Sir Ridley Scott is currently promoting his latest movie, the science fiction survival movie The Martian starring Matt Damon. In a recent interview to promote the movie with Total Film the British director was unsurprisingly quizzed about the eargerly awatied yet still unnamed sequel to 2012's Prometheus, to which the director answered that principal photgraphy would begin in January of 2016, which seemed to be comfirmed recently in another interview when Scott announced that "Prometheus 2" was to be his next movie. In a more recent interview with Deadline Scott has again confrimed that the prometheus sequel is his next movie but has interestingly stated that filming will instead begin in February...
DEADLINE: How has the development of visual effects technology helped you do things here that weren’t possible when you made Blade Runner and Alien?
SCOTT: In the days of Blade Runnerand Alien, there were where I would call matte paintings. We did pretty well with those paintings with Blade Runner, but when you look at them today you can see the seams. In those days, it was good enough, and digital effects didn’t exist. To doAlien, I literally had to have a guy in a black rubber suit. That’s why the film is likeJaws, where you don’t see much of the shark, and you don’t really want to look that closely. In Alien, the scariest of all the films in that series, you don’t see much of the monster, mostly because I was so limited in what I could do. The head. The helmet he had to wear, we went through industrial design and got it down to five pounds, but you wear five pounds and turn your head, and you’re going to crick your neck. Everything was a problem. How do I get the suit to be so tight so that it doesn’t look like a guy in a rubber suit? Today, I can digitally represent that, perfectly. There’s a downside to that as well. If everything can be done perfectly, it gives you massive capability as a filmmaker. You’ve got to watch that you don’t make something so dramatic it becomes not feasible or dramatically dodgy. If I’m going to have an explosion, it can’t be too big that the guy wouldn’t survive.
DEADLINE: Alien stamped the way outer space movies are shot. It came not long after Star Wars, which is being revived later this year. Can you recall how seeing that movie the first time affected you?
SCOTT: Absolutely seminal for me, that first one that George Lucas directed. So creatively brilliant that he decided to make it the flip side of the coin to 2001, and it certainly became the flip side of Alien which I would do two years later. George made a fairy tale story, with a princess, the young prince, and the cynical Harrison Ford playing Han Solo. To me, it was an absolutely perfect rendition of a great comic serial. I learned to draw from comic strips, the better ones. I always remembered the early Supermans were better drawn than the later one, and the early Tarzans were spectacularly well drawn, the anatomy of the jungle was great. There’s artistry in comic strips and George was obviously a devotee of that and what he did was brilliant.
DEADLINE: What was your take away?
SCOTT: I canceled the film I was going to do, after I saw Star Wars. I’d finishedThe Duellists, which upon reflection is a good film that got a prize at Cannes. God bless Paramount for giving me $800,000 to make it, but they didn’t know what to do with it. If it had been 25 years later, you’d have had Harvey Weinstein or someone. But after it got the Grand Jury Prize, some bright spark saw the film and said, why don’t we give Ridley Alien? God knows why, but I had been a designer; my first job in television was as a set designer, and I was a devotee of comic strips. I enjoyed making The Duellists so much that I decided, with David Putnam, that I’d do Tristan and Isolde. I was in LA to show The Duellists and David said, there’s a film called Star Wars at the Chinese. I can get two tickets, do you want to go? I think you should go.
We went to an afternoon performance at 2:00, I was eight rows from the front with David Putnam. I never saw or felt audience participation like that, in my life. The theater was shaking. When that Death Star came in at the beginning, I thought, I can’t possibly do Tristan and Isolde, I have to find something else. By the time the movie was finished, it was so stunning that it made me miserable. That’s the highest compliment I can give it; I was miserable for week. I hadn’t met George at that point, but I thought, Fu*k George. Then, somebody sent me this script called Alien. I said, wow. I’ll do it. I was the fifth choice. They’d been to people like Robert Altman. How could you offer Robert that movie? He’d be like, this thing comes out of his chest, are you kidding? But I knew what to do. I read it and said, I’ll do it! I’d been in Hollywood 22 hours. They said, ‘do you want to change anything?’ Nope. ‘Do you…?’ Nope. I love it. I love it. I’m in.
DEADLINE: So Ridley Scott’s Alien exists, thanks to Star Wars?
SCOTT: Thanks to Star Wars, and to Stanley Kubrick for the way he influenced George and definitely influenced me, with 2001. The design on 2001…that’s the threshold for everything being real. You look at 2001 and you look at Star Wars. Stanley’s design influenced everybody. I’ve never shaken it off; it influenced me even with Prometheus. Stanley really got it right. Stanley was like the Big Daddy, so I never got jealous of him. I watched his 18th Century film Barry Lyndon when I was about to do The Duellists and I’d go, wow Stanley, you did all that in one shot. Hmm. Stanley was like the godfather. There’s a certain level of director where we all feed off each other. It’s like a painter who looks at the work of a peer and goes, damn. The influences can come even from brand new work, because I look at everything. Everything. Most of it is not so good.
DEADLINE: Alien set a high bar for filmmakers like James Cameron when he made that film’s sequel…
SCOTT: He felt it was hard to follow, because it was so frightening and so fresh, and no one had ever seen that before. I remember getting into such a fight with the studio because I wanted to use H.R. Giger and they thought it looked obscene. I said, are you kidding me? Obscene is good! We’re doing an R rated movie. I want to make you uncomfortable, apart from the fact that it’s scarier than sh*t. Comics might disagree, but it’s easier to make people laugh than it is to really scare the daylights out of them. I’ve never done anything I regretted, though.
DEADLINE: Prometheus ended with Noomi Rapace’s Dr. Elizabeth Shaw and the robot’s head, taking off to find the engineers, the ancient architects that created civilization. Will Michael Fassbender be lending his head, and presumably the rest of himself, for that sequel, even though it was reported he would do The Snowman?
SCOTT: Oh, yes. He and I are friends, because we also did The Counselor. And, I loveThe Counselor. No one else seemed to.
DEADLINE: Where do you take the Prometheus 2 plot?
SCOTT: You can either say, leave the first film alone and jump ahead, but you can’t because it ends on too specific a plot sentence as she says, I want to go where they came from, I don’t want to go back to where I came from. I thought the subtext of that film was a bit florid and grandiose, but it asks a good question: who created us? I don’t think we are here by accident. I find it otherwise hard to believe you and I are sitting here at this table, because the molecular miracles that would have had to occur were in the trillions, since the first sign of human life that crawled out of the mud with four fingers, would bloody well be impossible, unless there was some guidance system. Also, you have the sun approximately the same distance from earth as it is from maybe millions of planets and planetoids that are almost identical distance and therefore enjoy the value of sunlight on their soil. Are you telling me there are no other planets with human life? I simply don’t believe it.
That raises the question to me, same as was depicted in 2001 when that object comes hurtling through space, and lands in Ethiopia. And an ape that had been grubbing around in the water hole with all of them bickering at each other, goes up and touches it. He has a bigger thought injected into his brain than Newton got sitting under a tree and seeing an apple fall. Stanley then picks something metaphorically poetic in its violence, as the ape picks up a hip bone and brains the anteater so they can eat him. That is one gigantic, magnificent leap of a thousand years of evolution; that is where the world begins. It is pretty grand thinking, and that’s what I want to explore. You’ve got to go back and find those engineers and see what they are thinking. If engineers are the forerunners of us, and therefore were creators of life forms in places that were possible for biology to function, who created that? Where’s the big boy? You think this was all an accident? I don’t know. Even Stephen Hawking now says, I am not sure. He no longer believes in the big bang.
Normally a delay in any movies production schedule can be a worrying sign, but with filming only being delayed a month, taking into account that co-star Michael Fassbender is currently filming the big screen adaptation of Ubisoft's award winning videogame franchise Assassins Creed, and also considering that Scott is multi-tasking promotion for The Martian with pre-production and location scouting for the Prometheus sequel it seems as though studio 20th Century Fox have given the director some freedom with the movie.
The movie still having no set release date further shows 20th Century Fox's belief in Scott and his endgame for the Prometheus part of the alien franchise, which must be something special when taking into account the controversial fallout surrounding the first Prometheus movie, which would have otherwise eliminated any lesser franchises chance of a sequel.
Thanks to Scifider Membrane for the heads up.
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