Ridley Scott’s favourite Ridley Scott movie: “It cost £65 to make”
A fun thing I like to do now and then (I don’t have much to do) is pick a director’s best five movies and see how they stack up against other directors’ best five.
Sidney Lumet is a great one to do, because he directed 12 Angry Men, The Verdict, Dog Day Afternoon, Serpico and The Network, which is an insane run by any stretch of the imagination. You can do the same with Steven Spielberg. But Ridley Scott can also play this game, and get as close to the top as possible.
That’s because he has made some of the finest films in cinematic history, and his five include Alien, Black Hawk Down, Blade Runner, Gladiator and Thelma and Louise – which is impressive to say the least.
Hailing from the North East of England, Scott studied at the Royal College of Art in London where he helped to establish the film department, graduating in 1963 and getting a job working on sets for the BBC where he stayed for a couple of years, eventually ending up directing some episodes of low budget series.
After setting up a production company with his brother Tony, the pair would make several famous TV adverts, including one for Hovis bread, before the end of the 1970s saw him land his debut film direction job on The Duellists, a drama set in the Napoleonic era. Scott picked up a ‘Best Debut’ film award at Cannes for the film and was all ready to direct another period piece as his follow-up, until he saw Star Wars the same year and was so affected that he knew he wanted to get into special effects.
He landed on Alien in 1979, the seminal space horror starring Sigourney Weaver, and it was an astonishing success, winning an Oscar for ‘Best Visual Effects’ and bringing in almost $200million at the box office against a budget of less than $15m. The success of the movie allowed Scott to direct Blade Runner three years later, starring Harrison Ford – the film that is now considered as one of the greatest sci-fis ever made.
Over the next few decades Scott directed immensely important movies across genres, including the groundbreaking roadtrip Thelma and Louise, Russell Crowe’s Oscar winning Gladiator and the Denzel Washington hit American Gangster in 2007.
But perhaps surprisingly, it is Scott’s very first film that he has fondest memories of; all the way back at the art college in London in the early ‘60s. He told Letterboxd: “Boy and Bicycle is my favourite movie. It cost £65 to make. I was at a very good art school called the Royal College of Art, and I discovered in a locker a box that said (16mm camera) Bolex on it.”
Adding, “I got the Bolex and took it to George Carlson, our head of the department, and I said, ‘Can I borrow this for the Easter holidays?’ He said, ‘To do what?’ I said, ‘I want to make a movie.’ He said, ‘You can have the cameras if you’ve got a script.’ I said, ‘Well, I have a script,’ and I lied. So I wrote the script.”
Scott went back to a modernist literary classic to find inspiration for his short film, a book that changed the way future books were written. He concluded: “I was high on Ulysses by James Joyce at this point, mainly because Joyce is such a visual writer, and I wrote a film about a boy who decided to play hooky for the day and think it’s going to be pure freedom, but all he does is hide all day because he’s scared of being seen. It’s a very simple story, but it needed a stream of consciousness.”
