Ridley Scott Quotes

I think going into space would be like going deep into the ocean, like 5,000 meters down. When you go down that far, it's just awfully black. There's not much there except mud and some particles. I imagine space would be a similar thing. The only difference is you're hoping to bump into some sort of intelligent extraterritorial being.

I went to Art College and during the summer I made a movie with my brother. I got hold of a little camera, wrote a script and dragged my brother, Tony, out of bed to help me (which he did not like), so that we could shoot a film every day for six weeks. It was made for £65 and it was called Boy On A Bicycle.

I want to make films about the human condition, what we're doing to the world or ourselves.

I don't make films for other people; I make films for me.

I wanted 'Alien' to be all about claustrophobia.

Unfortunately, we don't seem to learn from history, do we? And you'd think we would.

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.

There's great wine from Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Chile and, of course, California. But there's nothing like a really great French wine, they're so well balanced. The better the wine, the less you feel the effects I think.

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.

People have no idea how physically tough doing a film is.

I watch a lot of 'National Geographic.'

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.

I want to return to the epic idea of the grand, big Western, in the sense that 'The Searchers' was.

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.

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.

If you ever have a kid who doesn't know what to do, stick him in art school. It's amazing what evolves.

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.

If we had written Tristan in the true vernacular the audience would have been very small. It wouldn't have even been Shakespearean. It would have been so Celtic you wouldn't understand what was going on.

If somebody's given me X amount of dollars to fulfill a dream, they've got every right to actually say something about it.

Once you crack the script, everything else follows.

I've always avoided sequels, unless I felt there was something fresh.

I'm a very practical person.

I grew up in the North of England at a time when Stirling Moss was a hero. Everyone wanted to be a racing driver.

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

I like my wine and vodka, but that doesn't mean I fall about drunk. I know my limits.

Sci-fi films are as dead as westerns.

Doing science fiction at a high level is tricky. It's really tricky.

I think over time I've learned to stop being a screamer and get interactive; otherwise, you get killed in Hollywood. I stopped being a screamer shortly after 'Blade Runner,' kicking doors and things like that, because I wasn't actually getting anywhere.

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.

Most people need the money all the time.

I spend a lot of my time just developing material; or the company does. That material can come from a book, can come from a newspaper, can come from a discussion and sometimes it can come from a script that got passed over and is floating around.

I do a pretty good job at casting actually.

You always worry before your movie opens that no one is going to come out.

'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.

Everyone sniggered because I was going to do a sandal and toga movie. But I knew exactly how to do it and I know how to make Robin Hood.

You've got to be able to know someone really well to be able to have a row and then also walk away from it and not have it matter, especially in this business. That doesn't mean to say we have many rows but I think the nearest thing to a row would be just flatly disagreeing with something .

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.

I think I was really bored at school. I was quietly clock watching for years. I went to 10 schools because my dad was in the Army and we moved around a lot.

I've got many letters from Muslim organizations thanking me for making 'Kingdom of Heaven.'

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.

That's a heavy word, but picking up a newspaper every day, how can you not despair at what's happening in the world, and how we're represented as human beings? The disappointments and corruption are dismaying at every level. And the biggest source of evil is of course religion. Religions are tearing each other apart in the name of their personal god. And the irony is, by definition, they're probably worshipping the same god.

Dad entered the Second World War like any other man, trying to do the right thing.

As soon as you're at the higher levels of budgeting, you've got to get the film made, and the only way to support the film is to have actors who can support the budget.

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.

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 am in a constant stage of development.

I think sci-fi can easily be PG.

If you circle above Central Park at night in a helicopter, you're looking down at the most expensive real estate in the world. It's the American Monopoly board.

A word on 'Kingdom of Heaven:' if you get the four-disc set, which is 3 hr. 8 min., you'll see why it's such a good movie. It was a real passion project, and it's the film I'm most proud of. I think it was treated incredibly unfairly.

I would make a film with a political point of view if I agreed with it, and even, perhaps, if I didn't.

I love designing, and I still do it.

The key thing is you can be the only person, your own critic.

From time to time, there are people in the film industry who appear on the horizon with a unique vision. South African director Neill Blomkamp is one of those rare people.

I'm a yarn teller. My job is to engage you as much as I can and as often as I can.

I don't ever blink, honestly.

When you're watching a documentary, the danger is to romanticize.

Do what you haven't done is the key, I think.

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.

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 have a healthy competitive nature.

'Alien' is a landmark. One of the really good science-fiction films.

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.

The best stories come out of the truth.

The 3D world allows you to engage even more with a film because you're somehow drawn into the landscape or the universe of that scene. Even when it's two people talking at a table, you feel like you're a third party.

There's some politicians who still seriously believe that we haven't got global warming.

Sometimes you can do a TV show on a subject you just can't do in film. Either it's too long or studios will perceive it as not being commercial.

I think movies are getting dumber, actually. Where it used to be 50/50, now it`s 3% good, 97% stupid.

In film, it's very important to not allow yourself to get sentimental, which, being British, I try to avoid. People sometimes regard sentimentality as emotion. It is not. Sentimentality is unearned emotion.

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.

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.

Anybody who does 90 takes has a problem.

In science fiction, we're always searching for new frontiers. We're drawn to the unknown.

Conscience, the power of conscience, can unearth all kinds of things.

I started late. I didn't make my first movie until I was 40.

I am a science fiction enthusiast, really, deep down.

We can't terraform yet, but we know it exists.

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.

I think, at the end of the day, filmmaking is a team, but eventually there's got to be a captain.

If studios don't get their money back, we don't have any movies. So it is important that films are successful, and I am fully supportive of that because I'm not just a director, I'm also not stupid. I've been in this business long enough and, to a certain extent, I'm a businessman; I know the importance of that.

I also love Australian movies. I love Muriel's Wedding - I've seen in six times. Baz Luhrmann's best movie is strictly ballroom ... without question.

Technology will need to make many more huge leaps before one can ever view films with the level of picture and sound quality many film lovers demand without having to slide a disc into a player, especially with the technical requirements of today's 3D movies.

Harrison is very much part of this one, but really it's about finding him; he comes in in the third act.

When you're doing a big movie, you're gone for 10 months to a year.

When I started the original 'Alien,' Ripley wasn't a woman, it was a guy.

I'm a reader. I found out that, whether you're a studio head or a director, you must read your own material. You can't rely on readers.

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.

Never be put off by anything because failure teaches you something.

A hit for me is if I enjoy the movie, if I personally enjoy the movie.

The great attraction to 'American Gangster' is these two great characters who are absolute paradoxes within their own sphere.

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

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.

I would like to have a bit of a break and do a comedy.

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.

By going to a preview, a director becomes insidiously infected by the process, so by the end of it, you're thinking, 'It may be a bit too long.'

I love different themes, different venues, different movies. I love to jump about and tackle different subjects. I have no intellectual master plan.

I'm not criticizing Hollywood because I work there, I partly live there. But I'm saying this is the way it is, commerce is taking over art. Commerce has become the most important thing in the film industry. Hollywood is an industry, it's not an art form, therefore they have to address the bottom line. But in a way it's sad when you get a remake, isn't it?

I unfortunately do suffer for my art.

The digital and theatrical markets are two different marketplaces.

The hardest single thing you do is get the bloody screenplay right.