Exclusive Interview: Ridley Scott

If it’s true that a picture paints a thousand words, then a beautifully crafted series or mini-series creates a world viewers want to inhabit. Oscar-winning director and producer Ridley Scott, who has thrilled the movie-going audience with classics such as Alien, Blade Runner, Thelma & Louise and Gladiator, has brought cinematic sensibilities to the small screen. He set new standards for quality television with historical and period mini-series, such as The Gathering Storm and The Pillars of the Earth, as well as the procedural dramas Numb3rs and The Good Wife.

WS: What appeals to you about working in television; what creative freedoms does it allow you to explore?
SCOTT: When you are working in television, whether you are working on series or mini-series, which can be four hours or eight hours, you can expand on the characters and the story in a way that can’t be done in a feature film. Feature film will always be a slimmed-down edition, especially if it’s an epic, which is quite difficult because you are trying to pin a feature film within the confines of two and a half hours. It starts to get very challenging if a film goes beyond two and a half or three hours, right? Whereas in TV, a mini-series of eight hours, or better still a series which goes on five or six years, is great because you get a real evolution of the characters and of the story as it’s happening and you create a universe in a way that you can’t really do in film.

WS: What challenges did The Pillars of the Earth present? It was a based on a long novel, with intertwining story lines. What appealed to you about the project?
SCOTT: I guess I like challenges. If you are in the film industry you’ve got to enjoy the stress that these challenges present you with. If you don’t, then don’t do the job! The first questions that arise are: how do you narrow this down, how do you break the episodes up, how do you break the stories up, can we actually accomplish this within the budget we have, which was tight especially when you spread it over eight hours and particularly with the number of important characters that run through the story. The first thing you want to do is get that on paper; if you can pin that down, the rest starts to fall into place.

WS: You have been credited with being one of the greatest visual stylists in film and you pay incredible attention to detail. Where did that come from?
SCOTT: I think it came from a natural source, which is my love of painting. I guess I was fairly advanced: I was painting from the age of five or six. While some kids were scribbling, I was doing full canvases by the time I was eight. I spent seven years in art school and then attended the Royal College of Art. I got my degree and followed a route in design, which would take me to the BBC and, eventually, I found myself directing.

The detail comes from my inherent love of looking at paintings and actually also photographs. I got into quite a high level of photography at the Royal College. The fashion industry really attracted me and I thought being a photographer might be a fun and good profession. I was looking in those days at people like Irving Penn and Richard Avedon. I wouldn’t have liked to do it if I had been anything less than that. All my work was so compacted, everything was always very detailed, that’s the way I saw everything. That’s been carried through to other areas of my work.

My success in advertising was because I brought what I thought were film sensibilities to television commercials. All my commercials honestly look like feature films. I think I’ve got what they call an eye, and with an eye you don’t need a set, you just need a camera, because your set, frankly, is when you step out the door. Whether you walk onto a set that is being constructed, or you walk into a room or you walk through a park, it’s all got to do with your eye—give me a shot. I’ve always been able to do that and, in fact, I’ve been criticized for that. But as Hitchcock said, at the end of the day this is not a radio play, dude, we’re talking about pictures here! Eventually I realized fairly quickly it was an advantage.

WS: Does television allow you to play that out even on the small screen?
SCOTT: Oh, terribly. I’m not standing there calling action, I’m not directing the TV series we do, but if I were, I would definitely try to wedge in the detail. It’s a knee-jerk reaction. It’s the way I see things. I try to talk to our TV directors as a producer, saying, God is in the details.

WS: When watching The Good Wife, besides the stories and the acting, there is something about the visuals that pulls you right in.
SCOTT: The trick is to create a universe that the audience wants to occupy for that space and time.

WS: Tell us about your passion for commercials, because your company RSA still produces them.
SCOTT: Oh, yes, the commercials never went away. I felt they might go away once I started film. I never did a film till I was 39 and by then my company in London, honestly, was the top company for commercials, really. We had already expanded into New York, so [the business] was not going away and [the credit goes to] my younger brother, Tony. Whenever I disappeared to make a film he was always there to defend the fort and keep the company going. I think we were one of the first to actually evolve into having a group of directors and run the company like a creative house.

WS: There is a very valid discipline in working in very short form, with only a minute or 30 seconds to tell a story, right?
SCOTT: And only a day to shoot it! You’re lucky if you have a 60-second commercial and you’ve maybe got two days to shoot it and you’ve got to really nail it in that time, so you are constantly working against the clock. It’s definitely art versus commerce. I think almost every top-of-the-line commercial director who is serious today thinks of what they do in terms of art. Of course, they are also quite into the fact that it’s got to function as a piece of advertising.

WS: The commercials I see airing in Europe seem like small films.
SCOTT: A lot of young filmmakers are coming out of commercials now, but directing commercials used to be a stigma. In my days it was me and Alan Parker and maybe Adrian Lyne out of the U.K. and there was almost a stigma if you came from advertising because the feature film people would say, “Yeah, but have you ever talked to an actor before?” I heard that all the time, you know?

WS: Are historical themes of particular interest to you when you tackle mini-series?
SCOTT: When you look at my body of work in film, I started off with The Duelists. In 1991, with Gerard Depardieu, I did 1492, which is 15th century. And then I did Gladiator and Kingdom of Heaven, so I am obviously a history buff. Maybe because looking back on those worlds the attraction is that they are more exotic than where we are today.

WS: You have a great fascination and admiration for Winston Churchill, don’t you?
SCOTT: Yes, we’ve done two mini-series about Churchill: The Gathering Storm with Albert Finney and Vanessa Redgrave, and Into the Storm with Brendan Gleeson. We are thinking about doing a third because Brendon took us through the war years right through to Churchill’s resignation. Actually, the English public voted him out to bring in the Labour Party with Clement Attlee in 1945. But remarkably Churchill retired to lick his wounds and while he was in retirement wrote the four-volume History of the English-Speaking People! And five years later was called to be prime minister again. Pretty remarkable man!

WS: Do you still find time to paint?
SCOTT: I do quite large canvases. I started painting again quite seriously about two years ago. And right now, frankly, I’m trying to find out who I am on canvas. I started pretty straightforward figurative painting because I can do pretty well and because honestly, three of my favorite painters today might be Peter Doig, David Hockney and Lucian Freud. Freud is a big influence on me. [My desire to paint] re-awoke when I was looking at a large painting by Freud of a child lying asleep on a carpet next to a rubber plant by the window, and the rubber plant was kind of ratty and dying. But the painting was fantastic and I thought, Oh, my God, because it was real. [So I thought] I’ll begin by being real [with figurative painting and] I may stay real.