Ridley Scott names the most personal movie of his career: “It’s not playing the game”
While the majority of the directors who go down in the history books as iconic figures in cinema tend to dedicate a great deal of their careers to passion projects they hold a deep connection to and personal investment in, Ridley Scott has never really been that guy.
Hotly anticipated sequel Gladiator II will be the 29th feature of a remarkable career that began with 1977’s The Duellist and has regularly produced greatness, but there arguably isn’t a single one of them that can be considered either entirely reflective of its creator’s belief system or evocative of who they are on a granular level.
Steven Spielberg is famed for informing his characters with his own familial background, many of Martin Scorsese’s pictures are driven by his sense of spirituality, Christopher Nolan regularly trades in the themes of time and memory, James Cameron has opted to make his environmentalism the backdrop to the remainder of his professional life, and Quentin Tarantino’s cinephilia has always been worn on the sleeve.
Those are all filmmakers who exist in the same ballpark as Scott in that they’re all major names who get to play with big budgets and reap the critical and commercial rewards. And yet, the distinguished veteran has never felt compelled to bare his soul onscreen, not that it’s held him back from becoming one of the all-time greats.
With that in mind, it potentially says a lot that the film he views as his most personal was also one of the most nightmarish, giving the director the opportunity to indulge his more combative and confrontational side. He was fighting against the tide of studio interference at every turn, and he was being constantly overruled, but it was to his immense credit and cinema’s benefit that a classic emerged on the other side.
“Blade Runner, in many respects, was my most personal film, and I was combating the investors who were saying, ‘This is costing too much,'” he told Rolling Stone. “By that time, I’d done over 2,000 commercials. I’ve got an office in New York, in London. I’m not an idiot. So I hate the fact that I went over budget because it’s not playing the game.”
Scott may have been vastly experienced in the ad world, but Blade Runner was still only his third feature. His second was a stone-cold classic, but Alien didn’t give him the freedom he’d envisioned. The timeless dystopian sci-fi was an arduous undertaking on a creative, artistic, and executive level, with the filmmaker constantly struggling to balance the film he wanted to make with the one the studio demanded he turn it into.
It was a formative experience that played a major role in shaping Scott into the unfiltered, unvarnished, and straight-shooting industry player he was destined to become, which illustrates why he sees Blade Runner as his most personal silver screen effort ever.
