Ridley Scott

Director

1937-11-30

Quotes by Ridley Scott

• One of the problems with science fiction, which is probably one of the reasons why I haven't done one for many, many years, is the fact that everything is used up. Every type of spacesuit is used up, every type of spacecraft is vaguely familiar, the corridors are similar, and the planets are similar.

  Read quote

• The great film editor is not a cutter, he's a storyteller, right?

  Read quote

• 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.

  Read quote

• 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.

  Read quote

• 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.

  Read quote

• That's part of the policy: To keep switching gears.

  Read quote

• 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.

  Read quote

• I was always amazed about how much I could finally squeeze into a thirty second commercial.

  Read quote

• 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.

  Read quote

• I had a quite unconventional childhood, in the sense that I traveled a lot and I went to 10 or 11 schools. I was completely confused academically, but wherever I went, I could paint. I painted an inordinate amount.

  Read quote

• I've gradually realised that what I do best is universes. And I shouldn't be afraid of that.

  Read quote

• 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.'

  Read quote

• 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.

  Read quote

• 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.

  Read quote

• 'The Duellists' won Cannes, but Paramount didn't know how to release a film about two guys in bizarre breeches, waving swords around. I actually think it's a pretty good Western.

  Read quote

• '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.

  Read quote

• 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.

  Read quote

• Life isn't black and white. It's a million gray areas, don't you find?

  Read quote

• 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.

  Read quote

• Technology continues to bring us wondrous advances in filmmaking to improve how we view movies.

  Read quote