Top 100 Ridley Scott Quotes
#1. I would like to have a bit of a break and do a comedy.
Ridley Scott
#2. 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.
Ridley Scott
#3. I've always avoided sequels, unless I felt there was something fresh.
Ridley Scott
#4. When I started the original 'Alien,' Ripley wasn't a woman, it was a guy.
Ridley Scott
#5. I grew up in the North of England at a time when Stirling Moss was a hero. Everyone wanted to be a racing driver.
Ridley Scott
#6. 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.
Ridley Scott
#7. 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.
Ridley Scott
#8. Once you crack the script, everything else follows.
Ridley Scott
#9. There has to be absolute trust between the tiger and its master, but its master must be the master - there must be no mistake about that.
Ridley Scott
#10. I think there's nothing worse than inertia. You can be inert and study your navel, and gradually fall off the chair. I think the key is to keep flying.
Ridley Scott
#11. If you ever have a kid who doesn't know what to do, stick him in art school. It's amazing what evolves.
Ridley Scott
#12. I like Wadi Rum - it's the best view I've ever seen of what could be Mars.
Ridley Scott
#13. 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.
Ridley Scott
#14. I've gradually realised that what I do best is universes. And I shouldn't be afraid of that.
Ridley Scott
#15. '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.
Ridley Scott
#16. I think, at the end of the day, filmmaking is a team, but eventually there's got to be a captain.
Ridley Scott
#17. 'Blade Runner' was a comic strip. It was a comic strip! It was a very dark comic strip. Comic metaphorically.
Ridley Scott
#18. Yeah, we're working on [Blade Runner 2] right now - that will happen sooner or later.
Ridley Scott
#19. I'll reshoot a corridor 13 different ways, and you'll never recognise them.
Ridley Scott
#20. 'Prometheus' was a great experience for me.
Ridley Scott
#21. Do what you haven't done is the key, I think.
Ridley Scott
#22. Audiences are smarter than ever; they know if filmmakers cheat an environment.
Ridley Scott
#23. 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.'
Ridley Scott
#25. The hardest single thing you do is get the bloody screenplay right.
Ridley Scott
#26. How can you look at the galaxy and not feel insignificant?
Ridley Scott
#27. 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.
Ridley Scott
#28. The great film editor is not a cutter, he's a storyteller, right?
Ridley Scott
#29. I believe all of us only use one tenth of our brain. I know people who use one per cent only!
Ridley Scott
#30. I like a film such as 'American Beauty,' and I like 'Spider-Man.'
Ridley Scott
#31. I like my wine and vodka, but that doesn't mean I fall about drunk. I know my limits.
Ridley Scott
#32. Life isn't black and white. It's a million gray areas, don't you find?
Ridley Scott
#33. 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 .
Ridley Scott
#34. 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.
Ridley Scott
#35. I'm a yarn teller. My job is to engage you as much as I can and as often as I can.
Ridley Scott
#36. I'm just trying to think what other sequels there were. There was the James Bond movies and not many. I think sequels have become a recent idea of franchising.
Ridley Scott
#39. I'm fundamentally a positive person. Otherwise, I wouldn't be doing some of the insane movies that I do.
Ridley Scott
#40. The ego is there, but I'm learning to channel it.
Ridley Scott
#42. 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.
Ridley Scott
#43. The U.K. has to keep investing in new technology, skills, and infrastructure to keep pace with international competition.
Ridley Scott
#45. I've got many letters from Muslim organizations thanking me for making 'Kingdom of Heaven.'
Ridley Scott
#46. When you're at a certain point in your time - age, that is, when you're older - you start to realize that, actually, what you leave behind you does count, and so you start to become fundamentally aware of your own destiny, which sounds very grand. It's not grand at all, actually.
Ridley Scott
#47. The people who really resurrected 'Blade Runner' was 'MTV.'
Ridley Scott
#48. I always shoot my movies with score as certainly part of the dialogue. Music is dialogue. People don't think about it that way, but music is actually dialogue. And sometimes music is the final, finished, additional dialogue. Music can be one of the final characters in the film.
Ridley Scott
#49. When you think about it, 'Avatar' is almost completely an animated movie.
Ridley Scott
#50. Scaring someone's the hardest thing to do, and that's why most of these scary movies are not scary. They're sick, but not scary. There's a lot of sickness out there, of people who then sit there and watch it, which I think is absolutely dismaying.
Ridley Scott
#52. 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.
Ridley Scott
#53. What's interesting to me about Moses isn't the big stuff that everybody knows.
Ridley Scott
#55. 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.
Ridley Scott
#56. Well, not totally because over the years I've probably done 2,700 commercials. So, I'm always ticking. And in a way that was a huge advantage because I was able to take my time choosing my film subjects because I wasn't relying on the fear of not being able to work.
Ridley Scott
#57. We can't terraform yet, but we know it exists.
Ridley Scott
#58. Dad entered the Second World War like any other man, trying to do the right thing.
Ridley Scott
#59. There are some moments that are pretty distressing in 'Prometheus.' In fact, the last hour is pretty distressing.
Ridley Scott
#60. It's very difficult to find good scripts in Hollywood any more.
Ridley Scott
#61. As I'm getting older, I want to make sure every film I do really counts.
Ridley Scott
#62. They say, 'TV is not a captive audience,' but it definitely is. You can easily switch off the bloody television.
Ridley Scott
#63. 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.
Ridley Scott
#64. I don't make films for other people; I make films for me.
Ridley Scott
#65. I do a pretty good job at casting actually.
Ridley Scott
#66. I started late. I didn't make my first movie until I was 40.
Ridley Scott
#67. Any period is fascinating: the more ancient, the better.
Ridley Scott
#68. I'm used to very strong women because my mother was particularly strong, and my father was away all the time. My mother was a big part of bringing up three boys, so I was fully versed in the strength of a powerful woman, and accepted that as the status quo.
Ridley Scott
#69. Far from being dead, physical media has years of life left and must be preserved because there is no better alternative.
Ridley Scott
#70. Never be put off by anything because failure teaches you something.
Ridley Scott
#71. As a filmmaker, deep blacks are essential, and in my experience, no technology captures those attributes as well as Plasma.
Ridley Scott
#72. I love different themes, different venues, different movies. I love to jump about and tackle different subjects. I have no intellectual master plan.
Ridley Scott
#73. I want to make films about the human condition, what we're doing to the world or ourselves.
Ridley Scott
#74. I tend to watch a lot of lower-budget movies to find out what's doing down there and find out who's coming up.
Ridley Scott
#75. If I have to, I'll go and direct theater and talk till the cows come home.
Ridley Scott
#76. The Gulf of Mexico, they believe, is a huge asteroid. That was an impact zone, you know that? Yeah, for that big a thing to actually hit our globe, it would have had to adjusted the spin, the axis.
Ridley Scott
#77. I would make a film with a political point of view if I agreed with it, and even, perhaps, if I didn't.
Ridley Scott
#78. Stanley Kubrick's '2001' was the door that opened up the possibility of science fiction for me. Everything else up to then was fine, but didn't quite work for me.
Ridley Scott
#79. On 'Black Hawk Down,' I was employing 1,000 Muslims. 'Kingdom of Heaven,' same deal except bigger, probably 1,500 Muslims.
Ridley Scott
#80. 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.
Ridley Scott
#81. Films like Harry Potter and Narnia, I'm sure they'll do another one. The biggest audience of course is the youngsters.
Ridley Scott
#82. I was always aware that this whole Earth is on overload.
Ridley Scott
#83. I want to return to the epic idea of the grand, big Western, in the sense that 'The Searchers' was.
Ridley Scott
#84. I made the mistake of saying I was an atheist at one point, when I was doing 'Kingdom of Heaven.'
Ridley Scott
#85. 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.
Ridley Scott
#86. I come out of TV. I come out of live television, BBC drama: that's where I started first as a designer, then a director. Then I went independent TV, then television advertising.
Ridley Scott
#88. 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.'
Ridley Scott
#89. Good FBI officers are not noticeable. You would never look at them.
Ridley Scott
#90. Nowadays, everything's evolved into superheroes and it's boring. If I see one more superhero movie I'm going to shoot myself.
Ridley Scott
#91. I've got a terrible knee from too much tennis.
Ridley Scott
#92. I do like to make films with a political theme, but sometimes it's nice simply to make people laugh. That's the hardest thing to do in fact.
Ridley Scott
#93. The story of 'Prometheus' is the idea that if you're given a gift from the gods, do not abuse it, and do not think you can compete.
Ridley Scott
#94. I knew exactly what to do on Alien, it was funny.
Ridley Scott
#95. 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.
Ridley Scott
#96. '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.
Ridley Scott
#97. I think Phil Dick was particularly interesting in that, first of all, he was a very modern man and a very modern thinker, but I don't know what demons drove him.
Ridley Scott
#98. There is an access to ... people can now afford very high quality technology, where you can have a very good reproduction of a large picture on a large screen at home. People go out less. I don't know that it's going to stay that way but, I think also, we've got to start making better movies.
Ridley Scott
#99. I am a science fiction enthusiast, really, deep down.
Ridley Scott
#100. Doing science fiction at a high level is tricky. It's really tricky.
Ridley Scott
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