ANAHEIM, California -- On a recent afternoon, the man who made two sci-fi masterpieces twirled crumpled water bottles back and forth across a table to illustrate his gift for making imaginary worlds seem utterly believable.
"It's like a big miniature Lego kit that you're building into a giant house, except every part is not the same size -- it's slightly different," said Ridley Scott, cocking his head to scrutinize the plastic building blocks he used as impromptu props. "You get the parts to plumb, and you get the house complete and you turn it around and you go, 'I need a bit here, I need a bit there ... and that doesn't work so well.' It's a constant evolution."
Few filmmakers shepherd a story from page to screen with the mastery of detail that Scott demonstrates as a matter of course; fewer still match his gift for visualizing dread, fear and loathing. So it's hardly a surprise that cineastes and sci-fi geeks alike are drooling over Scott's scary new 3-D space epic Prometheus, which opens Friday in the United States. With stunning visuals, a grim, atmospheric vibe and a story that probes some of mankind's deepest questions, it's a welcome alternative to the sugary summer slate of feel-good movies -- a bracing shot of smoky Scotch in comparison to The Avengers' bubbly (although undeniably delicious) supersized soda.
Scott left his indelible dark mark on sci-fi when he grafted the austere visual stylings of 2001: A Space Odyssey with rib-splitting terror inspired by The Texas Chain Saw Massacre in his landmark 1979 thriller Alien. Three years later, the British director set the standard for dystopian cinema with Blade Runner, which realized Philip K. Dick's vision of an acid-rain-soaked Los Angeles hellscape circa 2019 populated by robotic replicants that snapped Harrison Ford's fingers when they weren't posing fundamental questions about what it is that makes someone truly human.
And then, Scott quit science fiction. "I couldn't find anything of interest," he told a WonderCon audience in March.
So Scott explored other genres. He made the zeitgeist-defining feminist road movie Thelma & Louise. He painted a blood-soaked portrait of ancient Rome in the Oscar-winning Gladiator. For unnervingly realistic war movie Black Hawk Down, he captured the panic of a U.S. military intervention gone horribly awry in a dusty Somali city.
Scott revisits the sci-fi realm with the R-rated Prometheus, a film vaguely tied to his Alien universe. Shot over the course of nine months in Canada, England, Spain and Iceland for an estimated $150 million, the film represents a brilliant return to form: A majestic opening sequence sets the story in motion for a crew of earthlings who embark in 2093 on a scientific mission to uncover the origins of human life on a distant planet. There, the explorers get sucked into a vortex of extraterrestrial terror animated by Scott's influential blend of brainy science fiction and brute beauty.
"Ridley has an aesthetic," said Damon Lindelof, the Lost co-creator who wrote the final version of the Prometheus screenplay. Joining Scott for a chat with Wired at the Anaheim Convention Center, Lindelof said he sees all of Scott's work as a piece: "It's easy to say that Prometheus and Blade Runner belong to the same world [as] Alien, because that's Ridley's eye. That's the way he sees things."
Lost Man Meets His Hero
When Ridley Scott rang Damon Lindelof on his cell phone asking him to rework Jon Spaith's initial Prometheus draft, the Lost scribe "practically ran into a fucking lamppost," Scott laughs. "I slammed on my brakes and pulled over my car," Lindelof recalls. "Ridley started chatting with me like we knew each other, told me he was going to send a script over and that everything was top secret, that I was to read and let him know what I thought about it. I tried to act like this was a natural thing to happen to me, as opposed to getting a call from one of the few people who made you want to do this for a living."
Once Lindelof calmed down and got to work, he found Scott to be a congenial collaborator.
"In terms of his stature, Ridley is intimidating," he says. "But in terms of who he is as a human being, as soon as I walked in and we met for the first time, he made himself very accessible. He wanted to have a conversation. He's not a guy who says, 'You will do it this way or you will do it no way.' At the same time, he has an incredible vision. I was shocked at how collaborative he was, and instantly sort of supplicated myself to do whatever he asked me to. It was one of the most rewarding collaborations of my life."
Assisted by a recurring coterie of collaborators, Scott authors his movies just as surely as a great novelist produces words on a page, according to Lindelof. "Hemingway had different characters in every novel, yet they are distinctly Hemingway," he said. "Any movie that Ridley does is going to be original, but it's also filtered through the perspective of how Ridley sees the world."
Like Ernest Hemingway, Scott favors grim stories that pit tough, taciturn heroes against hostile environments. Even when his films fizzle -- as with the old-fashioned Robin Hood or the sluggish Crusades costume drama Kingdom of Heaven -- Scott delivers heroically scaled narrative. Informed by a visual virtuosity honed through years of study at London's Royal Academy of Art, his most compelling films draw on magisterial master shots, fluid camera moves, atmospheric lighting, exceptionally cohesive production design and deeply persuasive actors to dramatize a Darwinian world view devoid of wisecracks, cute kids or anything else that might distract from the impending horror.
The Ridley Scott Imprint
Scott's shock-and-awe sensibility imprinted upon an entire generation of sci-fi storytellers, including Richard Kelly, director of sci-fi cult classic Donnie Darko, who said he became inspired to become a filmmaker at age 15 after seeing Alien and a 1992 theatrical rerelease of Blade Runner.
"If you look at the through-line in Ridley Scott's work, he creates these doomsday worlds filled with death and mutilation and violence, but he makes them beautiful and intoxicating," said Kelly, who presented his own take on a dystopian Los Angeles in 2005's * Southland Tales*. "Despite the danger and oppressive violence, Scott's films are so elegant and have such cohesive depth that you just want to enter into that world."
Christopher Nolan's Batman movies, too, owe at least some of their brooding sensibility to Blade Runner. Nolan has seen the film "hundreds of times," the director told a Hero Complex Film Festival audience. "It really spoke to me in terms of what I wanted to do as a filmmaker. [Blade Runner] has this sort of density to it visually. You come back to it and see something else in it every time. I try to do that in a different way, sort of more narratively than visually."
Moon visual effects supervisor Gavin Rothery made sure that director Duncan Jones took a fresh look at Alien before filming began in 2009 on the critically acclaimed space station drama that put the first-time helmer on the map. "When we were getting the story together, I gave Duncan a pile of recommended viewing from my DVD collection, and of course, Alien was in there," Rothery said in an email to Wired. "The tone we were going for in Moon was that of a lost film from the late '70s or early '80s."
Full-time director/part-time Ridley Scott fanboy Zack Snyder recently prepped for an opening-weekend family outing to see Prometheus by screening Alien for his three teenage kids.
"Ridley Scott makes a beautiful frame and then lets things happen inside it," Snyder told Wired by phone. "He doesn't rush it. That's why his movies are so immersive: By the time he starts to scare you, it's too late to get out because you've already bought into it. After 15 minutes, you can't get away. You're in it."
Like Scott, Snyder went to art school and shot TV commercials before making visually driven action pictures including 300, Watchmen and next year's Superman reboot, Man of Steel.
"The problem sci-fi often has is that it seems impersonal," Snyder said. "The way Ridley does it, you can imagine the gritty reality of those worlds and therefore the events that take place within the film connect with you in this personal way. Even though he creates this epic landscape, he finds a way to make it human."
The Auteur Picks a Team
Though Scott earned a reputation early in his career as a gruff director who operated his own camera and kept actors at arm's length when it came to discussions about motivation, the England-born auteur credits collaborators like Alien effects creator H.R. Giger and Blade Runner "visual futurist" Syd Mead as key contributors to his movies' success.
Not content to praise the location scouts who found exotic spots in Iceland to serve as extraterrestrial landscapes, Scott said his production team consists of "ass-kicking everything! Over the years, you go out and get them." For Prometheus, Scott teamed with longtime production designer Arthur Max, cinematographer Dariusz Wolski and costume designer Neville Page.
"The evolution for a movie like this happens out of discussions with Damon and out of that comes the next step, until it's polished and complete," Scott said. "That takes a while. And even then it goes on during principal photography, because I have to take the story into [costume designer] Janty [Yates] and go, 'OK, space suits: What the fuck are they going to look like? We've seen a trillion space suits over the past 35, 40 years, so what is this going to be?' And that's just part of the house you're building."
The Return of the Alpha Female
In addition to the film's bold visual aesthetic, Prometheus also rekindles Scott's early fondness for putting strong women in the thick of the action. Prior to Alien, sci-fi films usually treated female characters as eye candy. Alien busted up the boys club by casting Sigourney Weaver not as the clichéd "girl in jeopardy" but as a monster-slaying woman who outlasts everyone else on doomed mining spaceship Nostromo.
"It was almost the first-week discussion when somebody said, 'What would you think if Ripley were a woman?'" Scott said, recalling early Alien production meetings. "I didn't think it was an earth-shaking idea, but I just thought, 'Why not? Why should it be a guy again?' So when Sigourney walked in, like 6-foot-2 in flats, I figured, 'This is it.' Because she also had the smarts to go with the height."
For Prometheus, Scott found his alpha female in the person of Noomi Rapace, who stars as scientist Elizabeth Shaw. The Swedish actress caught Scott's eye when he saw her portrayal of antisocial hacker Lisbeth Salander in 2009's original The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo movie.
"I was absolutely knocked out by her and loved the movie enough to see it three times," he said. "Noomi got into my DNA, and I thought, 'Who the hell is this woman? This punk?'"
Scott arranged a meeting in Los Angeles and was surprised by his face-to-face encounter with Rapace. "In walked this rather elegant, rather beautiful woman," he said. "That's when I realized I was dealing with a real actress."
Prometheus boasts a second ballsy female actress in the form of Oscar-winner Charlize Theron, who plays a tough minion of the Weyland Corporation -- the same company that sponsored the Nostromo's doomed ore-mining expedition in Alien, set 50 years after the Prometheus' scientific mission.
"Apart from being very beautiful, Charlize has this wonderful sense of humor," Scott said. "To play someone who's a real bitch, you've got to have a sense of humor."
The Big Picture
Prometheus: Devilish in Details- The film's 3-D hologram star map draws from 1766 Joseph Wright painting A Philosopher Lecturing on the Orrery. Screenwriter Jon Spaights located the reference art through a Google search after Scott described the painting as "circles in circles with a candle-lit image." --Forbes
- Early drafts named the hero ship Magellan, Icarus and Paradise before Lindelof and Scott decided on Prometheus, in honor of the Greek god that tried to steal fire from the sun. --The Hollywood Reporter
- Alien creature designer H.R. Giger created murals that appear as some of the first artifacts discovered by the Prometheus crew. --Coming Soon
- Spherical glass space helmets feature nine interior video screens plus an exterior cameras, transmitter and recorder. After Ridley Scott read a Steve Jobs biography that described how Apple co-founder built an office out of Gorilla Glass, he said, "If I'm in 2083 and I’m going into space ... I want is something where I have 360 [vision]." --Collider
- The alien creature in Prometheus mutates organically into four different forms in a way that actress Noomi Rapace describes as “every woman's worst nightmare." --The Hollywood Reporter
- Scott sketched a figure with a bright red Mohawk haircut to define the look of geologist Fifield, played by Sean Harris. --Empire
- Prometheus' aliens incorporate characteristics found in earthly plant life and sea creatures. --Collider
- Costume designer Janty Yates researched medical advances in skin-replacement therapy while developing the neoprene garments worn under by Prometheus crew members.
--ScreenSlam
Other Prometheus cast members Michael Fassbender and Idris Elba, who play the spacecraft's resident robot and captain respectively, spent months with Rapace and Theron in dank soundstages and icy landscapes in order to satisfy Scott's chilly vision for the film. "What I want to do is scare the living shit out of you," Scott said, outlining his intentions in a Prometheus promotional video.
Prometheus delivers plenty of nasty chills and thrills, but the manufactured dread serves a loftier intent, according to Lindelof, who steered an early version of the script into more cerebral waters after Scott discussed the "ancient astronauts" theory that extraterrestrials might have aided humankind's evolution, as described in books like Chariots of the Gods? by controversial Swiss author Erich von Däniken.
"Ridley told me he was interested in making a movie that dealt with the philosophical ramifications of man's desire to know his own origins," Lindelof said. "The idea is that 100 years from now, people will still want to know where we came from, who made us, what is our purpose here? That little carrot that he put out in front of me was so enticing that I said, 'Maybe this movie is the answer to those questions.' That was the jumping-off point."
And it sounds like Scott's ready to make a Prometheus sequel in order to get to the bottom of the cosmic conundrum. "There is another journey at the end of this movie," he said.
Should that next chapter materialize, filmmaker Gale Anne Hurd will likely be standing in line. She produced James Cameron's sequel Aliens seven years after being blown away by the original 70-millimeter release of Alien.
"That summer, everybody was talking about the Alien trailer," she told Wired in a phone interview. "I camped out with everybody else to get in line for the opening." The movie lived up to the hype. "All us geeks had been waiting for a master filmmaker to direct a sci-fi movie. They'd mostly been cheesy B movies before. Alien was a game-changer."
New Tools, Classic Craftsmanship
In Alien, Scott used pig guts and spaghetti to shock audiences and his own actors, who hadn't been warned in advance about the film's iconic chest-bursting sequence. He's got a far more sophisticated bag of tricks to use on Prometheus, including five double-camera 3-D rigs.
Scott said he embraces new technologies, like 3-D, as long as they help deliver the kind of jolts that make his movies seem believable. He cites his multicamera experiments on Black Hawk Down as a case study for how today's filmmaking technology can deliver visceral impact.
"We had 11 cameras -- 11 operators, 11 units," he said. "You walk through the dirt, you got a chopper going, you go, 'When I say action, the whole fucking thing is going to happen.' There's blanks flying everywhere, brass is flying. In essence, it's the real thing. If you don't wear earplugs, you are deaf, forever."
Scott evidently wore the plugs, surviving to tell his new Prometheus tale with more cameras, more dimensions and bigger stakes -- it doesn't get much more profound than the origins of mankind. At age 75 and still going strong, Scott regards the 21st-century digital tool kit from the classicist perspective of a slightly pugnacious Old Master.
The camera is "an extension of the pencil, if you can draw, and I can really draw," he said. "One old friend who became a lawyer said to me, 'Hey Ridley, you still pushing a pencil?' I said, 'As a matter of fact I am pushing a pencil. What are you doing, dude?'"
