“We did a very good take”: the infamous 1984 flop Ridley Scott walked away from directing
It’s quite good fun that Ridley Scott has reached the phase where older people don’t really care what anyone thinks about anything, because it leads him to say entertaining stuff like when historians criticised a few inaccuracies in Napoleon and he asked them if they were there at the time, and if not to “Shut the fuck up then”.
Entertaining quotes aside, Scott is still making brilliant films even at the age of 88, which bodes well for the likes of Steven Spielberg, because he’s only 79 and his latest, Disclosure Day, is absolutely epic. Along with Spielberg, Scott is, of course, one of the most important movie directors of all time, and again, like Spielberg, one of the most important figures in sci-fi history.
The two men made their marks on the world at very similar times, and in fact helped each other in making decisions back in the late 1970s that ended up shaping some of our best-loved films into the iconic fare they would become. Not long after Spielberg had directed 1977’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, he was considered to direct another film about extra-terrestrials, this time much less friendly ones, but he was too busy, and Alien ended up being helmed to an incredible standard by the British director Scott instead, who made the key decision to switch the lead character of Ripley from a man to a woman.
After the global success of that film, Scott’s next film was another seminal sci-fi in the form of Blade Runner, and Spielberg had a big part to play in that, because he invited Scott to London to watch early footage from his new film, Raiders of the Lost Ark, featuring Harrison Ford. It was thanks to that trip that Scott was convinced Ford should be the lead in Blade Runner. But in fact, there should have been another Ridley Scott sci-fi made in the three years between Alien and Blade Runner.
An adaptation of Frank Herbert’s novel Dune was well underway with Scott as director by 1980, and even went into production after he had put a year of work into the project. The interplanetary story of families battling for the galaxy’s most precious material, ‘spice’, had long been considered unfilmable, but Scott disagreed and was ready to make the movie.
He told Totalfilm: “It’s always been filmable. I had a writer called Rudy Wurlitzer, of the Wurlitzer family, you know, the Jukebox? He’d written two films: Two-Lane Blacktop with James Taylor and Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. We did a very good take on Dune, because early days, I’d work very, very closely with the writer. I was always glomming the look of the film onto what he or she was writing.”
After seven months of pre-production, Scott and his team had moved into Pinewood Studios just outside London and were ready to start filming, before two pivotal events took place. Firstly, Scott’s older brother Frank died unexpectedly from skin cancer at just 45. “And then,” continued Scott, “[Dune producer] Dino De Laurentiis had got me into it, and we said, ‘We did a script, and the script is pretty fucking good’. Then Dino said, ‘It’s expensive, we’re going to have to make it in Mexico’. I said, ‘What!’ He said, ‘Mexico’. I said, ‘Really?’ So he sent me to Mexico City.”
That proved to be a step too far for Scott, who realised how long making the movie would take and how much work and travel would be involved. He informed De Laurentiis that he would be exiting the project and instead focused on beginning Blade Runner. Dune was taken over by David Lynch and released in 1984, with a cast including Patrick Stewart and Sting, but struggled to break even and got poor reviews.
December this year sees the third part of Denis Villeneuve’s reboot of the franchise released, with an all-star cast including Timothée Chalamet, Zendaya, Robert Pattinson and Florence Pugh.
