Forty years later and Ridley Scott is still determined to make films about abnormal topics — or at least rebuff whatever studio advice is being doled out.
Scott said during the Director’s Guild of America’s “Director’s Cut” podcast (via Entertainment Weekly) that his first four films — “The Duellists,” “Alien,” “Blade Runner,” and “Legend” — were plagued by bad marketing tactics and were misunderstood by studios and audiences upon release.
“There’s only one film worked out of all of that lot,” Scott said, seemingly referring to the franchise-spurring “Alien,” “but they’re a pretty good first four movies. So I knew I’m on the right track.”
Scott even said that Pauline Kael’s review of his now-classic 1982 feature “Blade Runner” was indicative of how “wrong” audiences and critics were of his early films.
“To me, it almost walked in the column of industrial espionage,” Scott said of the infamous review, “because you’re destroying a product before it’s out.”
Kael wrote that Scott had a “creepy, oppressive vision” in “Blade Runner,” calling the film a “suspense-less thriller.” “Blade Runner” landed a 2017 Oscar-winning sequel, “Blade Runner 2049,” which was directed by Denis Villeneuve. The franchise is also expanding again with an upcoming Prime Video limited series, “Blade Runner 2099,” with Scott producing and Silka Luisa (“Shining Girls”) as the showrunner.
Scott now continued of the reception of his first films at the time, “These are all good movies, so there’s something deeply wrong with the audience or marketing. But you know, I’m not bitter. I’m very happy where I am. It is the best attitude that one can have. I think, you know, that’s the best attitude that one can have, to just love all of your movies, trust, and keep going.”
And that included continuing going his own way: Scott recalled how a studio executive questioned why he didn’t try to make features that assimilated into a conformist norm.
“Somebody at one of the studios said to me, ‘Why don’t you do a film about normal people?’” Scott said. “I went, ‘What the fuck does that mean?’ Because no one’s normal unless you’re totally boring, right?”
Interestingly enough, it was a show literally titled “Normal People” that helped him cast his latest blockbuster, “Gladiator II.” It was Paul Mescal’s performance in the novel adaptation that led him to cast the actor in the lead role for the sequel feature.
