out there.
A hit for me is if I enjoy the movie, if I personally enjoy the movie.
That's part of the policy: To keep switching gears.
I think, at the end of the day, filmmaking is a team, but eventually there's got to be a captain.
I don't get attached to anything. I'm like a good antique dealer. I'm prepared to sell my most valuable table.
Politics is very interesting and always leads to conflict.
I'm agnostic because I went through the usual process of parents insisting you go to church, and yet they didn't. So there's me, sitting in the chairs, thinking, 'Jeez, why am I here? I'd rather be playing tennis, seriously.'
I had been very impressed with the voiceover of 'Apocalypse Now,' with Martin Sheen's voice. That was a great voiceover; it really internalized the Martin Sheen character, who was essentially fairly low key and didn't say a lot during the whole movie. But he thought a lot, so I always thought that was really great.
How can you look at the galaxy and not feel insignificant?
People have no idea how physically tough doing a film is.
Digital is a different world because you are sitting at home and a hi tech piece of equipment today is within reach of most people, so they are watching a pretty hi tech version of whatever you've done.
I made the mistake of saying I was an atheist at one point, when I was doing 'Kingdom of Heaven.'
People say I pay too much attention to the look of a movie but for God's sake, I'm not producing a Radio 4 Play for Today, I'm making a movie that people are going to look at.
Good FBI officers are not noticeable. You would never look at them.
Taking a comic strip character is very hard to write. Because comics are meant to work in one page, to work in frames with minimalistic dialogue. And a lot of it is left to the imagination of the reader. To do that in film, you've got to be a little more explanatory. And that requires a good screenplay and good dialogue.
The great attraction to 'American Gangster' is these two great characters who are absolute paradoxes within their own sphere.
'Alien' is a landmark. One of the really good science-fiction films.
In my view, the only way to see a film remains the way the filmmaker intended: inside a large movie theater with great sound and pristine picture.
There's still a lot of investors wondering what to invest in. And, of course, I think entertainment looks attractive when you read the few films that make these insane amounts of money. What they don't know is they don't always do that.
I like Wadi Rum - it's the best view I've ever seen of what could be Mars.
I was always amazed about how much I could finally squeeze into a thirty second commercial.
I started late. I didn't make my first movie until I was 40.
Stanley Kubrick's '2001' was the door that opened up the possibility of science fiction for me. Everything else up to then was fine, but didn't quite work for me.
Blade Runner appears regularly, two or three times a year in various shapes and forms of science fiction. It set the pace for what is essentially urban science fiction, urban future and it's why I've never re-visited that area because I feel I've done it.
The best stories come out of the truth.
Scaring someone's the hardest thing to do, and that's why most of these scary movies are not scary. They're sick, but not scary. There's a lot of sickness out there, of people who then sit there and watch it, which I think is absolutely dismaying.
On rare occasions, Dad used to reminisce about when he met Eisenhower and how Churchill would pop in, in the late hours of the evening or night, carrying a cigar, when he'd obviously had a good dinner.
Conscience, the power of conscience, can unearth all kinds of things.
And anyway, it's only movies. to stop me I think they'll ahve to shoot me in the head.
I'm used to very strong women because my mother was particularly strong, and my father was away all the time. My mother was a big part of bringing up three boys, so I was fully versed in the strength of a powerful woman, and accepted that as the status quo.
Same thing with film, by the time you've finished shooting and you've really been into everything, you've touched up everything in the editing room. You've gone in there and taken little bits from everything.
The very first film I ever saw was a pirate movie called 'The Black Swan' with Tyrone Power. And I thought that was great stuff. Of course, in those days, Technicolor was really Technicolor; there was no such thing as desaturation. Everybody looked super suntanned.
When you're watching a documentary, the danger is to romanticize.
When you're in the editing room, the dangerous thing is that it becomes like telling a joke again and again and again. Eventually, the joke starts to not be funny. So you have to be careful that you're not throwing the baby out with the bath water.
Do what you haven't done is the key, I think.
I think one of the successes of Gladiator is how we manage to turn on a dime the character from one thing to another where you believe he is one thing and he is something very different.
I knew exactly what to do on Alien, it was funny.
The ego is there, but I'm learning to channel it.
I come out of TV. I come out of live television, BBC drama: that's where I started first as a designer, then a director. Then I went independent TV, then television advertising.
The Gulf of Mexico, they believe, is a huge asteroid. That was an impact zone, you know that? Yeah, for that big a thing to actually hit our globe, it would have had to adjusted the spin, the axis.
I get so used to working with writers that my prime occupation is development.
I'm fundamentally a positive person. Otherwise, I wouldn't be doing some of the insane movies that I do.
Everyone is tearing each other apart in the name of their personal god. And the irony is, by definition, they're probably worshiping the same god.
There has to be absolute trust between the tiger and its master, but its master must be the master - there must be no mistake about that.
What you do, is you gradually become more and more experienced, and more and more realistic about dramatic tolerance, i.e. about how long the play should be.
The word 'religion' is only a label. What lies behind that, the most important thing of all, is the word 'faith'. You either have faith, or you don't have faith, or you have degrees of faith - and if you have degrees of faith, then you become agnostic. You're kind of in-between, or you're on the fence.
Actors are all different. They're not all volatile. Some are sweet, some are volatile, but what is fundamentally in there is something that has to be paid attention to, in that they are, I would say, needy.
Far from being dead, physical media has years of life left and must be preserved because there is no better alternative.
For 'Prometheus,' I came back to a very simple question that haunted me that appears in the first 'Alien,' and no one answered in subsequent Alien films: who was the 'Space Jockey' - the big guy in the seat? If you really go into that, it becomes the basis for a pretty interesting story.
Cast is everything.
I love designing, and I still do it.
I'll reshoot a corridor 13 different ways, and you'll never recognise them.
I used to agonise over what to do next, but now I'm making a movie a year. It's insane, but it's only a movie after all. You just hang in there, and occasionally you might make something which you can call art... briefly.
I was one of those kids who tended to stay in on Saturday nights. My mother used to come and say, 'Why don't you go to the dance with the boys?' And I'm going, 'No, I'm perfectly happy.' I think my parents thought I was definitely weird.
Sacred texts give no specific depiction of God, so for centuries, artists and filmmakers have had to choose their own visual depiction.
Your landscape in a western is one of the most important characters the film has. The best westerns are about man against his own landscape.
And I maintain good relationships with all the studios so I've never been bullied into any cut, frankly.
I am a science fiction enthusiast, really, deep down.
History is only conjecture, and the best historians try to do it as accurately as they can. They try to accurately reassemble the facts and then put them down on paper.
I didn't want to go down the route of spending a year of my life making a movie that would never be seen. I may as well go down a route making a film that a lot of people will see, which is the whole idea behind cinema.
Dad entered the Second World War like any other man, trying to do the right thing.
MPC, Moving Picture Company, they're really excellent, they did the majority of the effects.
If you ever have a kid who doesn't know what to do, stick him in art school. It's amazing what evolves.
I do a pretty good job at casting actually.
I think if I'm going to do a science fiction, I'm going to go down a new path that I want to do.
I watched Someone to Watch Over Me the other night. I thought it was a really good movie. It's a great movie.
I'm really intrigued by those eternal questions of creation and belief and faith. I don't care who you are, it's what we all think about. It's in the back of all our minds.
I'm a very practical person.
If I have to, I'll go and direct theater and talk till the cows come home.
Some people like to do everything always the same thing. That's another way: To do the same thing.
It's everything and I always make decisions about the cast.
My career seems to be a career of non-specific subjects which are all over the place.
But Gladiator is one of my favourite adventures because I really loved going into the world. I loved creating the world to the degree where you could almost smell it.
I try to make films, not movies. I've never liked the expression 'movie', but it sounds elitist to say that.
Yes, obviously, there's this degree of wanting people to accept other people faiths and philosophies.
When you're doing a big movie, you're gone for 10 months to a year.
If you believe, you believe; if you're faithful, you're faithful. I don't care what your religion is. The same if you're agnostic. That should be accepted, too.
I was always aware that this whole Earth is on overload.
I don't ever blink, honestly.
There's some politicians who still seriously believe that we haven't got global warming.
When I started the original 'Alien,' Ripley wasn't a woman, it was a guy.
I've always avoided sequels, unless I felt there was something fresh.
Egypt was - as it is now - a confluence of cultures, as a result of being a crossroads geographically between Africa, the Middle East and Europe.
Fire is our first form of technology.
Doing science fiction at a high level is tricky. It's really tricky.
I always shoot my movies with score as certainly part of the dialogue. Music is dialogue. People don't think about it that way, but music is actually dialogue. And sometimes music is the final, finished, additional dialogue. Music can be one of the final characters in the film.
I think sci-fi can easily be PG.
It's hard writing screenplays.
'Alien' is a C film elevated to an A film, honestly, by it being well done and a great monster. If it hadn't had that great monster, even with a wonderful cast, it wouldn't have been as good, I don't think.
Churchill strikes a note in my life because my father worked on Mulberry Harbour, which was the code name for the temporary concrete harbours which were towed across the Channel to make the D-day landings in France possible.
I don't go to the cinema often anymore - I'd rather just pop in a disk and get the biggest monitor you've got, and if the quality is superb, I can watch a film, and if I don't like it I can pop it out.
Perhaps because of my background as a graphic designer, I'm drawn to rich and beautiful colors.
I've seen some of James Cameron's work, and I've got to go 3D.
I am in a constant stage of development.
There's a big film industry in Egypt, and quite a big one in Syria, and there's a big Muslim community in Paris.
'Blade Runner' was a comic strip. It was a comic strip! It was a very dark comic strip. Comic metaphorically.
When you think about it, 'Avatar' is almost completely an animated movie.
In science fiction, we're always searching for new frontiers. We're drawn to the unknown.
I tend to watch a lot of lower-budget movies to find out what's doing down there and find out who's coming up.