The movie Ridley Scott called “absolutely perfect”
As the director behind two of the finest sci-fi movies ever made in Alien and Blade Runner – as well as the architect of a 21st gem via The Martian – Ridley Scott is very familiar with what it takes to achieve greatness in the genre.
While his reputation these days is hardly that of someone who stands out as a beacon of unyielding positivity, his praise for George Lucas and Star Wars borders on the hagiographic. Of course, nobody can deny the first chapter in the spacefaring saga changed the face of cinema forever, but the impact it made on Scott, in particular, can’t be overstated.
His admiration for Star Wars is well-known, with the Gladiator director even placing it in the same rarefied air as Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Describing what would soon become rebranded as A New Hope as “absolutely seminal” to Deadline, Scott once again intertwined the two titans of the medium released less than a decade apart.
“So creatively brilliant that he decided to make it the flip side of the coin to 2001,” he explained. “George made a fairy tale story, with a princess, the young prince, and the cynical Harrison Ford playing Han Solo”. Long before Lucas’ love of pulp serials gave rise to Indiana Jones, Scott was convinced that he’d already mastered it.
Calling Star Wars “an absolutely perfect rendition of a great comic serial”, he elaborated on how “there’s artistry in comic strips and George was obviously a devotee of that, and what he did was brilliant”. In fact, the impact proved to be so great that it altered the trajectory of his entire filmmaking career.
Having made his feature-length debut on the 1977 period drama The Duellists, Scott admitted that he “cancelled the film I was going to do after I saw Star Wars“. The project he had lined up was an adaptation of Tristan and Isolde, but as he exclaimed, Lucas had put paid to that: “When that Death Star came in at the beginning, I thought, I can’t possibly do Tristan and Isolde, I have to find something else. By the time the movie was finished, it was so stunning that it made me miserable.”
As fate would have it, though, a sci-fi project of his own soon came around when he read the script for Alien. The two couldn’t be more different on every conceivable level other than occupying the same genre by its strictest definition, but it wouldn’t have happened at all with Scott behind the camera were it not for Star Wars.
Does that mean he’d be interested in taking a crack at the franchise himself? Considering he told Empire that “I’m too dangerous for that because I know what I’m doing,” the chances of it happening are about as slim as it gets.
