Ridley Scott on Adam Driver, explosions, and the subjectivity of art
The legendary director tells us what he thinks about creating films for the masses: "I don’t make movies for that lot."
Film Features Adam Driver
While he’s as prolific now at 83 as he was decades ago, Ridley Scott is still having somewhat of a banner year. He’s directed two high-profile films this year—The Last Duel and House Of Gucci—and he’s making headlines (again) for his brutal comments on the state of cinema today. We sat down with the legendary director to ask him about Adam Driver, his roiling work schedule, and the subjectivity of art.
The A.V. Club: You have a few big movies this year, and you’re a busy, busy guy. Does it ever feel like a lot?
Ridley Scott: Never.
AVC: You just like being busy?
RS: What am I going to do? Walk the dogs? No, I need to work. And as long as they want me to do it, I feel privileged, but I’ve earned it.
AVC: You’ve made so many movies in your career. Are there certain movies that you become fonder of over time or that you’ve thought were overlooked at the time?
RS: Well, I think there have been a few overlooked and to a shocking degree, actually. But if you’re talking about awards, awards don’t mean that much to me.
I think what’s more important to me is that I’m allowed or they want me to continue working. Then, it’s all to do with “Have you got material that people want?” I have to come through the door with material because people stopped offering me films years ago because mostly I’m the hardest person to choose a subject for and therefore they don’t try. For the most part, I say, “Not really, but thank you for thinking of me for that,” if it gets to that.
Occasionally something will come in, like The Martian landed on my desk and they said, “What do you think? This has been on the shelf for two years.” So then I can come in and then go, “But this is a comedy!” And they go, “What?” I said, “Yes, it’s a comedy. And that’s why it never got made.” So I do big adjustments like that, right?
Alien landed on my desk. I was fifth choice. The guy before me, bizarrely, was a great filmmaker called Robert Altman. But what on earth would you offer Robert Altman Alien for? He must have got to the breakfast scene and started thinking, “What??” But because of where I come from, which was fundamentally being a pretty good art director, I could see what I could do with it immediately. So I said, “I’ll do it.” So, you know, it’s horses for courses.
AVC: In House Of Gucci, there are some scenes that I really love that seem very real. For instance, there’s a scene in the bathtub with Lady Gaga and Adam Driver that seems spontaneous and natural and true. How do you create an environment on set to help actors work to their best potential?
RS: You make them work to their best potential.
AVC: Well, ask them to?
RS: No, I forced them to. It’s a big deal for me.
I’ve just gotten pretty good at casting. I don’t get into the medium-sized and smaller parts because I’ve got a lot going on when we’re going to do a movie. But I’ve almost always got in mind who will be the leading characters in the film. So when I’m reading it or preparing it, I’m preparing for so-and-so, so-and-so, and so-and-so on the basis that they’ll be the first bit we’ll go to.
So once I’ve got that in line and I get who I need to, the rest becomes forming a friendship and partnership with the actor. Because to me, I don’t believe in the Svengali process unless you’re casting a 6-year-old boy who’s never done anything before, and then you’re into trying to persuade this kid to do his thing.
With actors, you’ve cast great actors so that they don’t have to be stars. There’s a lot of great actors out there who are not stars. Once I’ve got a great actor, I tend to chat with them about anything but the script. I want to know who they are, how they think. I want to know how fast they are on their feet mentally because I’m pretty quick, and I want them to be able to evolve and grow with me on the set.
AVC: Do you consider yourself loyal to different actors, or do you just want the best actor for the role, period, no matter who it is?
RS: Well, I think you tend to go for who is best for the particular character. But I have worked with Russell Crowe five times and I’ve worked with Michael Fassbender four times, so it does happen where once you work with somebody and it’s A) got to be good fun. If it’s as if it’s a mountainous, difficult climb, forget it. You don’t want to go there again.
So, partly it’s how well you get on and how well does it evolve. The better you know somebody, the easier it is to say, “You know what? That wasn’t quite right. Can we do it this way?” So you have a real dialogue as opposed to a polite exchange. You need to get real and have a real dialogue pretty quick.
AVC: You’ve worked with Adam Driver two times this year alone.
RS: There you go.
AVC: What do you like about working with him and how did you develop that dialogue?
RS: Well, I was planning Gucci and I was making The Last Duel. I think Adam was literally trying on the chainmail and I said, “You know what, I’ve got a screenplay I want you to read this weekend.” He said, “What?” I said, “I’ve got this really interesting role. You may want to do it. I think you should read it.” And he read it that weekend and said, “Damn, okay.”
AVC: You caught him at just the right time. He had the right hole in his schedule.
RS: I overlap, otherwise, I’ve found you’ve got horrible gaps.
When you finish a movie—and everyone doesn’t do this same trick. You go find your own technique. But as I finish and I’ve said, “It’s a wrap,” I’ve been so inside that film for weeks or actually months. I’ve led my editor—and you’ve got to have a very good editor to do this. I trust the editor I have, Claire Simpson, totally. So she’s already cutting it and has been for the entire run of the movie.
I will then say, “How soon to a director’s cut?” She may say two weeks. Normally it’d be 14 weeks. She says, “I’m ready,” in three weeks, and I walk in. I’m really nervous because I’m now separated and fresh. I’m clear in my head. I’ve actually been working on something up until we sit down.
I have an assistant sitting next to me because once you start the screening, you cannot look away. If you go and write a note, that doesn’t work. You miss something. My films are organic, so I’ll just sit there watching, and calling out, “That! That! That! That!” and my assistant will be making a note of the number on the screen.
Then, after the screening, she’ll say, “So, you said something about the bathroom scene,” and I’ll say, “Oh, yeah.” I’ll give my critique on things that I saw because I’m fresh and [Claire’s] been editing. It is clearly less fresh and therefore to me, I’m coming in a bit like a computer. So far it seems to work quite well. But it means I can overlap one movie onto the next project.
AVC: I really loved The Last Duel, and I’ve been in rooms of women critics where they just rave about it, but we’ve also all talked about how, when we go look at most of the reviews, they’re written by men, and they didn’t like the movie or just didn’t see what we saw there. Have you experienced that?
RS: You know, everyone has a right to their opinion, and I realized that many, many, many, many, many years ago. There are many, many, many different layers. There’s a layer which I call the great unwashed, which is my favorite expression. It’s very rude and it’s fucking meant to be, because I don’t make movies for that lot.
I was, frankly, brutalized by a critic called Pauline Kael for a film called Blade Runner. Her review was systematically destructive and I had never met her. I didn’t meet her. She did four pages about it in The New Yorker, which is a very posh magazine. I was so in shock. I mean, it was a personal shock.
I framed those four pages and I have them hanging in my office today, and they remind me, with the greatest respect to journalists and critics, that I never read my own critique. When I’ve left the production, I have to have my opinion about what I did and I will move on.
If you get great critique, you think you’re walking on a cloud. If you get bad critique, you want to kill yourself. So it’s best to avoid both.
AVC: That brings me to another topic, then. You are well known for having strong opinions about all different kinds of movies. Do you think that taste is subjective? As in, are some things just not for you, or are there good movies and bad movies, full stop?
RS: No, there’s definite columns of intent. Studios will have a certain level of content that they will want because they think they’re going to be sure things. The thing they forget is there is no sure thing, but you can design a movie which will be sentimental, melodramatic, full of visual effects and no real story. And the visual effects support the fact there is no story. And so you, for the most part, are aiming at somebody who’s going to sit there with a giant bag of popcorn and Pepsi cola and watch it and not get what’s happening other than it’s noisy and it’s colorful and there are a great deal of visual effects.
Am I being rough?
AVC: No, but I do think sometimes you just want to go and watch stuff blow up.
RS: No, I never do and I never have done, even as a kid. I remember first seeing, and I think I was a teen, but I remember the first time I ever saw what I thought was quite a serious film. I think it was Orson Welles. He made it at 19 years old, Citizen Kane. I knew that right there, there was the difference and that’s who I wanted to be. David Lean, same thing. Occasionally you just see something and say, “That’s what I want to do.”
57 Comments
“And so you, for the most part, are aiming at somebody who’s going to sit
there with a giant bag of popcorn and Pepsi cola and watch it and not
get what’s happening other than it’s noisy and it’s colorful and there
are a great deal of visual effects.”So…Spandex Movies in other words? Which, while I’m not a fan I have to admit are not the worst thing in the world. I mean, there’s Transformer movies so…
I think some people are just not great at parsing action-adventure type movies, and can’t discern a good one from a bad one – so if the genre’s not to their taste, they assume them all to be similarly bad.
In the case of Marvel they ARE all similarly bad – at least, what is bad is shared across the series.Let’s take Shang-Chi, since I watched it on the weekend. When it’s allowed to be it’s own movie, it’s pretty good – the bus scene is fantastic! – but then it has to be a Marvel movie. So it has to tie into the mythology even though it’s an awkward fit. The final battles are all CGI and shiny lights – including what could have been a meaningful hand-to-hand fight turning into two people throwing colored lights at each other in the area from the opening of FFVIII. At its worst, it’s exactly what Scott describes – noisy, colorful and full of visual effects. I say this as someone who mostly liked that movie, it does exactly what he says.Marvel movies all do what he complains about – descend into pointless CGI spectacle. It’s the house style. He’s not unable to parse that type of movie, he’s seeing their flaws for what they are. Hell this is a big reason why I personally have Marvel fatigue – even if I like it I know it’s going to do things I hate.
Let’s grab a beer together because you are officially my favorite poster. And I agree with everything you wrote.
I think Shang Chi has the burden of being a marvel movie and Disney movie, in fact it may be the most Disney MCU film so far. The narrative has a lot of MCU tropes but Shang feels like an male Asian version of a Disney princess.
Going to a Marvel movie is like eating a meal at Chili’s and sneaking the appetizer and dessert in from a Michelin starred restaurant, and while I can’t actually say I’ve ever had a bad meal at Chili’s, personally, I’m not dying to go there.
Something about saying “Pepsi cola” makes it sound like he’s talking about the kids and their Nintendos. I think he was going to say Soda Pop, but then decided that the unwashed masses don’t call it that any longer because they can no longer appreciate the true artistic intent that used to go into brewing carbonated beverages.
As an American I always thought the general rule was “Soda” in the North, “pop” in the South by and large…
used to be tonic in the northeast but that’s gone out of style, alas
It’s way more varied than that. I’m in the south, and most of the people I know have always called it soda. A few of my friends do that thing where they call them all “cokes”. I’ve always associated “pop” with the midwest.But nobody uses Pepsi as a catchall. It would have been properly sneering if he’d said Mountain Dew instead.
I’ve heard “Coke” in the Northeast admittedly. I will say all my Southeast (aka Eastbound AND DOWN family) say pop: I have family in Virginia, Georgia and Florida. But either way, fuck Pepsi.
Orson Welles just gets younger and younger.
He directed that shit from the womb.
No kidding.
“Serve no whine before its time!”
I am definitely enjoying Ridley Scott’s “no fucks given” approach to press cycles this year.
How do you create an environment on set to help actors work to their best potential?
RS: You make them work to their best potential.
AVC: Well, ask them to?
RS: No, I forced them to.
“So once I’ve got that in line and I get who I need to, the rest becomes forming a friendship and partnership with the actor. Because to me, I don’t believe in the Svengali process unless you’re casting a 6-year-old boy who’s never done anything before, and then you’re into trying to persuade this kid to do his thing.”
Well that quote’s never gonna come back and haunt anybody.
It’s interesting “so and so” is such a part of his vocabulary since I still mostly associate it with his “Mohammad so-and-so” press quote from Exodus, which soured me on his persona.
He pointed out that to get movies financed that he needed big stars vs. even beginning to consider casting non-white in roles where it’d make sense to do so (like biblical figures).
While I do sort of get his point, where exactly is he discovering these stars if he looks down on more mainstream content and doesn’t bother engaging with it? It’s not like Scott has never worked with people of color, but off the top of my head a lot of the time they’re bigger names still playing fourth or fifth fiddle to some white actors, who are essentially nobodies to the greater populace he looks down on.
“And so you, for the most part, are aiming at somebody who’s going to sit
there with a giant bag of popcorn and Pepsi cola and watch it and not
get what’s happening other than it’s noisy and it’s colorful and there
are a great deal of visual effects.”Yeah lord knows Aliens is the pinnacle of intellectual film making.
I mean, Alien is smart as shit, what are you talking about.
Aliens (1986) dir. James Cameron
Haha shit you’re right, let me change that to Prometheus!
In an incredibly odd choice of back-to-back film watching, I saw Prometheus and Stillet Licht back to back, and I realized they were fundamentally the same: Fantastic looking movies that thought they had something meaningful to say but everything they said was very stupid.
Never saw Stillet Licht but that’s a real good description of Prometheus.
Silent Light > Prometheus. No scientist/astronauts taking off their helmets to bring an unknown species up to their face.
That JO motion needs to be a bit bigger to match Scott’s commentary.
Ehh.. Prometheus at least had some interesting ideas and was expressly a “Pepsi and popcorn” style movie. It’s just a shame the majority of characters in the film make absurd choices.
Who am I to tell Ridley Scott not to be an old crank, but I think we can all agree that anyone who doesn’t occasionally want to see stuff blow up is a weird dork.
As more and more of these directors come out to say (or are asked by reporters and say) that superhero movies are for dumb babies, I think of how pointless it is to divide movies into these worthy/unworthy categories. The fact is, our brains crave variety in entertainment just like our bodies do with food. Sometimes I want to see a film that makes me think about the big questions of humanity, so I’ll watch something like ‘Moonlight’. Other times, I just want to feed the part of my brain that likes big thrills, so I’ll watch a Marvel movie or a Fast and Furious film if I want something really ridiculous. Sometimes I want something witty, and it’s Wes Anderson time.Scott says he doesn’t want to watch action films ever. I guess I can see that; some people won’t ever eat mushrooms, no matter how well they’re cooked. I can respect that. But don’t tell me I’m an idiot because I like mushrooms.
“That lot”? Then who the fuck is the audience for Gladiator 2?
Yeah, it’s definitely an interesting attitude to take for a solidly middle brow director.
Hard to call him “middle-brow” when he’s directed some of the greatest movies of all-time.But yes, he certainly has a lot of filler in his oeuvre. Beyond a few directors , like Lean, Kubrick and perhaps Tarantino and Nolan, who doesn’t have some less-than-stellar works?
I call the great unwashed, which is my favorite expression. It’s very rude and it’s fucking meant to be, because I don’t make movies for that lot.Yes, I’m sure the great unwashed are aware of what of how you expect them to behave while basking in your presence.
Great reminder that he’s always been fairly cantankerous.
now i kinda want to see Ridley Scott do a movie adaptation of Married with Children
There’s a layer which I call the great unwashed, which is my favorite expression. It’s very rude and it’s fucking meant to be, because I don’t make movies for that lot.Lmao okay guy. Let’s not pretend like Robin Hood was aspiring to high art. Scott was just on Maron crying about how The Last Duel bombed because millennials can’t get off their phones so he’s in full on crank mode.
Or maybe, The Last Duel bombed because it was terribly marketed and had a very small audience that would of seen it to begin with
Scott was just on Maron crying about how The Last Duel bombed because millennials can’t get off their phones
This is hilarious. No, it couldn’t possibly be that a couple Massholes in a historical drama about sexual assault in medieval France sounds like a fake trailer straight out of Tropic Thunder (I’m aware the movie itself is quite good, which is quite a change from his last couple historical dramas, but that’s a hell of a difficult pitch in ordinary times, forget COVID-19).Also
There’s a layer which I call the great unwashed, which is my favorite
expression. It’s very rude and it’s fucking meant to be, because I don’t
make movies for that lot.
Gladiator was just a more garish Braveheart. You couldn’t make that thing any more middlebrow crowd-pleasing if Russell Crowe had secretly been Gladiator Man and Commodus has been played by Julia Roberts in full Erin Brockovich girlboss mode.I intermittently like Ridley Scott (when he’s good he’s really good, and he obviously does have a few genuine classics under his belt), but come on.
Full agreement.
The thing about a true egotist is that they will show you their entire ass. If Scott thought that he could pull in big bucks by doing Thelma & Louise II, where it turns out that the car had landed in a dump that just got a big load of mattresses, and they turn the convertible into a Mad Max-esque deathmobile and go around in black leather murdering Bad Dudes, he’d do it. (And I’d go see it, but I would have no illusions about why.)
https://gen.medium.com/the-decade-comic-book-nerds-became-our-cultural-overlords-f219b732a660Just gonna post this here again for everyone…
“Scott was just on Maron crying about how The Last Duel bombed because millennials can’t get off their phones so he’s in full on crank mode.”Old man yells at iCloud
I see what you did there
Not just Robin Hood, but every movie he’s ever made. Alien is very good, but it’s about as deep as a puddle of that white stuff the robots spit up. He’s never done anything better than that.
There’s a layer which I call the great unwashed, which is my favorite expression. It’s very rude and it’s fucking meant to be, because I don’t make movies for that lot.I’m very curious who he had in mind while making Prometheus. Cats wandering by while the TV happens to be on?
And not only that! Doubles DOWN with Alien: Covenant, which – while it didn’t anger me to the extent Prometheus did- is still a piece of (slick, well produced) shit
Thank you for your contributions to the art form, Mr. Scott. You’ve got your money, you can go now.
Orson Welles wasn’t nineteen years-old when he made Citizen Kane. He was, however, directing wildly ambitious shows on Broadway when he was nineteen.
“The great unwashed”? Does he also whack people with his cane when they don’t step into the gutter so he can pass on the street?
One would think that Pauline Kael would have been self-aware enough to know that writing such an overlong and over-critical piece on Blade Runner might mean it was actually something pretty terrific and special.Much of what she wrote in her piece seems fixated on just how ugly, dystopian, and dispassionate human existence might be in the not-so-distant future.Guess what Pauline? That inhumanness of the humanity that occupies the future is the whole fucking point. She remarks that the human denizens in the street markets don’t bother to look up and seem to be going about their dreary business in a lifeless way. The only beings that seem to express any type of spark of humanity are the fucking replicants! She even hints as much when she ironically reflects on the humans as “slot-machine zealots” and “oddly subhuman”. Bingo. Weird that she couldn’t connect the god damn dots.I could go on and on but one just gets the feeling that Kael is off-put because she feels that the narrative needs to explain why the world is so grimy, inhuman, and dreary. Those, ultimately, aren’t interesting questions to ask.Pauline Kael fucking sucks.
Is it me, or was that New Yorker article not as bad as he made it out to be? I mean, it’s definitely critical, but “systematically destructive”?
Pauline Kael was the greatest critic (she wrote awesomely and her analysis are easy to read, easy to understand, thorough, and sometimes made with the greatest love), but also one that had a very strict idea on how a movie should be constructed, what should be emphasised, etc. And she was not, at all, a fan of science fiction or horror (with a few very classic exceptions), or storytelling where you should change your view to the director’s view. Oh, no, she did not like that at all. And when she did not like it, she act as if you were offending the art itself and should be obliterated for that.
If she was that closed-minded, then it kinda sounds like she was a bad critic.
Yeah well, I don’t know. I disagree with her analysis most of the times, her snobbery irritates me, her obsession with her own persona was pure narcissism, and yet it is a pleasure to read her and there is always a point she made about a movie that I could not think of. It was the equivalent of those internet trolls that are not really trolls because even when they are confrontational and annoying they have always a point.
First Brian Cox spares no one in his memoir, now Ridley Scott tells millennials he has no fucks to give. Septuagenarian shit posting is the new punk rock.