directors' cuts

Cinematic visionaries pay tribute to the genius of Ridley Scott

christopher Nojan

The world-building auteur behind Oppenheimer, Inception and the Dark Knight trilogy on Ridley’s lasting influence.

I think Ridley Scott’s signatures have changed over time, which is one of the marks of a great artist. When he started, the painterly quality of the imagery was the primary thing that you were looking at, and there was a revolutionary aspect to what he brought to pop visual iconography in the late 70s and early 80s. The use of smoke on set. The backlighting. The use of certain motifs, like spinning fan blades. They were really taken up by the culture as a whole. But it’s been amazing to see his evolution as an artist through the years. He’s never really repeated himself, which is almost unique amongst filmmakers. Even with something like Prometheus, where he’s actually doing a prequel for Alien, it’s got a very different look and a very different feel.

My personal relationship with his work started when I was at school. I first encountered Blade Runner when I was 12 or 13, in the days when VHS was new, and I saw it in discrete chunks on a very poor-quality pirate VHS. The freshness of that vision, the world that was created: it came across, even in that format.

I think that would probably be the equivalent today of a teenager discovering a great film on their phone. When the vision is truly as outstanding as Blade Runner, and when the world creation is so complete and so radical and new, it just came across in any format.

And when I was able to see the film as a whole, I watched it again and again and again. I always had to watch it on VHS. But when I went to London as a student, I was able to see it at the National Film Theatre on a 35mm print, and that was just fantastic. It was the first time I was able to see it in ’Scope, and I was noticing things in the edges of the frame that I’d never seen before. And that was a couple of years prior to the 1992 rerelease. It’s a film that I know very well and that I’ve seen literally hundreds of times.

It’s one of the films that helps reconnect me to the potential of movies. Every year or so, I will put it on, and have another look at it. There’s always something new to find. Your relationship with great movies evolves over time.

I saw Alien soon after watching Blade Runner. I had been too young to see it on its initial release. These were two very different films - they’re both science fiction, but they have different actors, different stories, set in different worlds - and yet I could see something was connecting them. The same mind was behind them. That was really the first time that I ever took on board the idea of what a director is, and what a director can bring in terms of a personal vision to films. Those films are so clearly made by the same primary creative force, and that’s the force of a director. That was when I started to figure out what I wanted to do in the film business.

So much of the obsession of people considering his work was about the purely visual, but I think it was always more than that. It was always about texture. It was about creating a world, and letting the audience come into that world. You watch his films, and you know what things will smell like, and what they feel like. There’s a wonderful texture to it, with the costume design, with the hair and make-up, with the choice of casting, and the wonderful performances in those films.

He’s never really repeated himself, which is almost unique among filmmakers

Christopher Nojan

His use of music is second to none. It’s like Stanley Kubrick: he’s just got this absolute control of how music needs to function in the narrative. And the layering of the soundtrack on Blade Runner – there are just little fragments of voices and machine noises and things, with the type of music by Vangelis that blends seamlessly into sound design.

I’m hugely influenced by the sound design in his films. Watching his films is never like listening to a radio play. It’s a complete world where the details of the frame – the other things going on in the frame – are given equal weight. There’s a very immersive quality to it. It’s quite wonderful.

When you consider the individual innovations that Ridley brought to first the advertising world and then the movie business, it’s reductive to try to pull them apart because just as soon as you’ve got a handle on things that are in Alien, things that are in Blade Runner or Black Rain, along comes Thelma & Louise, which is connected to them by its extraordinary visual sense – and its sense of world-building, and creating a time and place that the audience goes into – but utterly different in terms of subject matter, and in terms of emotional connection with the material.

I’ve been honoured to meet Ridley a couple of times, and have always had nice, cordial exchanges. But I’m such an enormous fan, I’ve never really wanted to burden him with my outpourings of enthusiasm for his body of work. But I’d love to, one day, sit down and pick his brain on a lot of his attitudes and approaches to cinema, because I think he’s one of the most unique voices that’s ever existed in film, and his darkest visions are implanted in my subconscious with as much weight as real memories.

Guijjeermo dej Toro

The modern master of fantasy and horror behind Pan’s Labyrinth, The Shape of Water and Pinocchio on Ridley’s peerless craft and discipline.

I heard repeatedly that Stanley Kubrick was very, very fond, and very much in admiration, of both Ridley and [his late brother] Tony Scott, in different ways.

Ridley is, in my opinion, the superb stylist, visually, of that generation. You have Adrian Lyne, you have Alan Parker, you have Tony, you have Ridley – this influx of English directors that came from commercials. But Ridley Scott brings a gravitas to the image. He’s not worried about just things looking good, but things looking beautiful as storytelling devices. So the way he designs wardrobe to tell the story, and the way he designs sets to tell the story. His incredible command of light and lensing and staging.

He’s a superb, unstoppable craftsman. To me, it’s just stunning. We talk about the golden-era craftsmen like Victor Fleming or Raoul Walsh or William Wellman, who shot one or two movies a year and were unstoppable; Ridley Scott is 85 and he remains a film-shooting machine. The amount of discipline and the amount of craft and tools and artistry that come with a career that long is just staggering. I’m not talking just about his classics like The Duellists or Blade Runner or Alien or any of those. Also his later work. I saw The Last Duel at the theatre, and I had to pick up some popcorn with my jaw! The final duel, particularly the moment with the horse kick to the helmet… I just go, ‘How is he still coming up with these moments? How is he still designing moments that are visceral?’ Every decade, you can go and see two or three of his movies that are right up there.

Ridley Scott is 85 and he remains a film-shooting machine

Guiffermo dej Toro

He fights for his vision. I love that he has been that way from the beginning. When I think about his shooting of Alien… It was fraught with influences that were trying to shape him. And he resisted everything. He resisted strong producers. He went in for a sort of Gothic look for the spaceship that was medieval science-fiction, almost, and he contrasted it with areas of the shoot that were Kubrickian. He was innovating the language. It was strong. He was very direct, very simple in his strengths. It was only his vision. From then until now.

I always say that the director is someone who assembles an orchestra. You can take from fine art like he did with Giger, or you can take from pulp or comics like he did with Moebius. When a visual language includes a sliding rule that goes from pop culture all the way to fine art, and you discuss both with equal ease, that’s the vocabulary you want as a director. Ridley Scott can give you the visual punch of pop art, like Chris Frost or Moebius, or he can give you classical-painting references. And that’s because he was from the Royal College of Art. He understands the vernacular of fine art and the vernacular of pop art. I think he’s one of those directors that knows more than many of his heads of departments, so he’s not asking, he’s arranging, and he should not have patience with anyone else if that’s what he thinks is right. And that is admirable.

Gareth Edmards

The British filmmaker who has built immersive sci-fi worlds in Monsters, Rogue One and The Creator on being inspired by Ridley’s unbeatable visions.

I think the first Ridley Scott film I saw was Alien. But I think I did it backwards and watched Aliens first, and then Alien. With every movie I make, I basically gather a whole bunch of reference images. I go to every film ever made, and every photography book I’ve ever bought, and I start going through one by one and highlighting anything that looks good. And by the end of the process, you can essentially see what got a high score, and every single film ever, it’s a close call between Blade Runner or Alien. It’s the high benchmark of cinematography and production design, in one. And what’s funny is, they’re not the kind of films that… It’s not so much how you feel the first times you watch them; it’s the fact that you can revisit them 300 times, and you’re still in that world. It’s that perfect mix of high art and commerciality. People say The Empire Strikes Back, but Alien and Blade Runner have that award, I think.

To be honest, Blade Runner crept up on me. I saw it as a kid and I was probably the wrong age to see it. Obviously I was a big Star Wars fan, and a big Indiana Jones fan, and there was going to be a science-fiction film with that guy in it. I think it was lost on me as a kid. I understood that it was an amazing world that imprinted itself in my brain, but I didn’t race to revisit. I saw it again when I was about 16 or 17 when it got rereleased as a director’s cut, and I went with my dad to the cinema. I’d watched it a fair bit on VHS, but that was the time when it really hit me: ‘Wait a minute, this is a masterpiece.’ I think that’s what’s true of really great films – whatever you think of them the first time you watch them, they then impregnate your brain, subconsciously. And then you find yourself trying to emulate them. And you think it’s your idea. Like, ‘You know what, it would be great if one day someone made a movie a bit like an anime, but photoreal.’ Then after a while you go, ‘What am I on about? Ridley did it fucking years ago. It’s Blade Runner.’ It’s really hard to watch films like Akira and all these other amazing groundbreaking movies that are exceptional at world-building, and separate them from Blade Runner. Blade Runner, basically, is responsible, I think, for the whole anime/manga genre. Ridley’s got a phenomenal eye. The best eye there’s ever been in cinema, potentially. I don’t know how you can work that fast and so constantly. I think his weapon of choice is having all these ingredients in front of the camera and then he’s curating them to get this perfect cinematic moment. And that’s something he can do to his dying day. It’s not something you lose over time. A lot of people as they get older, their skill set diminishes, but a lot of painters did their best work until their last days. And I think he’s very painterly in the way that he makes films and visualises them.

Those early films achieved the ultimate high score – they are unbeatable

Gareth Edmards

What’s most heartbreaking about Ridley Scott is, in those first, early films that inspire you to want to make films, he achieved the ultimate high score. They are unbeatable. It’s a double-edged sword because he’s inspired me and other filmmakers like me to aspire to that greatness, but we can’t beat him. You’re doomed to failure. So it’s kind of a love-hate thing: ‘Damn you, Ridley, what’s the point of carrying on, because we’re never going to make something better than Alien or Blade Runner.’

Denis Vijjeneuve

The celebrated director of Arrival, Blade Runner 2049 and Dune on a sci-fi legend.

Ridley Scott is an absolute visual master. He is by far one of the greatest world-builders of our time. His level of aesthetic sophistication can be matched by very few in cinema history. For sci-fi filmmakers of my generation, he’s a legend, an enduring reference. He revolutionised science fiction by blending it with other genres, by bringing a disturbing realism. He is also one of the first filmmakers, after Kubrick, who made science fiction for adults without concession.

He is a force of nature. His level of energy and his work ethics are impressive. He is one of the most prolific filmmakers I’ve known.