Ridley Scott Interview

After achieving his commercial breakthrough as a director with Alien (1979), Ridley Scott is known for his sci-fi classic Blade Runner (1982); Legend (1985); Black Rain (1989); Thelma & Louise (1991); 1492: Conquest of Paradise (1992); best picture Oscar-winner Gladiator (2000); Black Hawk Down; Hannibal (both 2001); Matchstick Men (2003), Kingdom of Heaven (2005); A Good Year (2006); American Gangster (2007); Body of Lies (2008); Robin Hood (2010); Prometheus (2012) and The Counselor (2013).

His most recent film is the large-scale Biblical epic Exodus: Gods and Kings and Film-News.co.uk caught up with Ridley to find out more...

How daunting was it to make a film on this scale?

At this point it wasn’t daunting at all, otherwise I wouldn’t have tried it. Once you get a great script, then the script attracts great actors like Christian Bale. And when I’ve got that combination, the making of the film is really just a pleasure and not very daunting. You put the daunt behind you and you just face the problems of making a movie.

How important was it for you to work with those enormous sets at Pinewood?

Obviously, part of my job is that I have to deliver to the actor a terrific proscenium and a terrific wardrobe because I think it affects the actor. If you walk onto an amazing set it affects everything and if they are fitted with costume properly that affects everything. So the detail is key. I am a detail freak. It is part of what I do.

With the Battle at Kadesh, how inspired were you by David Lean’s shots in Lawrence of Arabia where he is attacking the Turkish camp?

It was actually under the [same] rock. That was Wadi Rum. There is still a little village there. In fact, I was there seven weeks ago. There is still one of the wagons standing in a run of lines from when Lawrence blew up the Turkish train, and they have got this little village down there underneath the massive rock. But Wadi Rum, which is quite a big area, I would say rivals Monument Valley. It is extraordinary and I have been there three times now because David did Lawrence there and I knew him. And then I flew in helicopters for the planet in Prometheus. Then I had a lot of footage left over from that so I then used it for this film, in a lot of those aerial views. Really, you see, I am a budget-conscious director so a lot of the stuff that we see in this journey is from Wadi Rum. And I am going to go back there in February this year to finish off The Martian.

Did you shoot much extra material that we might see on the Home Entertainment release?

When the Blu-ray comes out there will be 20 minutes, not adding to the cut because I think that spoils the cut, but there’s 20 minutes of interesting stuff that could go into the extras because I know that people love going into the Blu-ray menu.


With Gladiator and Ben-Hur and Exodus, we have the idea of the fallen general rising again. Why is this opening to a story so important in mythical tales?

When I began the process I was offered the script, which was already written, and it was very interesting, certainly interesting enough to get me engaged. After that, I was more amazed by what I didn’t know about this character of Moses. I knew about the child in the rushes, and the tablets, but that was about it. So when I read the whole story I had no idea of the length and breadth of who this character was, and how important he was historically and religiously to three major denominations. So off that I set forth to adjust the screenplay to the way that I saw it, and in so doing I injected a little bit of myself into what I thought the story was. The first writer, Jeffrey Caine, was like an encyclopaedia and from that I was educated enough about the process not to have to sit down and read the whole Old Testament like Christian did. In fact, he read it about three times and that was after the screenplay was finished and he kept going, ‘What about if we put this in?’ Anyway, I trod carefully and respectfully through the story of Moses because you cannot tell the whole story. If you told the whole story you’d have a 15-hour movie! In fact, we could do a sequel to this, if it does well, from the tablets through to Canaan. I’m not joking, you could. So I had to make careful selections. But for me there is no parallel with Gladiator. That film was made up, Moses wasn’t.

Why did you choose to explain the 10 plagues of Egypt and to rationalise them?

I watch a lot of National Geographic, and you watch the real animal world where people are sitting there for days getting shots of the animals in their own environment, and a lot of that influences me in this film. I saw a horrible piece of documentary on Madagascar where there had been this huge migration of flies that had attacked fishing boats and had killed a fisherman, where he had been breathing in flies. And that went into the little library of what I must do. I have seen plagues of locusts, so I wanted to embed myself in reality with the plagues.

You have a little bit of humour in the film at one point…

Yes, we have the rather amusing Ewan Bremner, who plays the scientist of the era, and the marvellous Indira Varma, who did a small part for me playing a priestess, who was clearly all about propaganda. She was the peak of the propaganda. Those two were destined for punishment and a definite hanging. I thought the film needed a little bit of humour so their comeuppance was the little bit of humour that I put in there.

Do you consider Moses an icon of freedom?

Naturally, there will be a connection between what we do, which is 5,000 years old, and lots of things going on today around the world, and the only lesson we seem to have learned is none! We keep repeating the same stuff. But I like to be positive about the way the world seems to be because if you look at the world today, in many respects we’re better off in many parts of the world than we were 50 years ago. So you have to be optimistic. But if you look at the overview of the political and religious movements going on right now, we don’t seem to have learned anything. Nothing seems to have moved forward.

Was it the Hebrews that built the pyramids or was it the Egyptian slaves?

There has been some controversy about whether it was the Hebrew or the Egyptian slaves that were building the pyramids, but in this instance, by doing my research, I had to make my decision. And what is interesting is that much of the success of their economy was the fact that the Nile floods every year and gives them a marvellous land on which they can grow their produce. Then the thing that became a status quo over a period of hundreds of years was the assumption of free labour, and those camps grew. When doing my research I heard figures of 20,000 up to 200,000 to 400,000 and if it’s over four centuries those camps would become a city, and that city was free [labour]. Therefore, I can only assume that they also formed part of the labour force to build the monuments and the pyramids. They were the bricklayers of that process. I am sure that the Egyptians were there as well, as the key personnel, the organisers and architects. It’s kind of logical, really. You look at what happens today and you can apply that to ancient and medieval times because things don’t change that much.

Exodus: Gods and Kings is out on Blu-ray 3D, Blu-ray and DVD on 27th April.