“What the fuck does that mean?”: Ridley Scott’s career-long aversion to “normal people”
Ridley Scott is one of the greatest directors of all time, but he’s also someone who refuses to be silent when discussing his honest feelings about the craft and business of filmmaking, such that his cinematic brilliance hasn’t always had the most commercial results.
Scott has often complained about the difficult process of getting his films financed, and is fairly judicious in handing out praise to other directors. Given that he is 88 and still making new films with massive ambitions, it’s hard not to respect his work ethic.
The director is also someone who can surprise people, as he has managed to show that he still has momentum very recently when he released two surprise critical darlings in 2021 with The Last Duel and House of Gucci. However, it was the first decade of Scott’s career that turned him into the legend that he is today, where in less than ten years, he directed the medieval swashbuckling adventure The Duellists, the science fiction body horror classic Alien, the futuristic neo-noir thriller Blade Runner, and the high fantasy epic Legend.
It was evident that he had a mastery over taking unfamiliar worlds and grounding them, but of his first four films, it was only Alien that was a massive box office success. Scott said that he had faced criticism from his financiers, who felt that he should work on more empathetic and relatable stories.
“There’s only one film that worked out of all of that lot, but they’re a pretty good first four movies,” he told Variety, “I knew I’m on the right track, but somebody at one of the studios said to me, ‘Why don’t you do a film about normal people?’ I went, ‘What the fuck does that mean?’ Because no one’s normal unless you’re totally boring, right?”
When considering his ability to create exciting worlds and put together sprawling adventures, it would be a waste of his talents to simply tell stories about “normal people”. In fact, Scott’s worst films are those that tend to get more grounded and less ambitious: A Good Year was a fairly generic romantic comedy, White Squall wasn’t that much different from other coming-of-age adventure dramas, and the romantic melodrama Someone to Watch Over Me felt mismatched for his sensibilities.
While it was only Alien that became a breakout hit out of its initial run of films, the other three have all enjoyed critical reappraisal. The Duellists simply didn’t get a wide enough release to be seen by most audiences, and grew more appreciation for the level of detail Scott had poured into his story of medieval combat. Similarly, Legend earned more attention in the years after it was released, and its star, Tom Cruise, transformed into the biggest movie star in the world.
There’s no better example of Scott’s foresight than Blade Runner, the ambitious Philip K Dick adaptation that famously bombed at the box office because it ran into the record-breaking success of ET the Extra-Terrestrial, a much more family-friendly science fiction film, and one that had a more uplifting message.
Blade Runner was soon accepted as a secret masterpiece, and it earned even more legitimacy after Scott released his director’s cut, which removed some of the unhelpful studio edits inserted to make the film seem more “normal”. More studio heads, producers, and executives would do themselves a favour if they just let Scott be the master at his work.
