The 2011 promise Ridley Scott failed to keep: “I’ll never work without it again”
Ridley Scott has said a lot of random crap over the years; he’s the kind of loose-lipped visionary the media loves to quote for his far-ranging yabber.
Let’s pluck out a random 2021 interview from the archive, where Scott, unprompted, admitted that he believed all superhero movies are crap. They’re “boring as shit,” he shrugged, adding that the scripts usually “aren’t any fucking good”.
Scott’s not wrong here: The latest DC cinematic extravaganze, Supergirl, has tanked on the critical front, and with abysmal entries like Joker: Folie à Deux, which Lady Gaga couldn’t even save, Scott appeared to predict the poor, declining future for the once epic genre.
That doesn’t necessarily mean that everything Scott says comes true. Though he hates the grandiose world of superheroes, Scott is still interested in the bombastic, brutal, and flamboyant. For his 2012 movie, Prometheus, Scott tackled the feat of immersing the viewer in his cinematography using a different tool: 3D cameras.
Beyond the gimmicky idea of 3D cinema consisting of those ugly red and blue glasses most 1990s and 2000s babies will remember, using native 3D filming throughout the entire shooting process of a movie can allow for meticulous framing and composition. Beyond this, spaces can be layered, allowing the director to emphasise things like the distance between a character and their surroundings. Depths can be digitally adjusted with the lift of a finger.
Speaking to Backstage at the time, Scott gushed about the technology, admitting that from thereon in he would “never work without it again”. Why? Because “It opens up the universe even for the small scenes”.
He added, “Robots and androids and replicants have become so much of the landscape, so you have to come up with something that hasn’t been seen before. You have to find a notion that makes something fresh.” Scott thought he’d found his calling and vowed never to work without the high-quality equipment ever again.
Fans would quickly come to realise that this was a fresh-faced lie from Scott. It wasn’t as if the time between releases or projects was so great that he might forget about the commitment: A week after Prometheus was released, Scott and team were on the set of The Counselor. In fairness to Scott and his cinematographer Darius Wolski, the character-driven dialogue amassed a greater portion of the film than in the action-packed Prometheus.
For a short run, Scott kept true to his promise; he shot Exodus: Gods and Kings with 3D in mind and released it in 2D, 3D, and IMAX 3D for full effect. Next up, his Matt Damon space extravaganza, The Martian, was shot using stereoscopic 3D cameras and was widely released in 3D, while Alien: Covenant continued the approach he used in Prometheus.
But that’s where his love affair ends. Let me tick off a list of painfully non-3D releases for you: All the Money in the World, The Last Duel, House of Gucci, Napoleon, and Gladiator II were all captured and completed without his trusty 3D set-up.
As for his next release, The Dog Stars, set to feature Margaret Qualley and Jacob Elordi in a post-apocalyptic world, it’s unknown whether Scott will try his hand at 3D once more. But the trailer promises brooding, mysterious, action-packed thrill, a bullseye which Scott always hits dead-on.
