Ridley Scott Quotes on his Alien Movies

I have a habit of copying and pasting quotes about the Alien movies into word documents to browse later. I was going though some of Ridley's comments over the years and thought I would post a few, sort of in chronological order...just to have in one place.

RIDLEY SCOTT QUOTES

RIDLEY'S ORIGINAL IDEAS FOR A SEQUEL
“It certainly should explain what the Alien is and where it comes from…That will be tough because it will require dealing with other planets, worlds, civilizations…The Alien may be one of the last descendants of some long-lost self-destructed group of beings…in many respects it’ll be more interesting [than the first movie], from a pure science-fiction stand point. We’d get into speculative areas, deal with two civilizations.”

“There were no speculative scenes or discussions about what the Alien was and all that sort of thing either. I believe that audiences love those, especially if they’re well done. They give the threat much more weight…"

“I was amazed that no one asked me about this mysterious element of the film, but if you would have asked me in 1978, I would have gladly explained that, in my mind, all this alien ship could be was a battleship...they missed one of the biggest questions of all, which is: who’s the big guy? Who’s flying the ship, basically? And where are they going? And with what? Why that cargo?”

RIDLEY'S ORIGINAL IDEAS FOR A PREQUEL
"All I was doing was turning the chapter and opening the door, because why would that creature have a cargo like that? What was his intention? I used to blindly call it a battleship… I was never really happy about the layout of the eggs on the floor, but that's the way it was when we did it at the time, and when we actually built the eggs they were sitting in rows, a bit like pineapples, and it was a specific layout, so clearly this was a hold of some kind for some reason, and so you may as well open it up and tell - well it's that, and it's deadly. Then the biggest question becomes why, and who would conceive of these things, and where were they going? This is a whole new story."

ON THE DIFFICULTY OF SCIENCE FICTION FILMS
"Being able to say, 'anything goes', that's also very dangerous, because anything goes becomes rubbish if you don't watch it. An therefor you've still got to create your own parameters for a three act play. You have still got to create your own rule book, because otherwise it's like,  silly. That's always been my problem with most films, unless they re reality based. To do science fiction at a high level is tricky. History is straightforward because I'm re-telling a story and I've got points of reference. Science fiction, there's no points of reference. It's all brand new."

THE 'CREATION' PROLOGUE OF PROMETHEUS
"… the sequence at the beginning of the film (Prometheus), that is fundamentally creation. It’s a donation, in the sense that the weight and the construction of the DNA of those aliens is way beyond what we can possibly imagine,” Scott said. Adding that the planet isn’t necessarily Earth, he says, “No, it doesn’t have to be. That could be anywhere. That could be a planet anywhere. All he’s doing is acting as a gardener in space. And the planting that life, in fact, is the disintegration of himself."

ABOUT THE ENGINEER SHIP DESIGN IN THE PROLOGUE
"They tried to say (to me), why wouldn’t they have the croissant (Juggernaut) at the beginning of the movie? I said, well, considering that saucer is probably at least 10 million before this, why the hell wouldn’t they have changed the design of the spaceship."

ABOUT THE PROMETHEUS MISSION
"They are going somewhere, but the destination is undisclosed, because it is top secret"

ABOUT THE ENGINEERS
"In a funny kind of way, if you look at the Engineers, they’re tall and elegant … they are dark angels. If you look at [John Milton’s] Paradise Lost, the guys who have the best time in the story are the dark angels, not God."

"…they’re such aggressive f**kers … and who wouldn’t describe them that way, considering their brilliance in making dreadful devices and weapons that would make our chemical warfare look ridiculous? So I always had it in there that the God-like creature that you will see actually is not so nice, and is certainly not God."

Hall of heads (in Prometheus) is a rounded, earthy room. Scott told us the faces might be those of apostles, wise men — a superior people, while production designer Chris Seagers revealed that the heads were meant to give a sense of history and gravity to the sacred place… a place where the Engineers stored their information.

"…Covenant gets us a step closer to who and why was this thing designed to make human beings. And if you think it’s them,” Scott said, gesturing to the monolithic figures of the Engineers surrounding us (hall of heads), “you’re dead wrong.”

WHY WERE THE LONGER SCENES CUT IN PROMETHEUS?
"I think what's good about it is that we tell enough, but not too much…there were longer scenes, and I think fundamentally when you go in too deep, and the running time, well not necessarily the running time…you have got one hour introducing elements and everything, this and that, before significant physically kicks in, so I thought that's enough. In the original Alien there was 47 minutes before John Hurt looks into the egg…and then it kicks off and starts its own engine. There was about an hour on this one and I thought that was time enough."

WHAT WAS THE PURPOSE OF THE LV-223 INSTALLATION
"In the story we confront one of these characters who is called an Engineer, who is of a race, that if we do a sequel to this prequel, we’ll find out who this race was and where they are. Because they are not of this planet, where we are right now (LV-223), and we will find out during the story, that actually this moon…I always parallel it to, I believe, the British in the second World War developed anthrax. All their experimentations went on in this place in - I believe in the Irish channel - which is like any old power station which is an atomic nuclear reactor, which is locked up for the next 500-600 years because you can’t cleans anything of anthrax. So I always think of and refer to it (LV-223) as the Anthrax Island of this race called the Engineers"

WHY THE ENGINEERS WANTED TO WIPE OUT HUMANITY AND START OVER
"…if you look at it as an “our children are misbehaving down there” scenario, there are moments where it looks like we’ve gone out of control, running around with armor and skirts, which of course would be the Roman Empire. And they were given a long run. A thousand years before their disintegration actually started to happen. And you can say, “Lets’ send down one more of our emissaries to see if he can stop it. Guess what? They crucified him."

"If the planet went wrong, they would want to wipe it clean. But that could take 500 years. When they revisit –  because different visitors would come back and see we’re not doing so well – they would look at these human beings that are jerks, that are killing the planet, killing themselves, can’t settle down, they’re like a bunch of children. We should wipe it clean…We will drop some of that stuff and wipe it clean. It could come in the form of a plague. In effect, the thing that is dropped is a plague. It kills everything beneath it, but it is insidious and spreads everywhere. It will take about a year, and you have got nothing left except flora. No fauna. The meat is gone."

WHY DAVID WIPED OUT THE ENGINEERS IN COVENANT
"Remember, an Engineer tore his head off. So the Engineer has proven to be an enemy of him (David), and whilst he stood there in wonder at the Engineer when he initially saw him, Peter Weyland over stepped the mark. His request was simply about mortality…the Engineer was kind of disgusted by that, because that was a question beneath his species. And so he killed Peter Weyland, and in effect killed David as well. So David comes back from that clearly not liking the Engineers."

"...That's why he drops it on their city, because he hates them. He has no respect for Engineers and no respect for human beings."

THOUGHTS ON SHAW
 "When you are philosophizing about the reasons for life, faith, God, it's always tricky because you don't want to get into long dissertations. And the trick of filming, which is so wonderful about film, is you can actually have a conversation between a father and her daughter, and she says 'how do you know it's beautiful?', and he says 'because it's what I believe Elle, what do you believe?'. And she looks over to this guy who's in her cyber sleep that shouldn't be there, and then you are off and running. So now you know that this is a person who has faith in the hereafter and certainly faith in her maker. She believes in God."

THOUGHTS ON DAVID
"The predecessor of Ash is David"

"In this one the idea to have David was not just useful, it was essential. Don't hide the fact that he is a, don't make him a revelation. Robots aren't a revelation anymore. Better to say, that's a really strange film, what the f**k is he? Weyland says he's my favorite son, but he has no soul, but he will have endless life. So in a very matter of fact way, we are talking about a creation…"

"..if it's completely cyber, how deep can that relationship go…can the cyber thing have feeling for you? We don't know, because it depends how sophisticated it is, and it also depends on how well you treat them. So you are re-polishing the whole notion of artificial creation, and that can become a serious relationship."

"There is a lot of good information where he talks about creation. Idle hands are the devil's work. Come look at my success. So gradually you are aware - Oh my God, he designed this muther f**ker - rather than it came from the Engineers. It came from him,  but he needed to use their black, deadly cleansing lotion (laughter)"

THOUGHTS ON WALTER
"David was so successful that Peter Weyland made quite a few.  Then Walter was part of that process, he was a follow through which you learned through the movie, except there were various governors on him.  He had an emotional governor and never hurt a human being.  So he could turn on David in like a heartbeat, as one creature to another and have them go at each other, but he would never attack another human being."

ON THE DAVID/WALTER SWITCH
"You knew Walter was David fairly early…That's why I had him go there and turn and look around (when David appears in Walter's clothes after the fight at the edge of the plaza, he turns and looks back with a strange look on his face)…in that moment, AI or not, I am a very logical person. So I'm thinking, wait a minute, you mean he cut his hand off, changed his clothes, cut his face open before going out there? So I was thinking, if I just do it, it'll fly by, because I think you are sandwiched between so much reason to get out of there, and then the appearance of the alien, it will get forgotten. So that's sometimes where you cheat, as a playwright. So it's about 20 minutes that I cheated with…if you only found out (it was David) when he was tucking her in (Daniels), you have not enjoyed the possibility that something is wrong."

ABOUT THE ULTRAMORPH (deacon)
"(in Prometheus) I left the xenomorph out, and tried to evolve int the first step of how it begins again, with that deacon (the ultramorph), and that's the precursor to what happens."

"It is a precursor to what was designed as the Alien (Giger)"

ABOUT THE NEOMORPH
"You get an unarmored - Alien was always a hard shell. Think about a cockroach. A cockroach is kind of beautiful when you examine one. Any insect is beautiful. So the alien was a beautiful insect with a hard shell. So that means its armored to a certain extent. But the Neomorph is soft, a little bit like us humans. We're pretty weak actually. If I prick you, you'll bleed and go 'oh my God' and you could die. So were not very strong. So the Neomorph is a bit more vulnerable but its an evolution from human DNA."

HOW SHAW FIGURED INTO DAVID'S EXPERIMENTS
She was integral to what David carried out later (breeding the xenomorph)."

ABOUT PROMETHEUS 2
"There were questions that remained unanswered: Where did the ship come from? Who was the pilot? What was his cargo? And why does human DNA play such an important role for the alien? Not to answer that, I thought was crazy. The first step to unlock those secrets was then Prometheus."

"In the story we confront one of these characters who is called an Engineer, who is of a race, that if we do a sequel to this prequel, we’ll find out who this race was and where they are. Because they are not of this planet, where we are right now (LV-223)"

“Yes, but it (link to LV426 and Alien) won’t be in the next one. It will be in the one after this one or maybe even a fourth film before we get back into the ‘Alien’ franchise… The whole point of it is to explain the Alien franchise and to explain the how and why of the creation of the alien itself. I always thought of the alien as kind of a piece of bacterial warfare. I always thought that that original ship (Juggernaut), which I call the croissant, was a battleship, holding these biomechanoid creatures that were all about destruction."

"I think what's good about it is that we tell enough, but not too much...You don't want to elaborate any more than that. And then they are off and running. It's topped by a terrific moment, when she says 'do you mind', and she puts his head in the bag.  She's never going to put his head on top of that body, because when she does he will become deadly again…it ends with 'I'm still searching'. You don't ask, how's she going to live? She isn't going to sleep? What's she going to feed on, what's she going to drink? You can get into all that, but then it becomes Robinson Crusoe, and that's another film."

"I’d love to explore where the hell [Dr. Shaw] goes next and what does she do when she gets there, because if it is paradise, paradise can not be what you think it is. Paradise has a connotation of being extremely sinister and ominous."

"So I’m now going to the next one (Paradise), which is the next evolution directly connected with the first one, which was…Shaw, when she repaired Michael Fassbender (who was) in two pieces, and we’ll kind of pick it up there and it will evolve."

“The beast is done. Cooked. I got lucky meeting Giger all those years ago. It’s very hard to repeat that. I just happen to be the one who forced it through because [the studio] said it’s obscene. They didn’t want to do it and I said, ‘I want to do it, it’s fantastic. But after four [Alien films], I think it wears out a little bit. There’s only so much snarling you can do. I think you’ve got to come back with something more interesting. And I think we’ve found the next step. I thought the Engineers were quite a good start.”

Scott said viewers could expect to see Prometheus 2 follow Noomi Rapace’s Elisabeth Shaw and Michael Fassbender’s decapitated android David in their mission to find the Engineers’ home world and find out why the human-like creatures want to destroy mankind. “[We’ll] find out how he gets his head back on,” he joked, adding that several drafts of the screenplay had been written.

"It starts off with a very grand idea—or a grand question, really. Who are they and why did they create such evil biology and bacteriology? And [in creating], to protect themselves from what? So the questions are answered there, or rather, beginning to be answered in Prometheus 2."

"…You can't have a person go off into the galaxy, and have a person who's still got his head off. Once that head goes back on, he's really dangerous, but he's also very seductive. So maybe he will persuade her to help him put the head back on."

"With Prometheus 2 what I'm trying to do is reintroduce a fresher form of alien in the third act."

ABOUT THE CHANGE IN DIRECTION BY BRINGING THE XENOMORPH BACK IN COVENANT
"…Because everyone said I missed the Alien. I said, really? And I said, OKaaayy (rolling his eyes). So I came back on…its actually 5 steps, you see 5 steps (5 stages of the alien). Pretty nasty."

"..comments were, that actually they missed him (the xenomorph)…they missed the evolution…so I thought we had better include it and try it out, so this (Covenant) is the trail run"

"It went straight up there, and we discovered from it that [the fans] were really frustrated. They wanted to see more of the original [monster] and I thought he was definitely cooked, with an orange in his mouth. So I thought: ‘Wow, OK, I’m wrong’. The fans, in a funny kind of way – they’re not the final word – but they are the reflection of your doubts about something ... and then you realize ‘I was wrong’ or ‘I was right’. I think that’s where it comes in. I think you’re not sensible if you don’t actually take [the fans’ reaction] into account."

“Years ago, I kept mulling over what Alien 2 could be. I was fiddling around with some ideas. I was always fascinated with why this thing [the xenomorph] would be made, by whom, and for what purpose? ...I think I have to go again. We will see who made it (the xenomorph), and why. That’s what’s interesting.”

The planet it (the xenomorph) was on – and I was looking at the dark side of the moon – would be called Paradise. Paradise is a very ominous word…In a way it is Prometheus 2. It’s exactly the same story. But it was always in the works to be called that [Alien: Paradise Lost]. Is Prometheus actually taking us off course from where I’m going, which is actually backing into the first Alien... I’ve even got connections with Ripley [in this], but I’m not telling you what.

ABOUT ALIEN: COVENANT AND THE FUTURE MOVIES

"I don’t know. [I’ll make] maybe two more [films], or maybe one more, I don’t know…"

"If this [Covenant] is successful, and then the next one, and then there will definitely be three more."

"There will be another one before we kind of literally and logically, clockwise, back into the rear back head of [the original] Alien…It will go Prometheus, Awakening, Covenant.. fairly integral where this colonization ship is on the way...."

"There will be three or four different players coming in to investigate, one of which will be the Engineers arriving back to find their planet decimated…Those ships (Juggernauts) come and go on regular intervals. I see them as the gardeners of space…where we go next is obvious. Were gonna actually go to the planet...

"When that’s finished there’ll be another one and then another one, which will gradually drive into the back entrance of the film in 1979. So in other words, why was this space jockey there and why did he have an Alien inside him? And those questions will be answered.”

"We are heading towards the back end of the first Alien, so that may be feasible (bringing a young Ripley in). I don't think it will…Ripley is going to be "somebody's" daughter, obviously…We are coming in from the back end, right? And you know the time constraints, of …what is the time between this film,  where we leave David going off into tending for that colony. I think we are probably two films out from even considering her."

"…we can come in at the back end of the first Alien. But what I think we've unearthed is a much larger, bigger universe and story, so I think it will be some time before we ever reach the backend of the first Alien. It's still evolving now. I'm already having another one written right now, let's call it Covenant 2. That's with John Logan and we've already got the three act plan on where it's going to go and where it's going to connect, but it's evolving and getting bigger all the time. I don't know where it will end!"

"I always thought the journey would be very much embedded, at least 50% in religion. Security blanket. You can go there next. When I get there, I'm looking at the colonies and what happens, and how it disintegrates…it's being written now, the sequel to Covenant…John (Logan, the writer) is a very good playwright. What I love is he lays out the three acts immediately up front in simple skeleton form. So you are staring at that and that's the point where real discussion and details and starts to get embedded".

"They (colonists) will go there (Origau 6), they will evolve, and they will form a new world."

"It's about a 10 page thing (Covenant 2) and it's being worked on right now. It will evolve logically into the next place, of course…and after that I'm not telling you…we can bring it back to talk about the creation, inevitably about God, and da, da da, da da…so the (Alien) universe is doing that (makes a flying gesture), and you can go on. I think I have woken up a monster."

"Whether we bring Daniels back or not in the next one…she has to come back..I'm not sure that's the right thing".

"we're writing [a sequel] now, as we speak. I'll be filming that within 14 months."

"…The alien franchise should be into War of the Worlds by now. That's where I'm going…they (Fox) don't know it yet, but that's what were doing, Fox."

ABOUT THE DERELICT JUGGERNAUT IN ALIEN

"It's a vehicle. It doesn't look like it crashed. It looked like it may have had a forced landing, but it landed. And why did it land, and why was the pilot damaged? Because something had gotten loose in the cargo, and had evolved, and taken him out. And so, what could that be?…Had he set up a distress signal that we in our 21st century electronics had caught technology that was a million years old."

"…he’s (the space jockey) one of the group that had gone off and his cargo had gotten out of control…because he was heading somewhere else and it got out of control…and actually he had died in the process, so that would be the story there. That ship happened to be a brother to the ship that you see that comes out of the ground at the end (of Prometheus). They are roughly of the same period give or take a couple hundred years, right? Other than that, there’s no real link except it explains, I think, who may have had these capabilities, which are dreadful weapons way beyond anything we could possibly conceive, bacteriological drums of shit that you can drop on a planet."

"In the original, it was a biomechanical weapon. I imagined it to be on board a war ship that had to leave its course and had to land. Perhaps it crashed because one of the aliens had escaped. The weapon was then sleeping at the crash site, waiting for someone to pass."

“I wanted a fossil, almost,” said Scott regarding the Space Jockey’s integration with his technology, “one which you’d have a hard time deciding where he leaves off and the chair, on which he died, begins.”

“I always wanted to go back and make an Alien 5 or 6, where we find out where they came from and go there and answer the question, who are they? Mars is too close, so they can’t be gods of war, but the theory in my head was, this was an aircraft carrier, a battlewagon of a civilisation, and the eggs were a cargo which were essentially weapons. So right, like a large form of bacteriological/biomechanoid warfare.”

“This Space Jockey I’ve always thought was the driver of the craft...[He is] a perfect example of Giger’s mind, which is ‘where does biology end and technology begin?’ because [Giger] seems to have grafted the creature into what was essentially a pilot’s seat. But clearly from here, this is where the [warning] transmission would emanate from, probably in an automatic transmission… maybe one of the eggs had been disturbed and a creature had got out, had attacked the rest of the crew, don’t ask me where they got to, but he’s pretty gruesome…”

DID THE COMPANY KNOW ABOUT THE ALIEN EGGS IN THE DERELICT JUGGERNAUT?
“I think any corporation that sends probes into unknown territory is going to think of the possibility of finding something new,” he said. “I’m sure that the crew members on all its ships would have been briefed to bring back anything of interest. It would be part of one’s job to bring it back. An alien, of course, would be of top priority. This particular corporation didn’t have a preconceived notion that an alien would be found on this mission, much less the particular Alien that is brought onto the ship. The idea of bringing it back alive would not have been on the minds of the corporate executives when they first received the alien transmission. They just had high expectations when they ordered the Nostromo to investigate – it was purely out of curiosity.”

THOUGHTS ON THE ALIEN

"Loose on the ship, this new alien begins to lay eggs in the bowels of the ship. It lives to propagate and must find food for its offspring - in this ace the crew of the Nostromo upon who the young aliens can feed their eggs until a new host comes along and prods the eggs. Then the cycle begins all over again."

"What gave us the cocoon concept was that insects will utilize other's bodies to be hosts of their eggs. That's how the alien would use Dallas and each of the crew members it kills. This explains why the alien kills them one by one. It wants to use each person as a separate host each time it has new eggs…The biological make up of humans was useful, however, for the alien eggs to feed on…"Omni: Screen Flights, Screen Fantasies.
“Like a butterfly or an insect, it [the Alien] has a very limited lifespan in which to reproduce itself … [it] only has a limited life cycle of, maybe, four days like an insect … the Alien lifeform lived to reproduce … [Ripley] killed it, but it would have died soon anyway.”

THOUGHTS ON THE EGG-MORPH SCENE IN ALIEN
“What gave us the cocoon concept was that insects utilize others’ bodies to be the hosts of their eggs,” Ridley said in 1984. “That’s how the Alien would use Dallas and each of the crew members it kills. This explains why the Alien doesn’t kill everybody at once, but rather kills them off one by one: it wants to use each person as a separate host each time it has new eggs.”

"Loose on this ship, this new alien, begins to lay eggs in the bowels of the ship. It lives to propagate and must find food for it's offspring - in this case, the crew members of the Nostromo, upon whom the young aliens can feed in their eggs until a new host comes along prodding the eggs. The life cycle begins all over again"

"The scene which was cut was one in which one of the crew discovers the bodies of one of the others being used as food. It was just too gruesome."

"They are morphing, metamorphosing…they are changing into, being consumed, I guess, by whatever the alien organism is, into an egg."

THOUGHTS ON ASH
Ash was programmed with a human ‘back-story’, though he was well aware of his artificial nature: “That was a consideration I had to deal with. There are a number of ways of approaching it, but the possibilities come down to either letting him know or programming him so he thinks he’s human. All the space in between was open, but we went with letting him know. If we had decided to keep it from him, there were all kinds of things we could have done, from programming him to know at a certain point, like an emergency, or even putting a complete memory in him that would give him a complete background – parents, schooling, brothers, the whole thing.”

“We theorized that the Alien would feel or understand that Ash was a construction of robotics, however complex and strange, Because Ash wasn’t human, he’d have been no use as a host for its eggs.”

"It all start with 2001…HAL was one of the most genius ideas of Kubrick, where the machine takes over. Then I had to do a film called Alien, and in there we had a great idea of having any corporate vehicle or vessel of such magnitude and cost, would have to have a company man on board. Better if the company man is an AI, and nobody on board knows who the AI is. It's always kept a secret. Because everyone looks human, no one knows…Ash is in fact the after runner of David and Walter."

THOUGHTS ON THE NOSTROMO CREW
“I guess if you spend a lot of time together in space the camaraderie will  gradually disappear, and each person will become isolated with their own thoughts and their memories of where they’ve been and where they’re going to. And therefore, all of the characters are designed as not really being comrades. There’s a kind of cold relationship amongst all of them.”

“I think the crew members of the Nostromo seem spirited only because of their argumentative nature, which is due to the fact that they probably can no longer stand the sight of each other. It wouldn’t matter how it was all worked out in the pre-voyage stage, where a computer probably determined the compatability of the unit; like all crews in confined spaces, they’d get on one another’s nerves and would be cutting each other’s throats in six months’ time. I tried to glean as much as I could from present-day astronauts who go through preparing for prolonged periods in space. I then factored in ten years in space and tried to envision how a character would react to going off for that kind of period. Obviously it would raise all sorts of psychological problems above and beyond claustrophobia and melancholia.”

“I loved the minimal dialogue, the minimalist characterisation – what do you need to know? Once this thing is loose, I don’t want to have scenes talking about mum and dad back on the planet.”

"you can’t afford to have love affairs in deep space. If you do, you immediately have two groups aboard. The pair who are in love and the rest of the crew. That’s the beginning of problems unless you are a space pioneer and settle down with your family.”

"There was a line through the movie which had a … more by innuendo than anything else, that there was something going on between Dallas and she [Ripley]. And then later, I thought what was really curious was -could be interesting- there was something going on between her and Veronica, which I thought was far more probable. I mean a hundred years from now, you know, that’s certainly not gonna be remarkable in space. In fact, in space relationships are probably gonna be discouraged, and if you have the need for sex, it can be with either gender. Really doesn’t matter, right?”

“Veronica was always great at barely controlled terror. Catatonic terror. She’s always like, two steps from a heart attack, which I think she finally does at the end – have a heart attack.”

"I wanted Lambert to get sucked out of the ship through an opening about the size of a keyhole. Not a very heroic ending – but dramatic. We couldn’t afford it, besides, I couldn’t work out in those days how to squeeze a body through a hole that big.”

ON THE AGE OF THE NOSTROMO
"Speaking of the Nostromo’s technology, Ridley Scott said in 1979 that “the machine that they’re on could in fact be 60 years old and just added to over the decades. The metal-work on it could be 50 years old.” That means it is much older than the Prometheus and Covenant.

ABOUT QUESTIONS NOT DIRECTLY ANSWERED
“The clues are there right through (in Prometheus). I do hope they don’t write essays about this in thirty years time. I’d rather they got it now. It’s all there if you are looking. It’s quite subtle.”

ON CRITICISM OF HIS FILMS
"I don't make films for other people. I make films for me. And so far its pretty good, because I'm still here after 35 years. So there's a great expression, 'f**k you very much'."

ABOUT FILM SUCCESS AND PROFIT
"The global world market place is changing…entertainment looks attractive when you read about the few films that makes these insane amount of money, but what they (investors) don't know is that they don't always do that. There's a level going about it on the business side, and that's not necessarily the box office. If it does fine in the box office, that's OK. But - it will play for years on television, reissuing DVDs…and so on, and so on. So there is an industry just in that…a lot of the revenue comes in from that over the years…The important thing to do is make it."