It was customary in the movie business to read scripts late at night, propped on a pillow in bed. Ridley Scott never worked at night. “You think you’re winning,” he says. “You’re not.”
The director approached the script for Thelma & Louise the way he read any new material, at seven in the morning, at his sharpest. He sat on a hard chair with good light in the study overlooking the formal garden at his eighteenth-century home in the affluent Hampstead area of London, a cup of strong, hot coffee at his side. No one was permitted to enter the room until he finished.
Mimi Polk had pitched the script as a possible project for him to produce and told him something about the writer being a friend or a friend of a friend who had been a receptionist at a place that made videos or commercials. He couldn’t quite remember. Ridley was skeptical of any amateur who claimed to have written a screenplay. Nevertheless, right away, he started laughing. By nine o’clock, he reached the last page, where the car leaped off the cliff. Wow, he thought. “The script flew,” he says. “It was very well written. I started to see faces. I started to think, Damn! This could be this, this could be that. This is good enough to get any actress.”
After seven years at art school, Ridley benefited from what he considered his greatest gift—his mind saw everything in picture form. “I could see the film almost immediately as I was reading,” he says. “I thought, This is epic. The landscape should be epic. The ending would be epic. But, unusually, it was a comedy. I mean, it was funny.”
He knew this wasn’t for him. It was too much from a woman’s point of view, full of womanly banter and a wrath he couldn’t quite grasp. But he knew there had to be some director who could carry it off.
On that morning in the early spring of 1989, Ridley formed a firm opinion about Thelma & Louise. It was an epic comedy about how women act when guys aren’t around, and it would end not with tragedy—he didn’t see the ending as tragic—but with the right decision. As long as a studio doesn’t try to make it better by not having them go off the cliff, he thought. “They have to,” he insists. “I saw it more as them continuing their journey. It was what they were intended to do.”
He asked Mimi to set up a meeting with this Callie Khouri person as soon as he returned to LA.
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WHEREVER DIVERSITY IN THE WORKPLACE is an issue, as it certainly was and is in the movie industry, it’s essential that some white guy stick his neck out to start to set things right. That guy doesn’t have to be a flaming activist, but he has to be able to empathize with the group that lacks a voice, to listen to the people who’ve been deprived of power up to now, to be willing to give over some responsibility, to trust their judgment, to stand up for their point of view. Could Ridley Scott be that guy? Aside from the casting coup with Sigourney Weaver in Alien, his oeuvre was largely devoted to guys waging battles with robots or monsters or other guys. His agent, Jeff Berg, called him Mr. Macho, and he wasn’t alone. “He hadn’t been any kind of a woman’s director,” says Susan Sarandon, summing up the industry consensus. “He was seen as a very male, very macho action director.”
Yet for all the typically eighties subject matter of his movies, they lacked the formulaic simplicity of the typical eighties blockbuster. Ridley Scott’s films possessed a sumptuous visual splendor, an elegant pace and a dark moral ambiguity that tipped in the direction of art. Hans Zimmer, the film composer who often collaborated with Ridley, says, “The bottom line is that Ridley just wants to make a really good movie, and it never occurs to him to be patronizing about the characters, or sexist, or whatever words you want to pick.”
It would strike many in Hollywood as odd that a European man like Ridley Scott could become a champion for a movie that tapped a powder keg of outrage about American women and their place in American society, but he didn’t think about that on the morning he read the script. He liked it. It made him laugh. It made him see pictures.
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RIDLEY HAD MADE FIVE MOVIES by this time, and yet as a personality he was something of an unknown on the Hollywood scene. Pale, freckled, with the short, stocky stature of a Celtic Briton, he rarely socialized in Los Angeles, preferring his home in London and often filming and editing abroad. In a town built on faux friendships, Ridley Scott didn’t do chitchat; he worked. People in the business knew his work, certainly, and his perfectionism had earned him a reputation for being somewhat crusty, if not outright difficult, but few would have known him well enough to be aware that at least one formidable woman had figured prominently in his life.
“My mom was four foot eleven and insisted she was five feet tall,” says Ridley. She ruled a pack of three sons through an itinerant boyhood set mostly in Northumberland, an industrial county wedged hard against the Scottish border and the coast of the North Sea. Ridley was born in 1937, following his older brother, Frank, who grew up to serve in the merchant navy, and six years before the youngest, Tony. Their father, Francis, served in the Royal Engineers during World War II, rising to acting brigadier general, while his wife, Elizabeth, imposed discipline on the home front and continued her rigid reign when the family reunited after the war.
“By the standards of mothers today, she must sound pretty tough,” Ridley concedes. “If I broke my arm, it was my fault. If I fell in the sea, it was my fault. You were not allowed to be ill.” Her favorite expression was “Pull yourself together.”
Ridley got the belt and he got the stick. “To me, it was a medal of honor,” he recalled later. “If I got a bruise on my ass from a cane? It was normal.”
Yet the family was tight, according to Tony. “Dad was a very gentle and sweet man,” he said. “Mum was the matriarch and the patriarch of the family. She ran the roost with a steel fist, but at the same time there was respect and love for her. The driving force Ridley and I have comes from Mum, but they were chalk and cheese.”
Ridley stumbled and brooded through a bewildering array of ten or eleven schools as the family followed his father’s career, first to Germany during the rebuilding after the war, then back to Northern England. “I hated school,” Ridley says. His performance reflected his disdain. Years later he framed a report card and hung it in his London office. It showed him ranked 29 out of 29 in his class—no half measures.
But he could do one thing inordinately well—he could draw and paint. He and his father sat quietly together making watercolors on a balcony in Bavaria, and he gave Ridley books for his birthdays: How to Draw Boats, How to Draw Horses. It was his mother who first took Ridley to the cinema—The Black Swan with Tyrone Power was the first; Great Expectations and Citizen Kane made big impressions. Soon he started to go alone, nursing a secret ambition to work on a film someday, maybe as an art director, a promising job title that he spotted in the credits. This was an absurd ambition for a shy, underachieving, working-class boy from the North. “It was just too silly for words,” he told himself. “I wouldn’t dare.” The film industry was the far side of the moon.
When a teacher suggested he switch to art school, Ridley jumped headfirst, and “the world began for me—I adored it.” He thrived at the local West Hartlepool College of Art for four years, followed by three more earning a degree in design at the Royal College of Art in London. There was no course of study for film, but he borrowed a Bolex camera to make a short, Boy and Bicycle, on a budget of £65, drafting Tony to perform as star and chief equipment carrier. After graduation in 1961, Ridley scored a job as a set decorator at the BBC, where he talked his way into a quickie directors’ training course. That catapulted him into overseeing episodes of hits like Z Cars, a police drama shot with social realism.
Ridley thought like an artist but was sharp to the ways of business, too. He bit when Gerber, the baby food company, offered him a chance to moonlight by making his first commercial. The young star spent the shoot spitting the product into the director’s lens, but at the end of a day Ridley was handed more cash than he earned in a month at the BBC, and he savored a budget that allowed him to create a tight visual gem on a short turnaround. A company that he formed, Ridley Scott Associates, soon emerged as one of the most successful and innovative makers of commercials through the seventies and eighties, many of them directed by Ridley or others on his roster, including Tony, who had followed him from art school into the field.
Ridley seized the opportunity to experiment with the charged emotional and marketing possibilities of moving images. Each Ridley Scott commercial got the mini-masterpiece treatment, storyboarded, designed, lit with perfection and shot by Ridley himself. A sentimental, nostalgic 1973 ad for Hovis bread, featuring a boy with a bicycle in a picturesque village, was voted Britain’s all-time favorite commercial. It was nothing like his 1979 “Share the Fantasy” ad for Chanel No. 5, an erotic reverie intent on a woman lounging by a swimming pool and the brazenly phallic figure of a man who rose from the water between her legs. That one turned heads with a glossy hint of kink.
Advertising made Ridley very rich and very busy—he sometimes made two commercials a week, completing more than a thousand commercials in little more than a decade. “You know how when you get hot you can do anything?” he says. “I loved the work and the pressure. There was a bit of stress, but there’s positive stress and negative stress. Negative stress is sitting around when you’re doing nothing, and I don’t like relaxing. Positive stress is where you feel elevated and usually you are in the face of some bloody huge quandary. I kind of like that. My work is my pleasure.”
But it drove him crazy as he approached his forties and other British ad directors made the leap to feature films before he did. He used his sizable stash of money to hire screenwriters to develop a property for him, settling on The Duellists, based on a Joseph Conrad story, a period piece about two French army officers who obsessively, even absurdly, fought each other for twenty years. It won the best first work award at the Cannes Film Festival in 1977, when Ridley was thirty-nine. He started prepping another art house project, a nonoperatic version of Tristan and Isolde.
That’s when he took a sharp turn and went Hollywood, never to pivot back. On a visit there in the spring of 1977, Ridley took in a movie that had opened that week, Star Wars. He flipped over the clever use of the landscape of Morocco, which he knew from commercials, over the mix of animals and human beings in the characters, over the technology of the spaceships. It stirred his competitive juices to the point of anguish. “My biggest compliment when I see a film is if I’m in a fit of total depression,” he says. “I walked out—damn!”
He set aside the beautiful hand-drawn storyboards for Tristan and Isolde, determined to take a new direction. Other directors had already turned down an outer-space project called Alien, a seemingly standard monster movie set on a spaceship. But when the script came Ridley’s way, it lit up his design imagination. He envisioned chilly, sinister imagery drawn from French heavy-metal comics and commissioned the Swiss artist H. R. Giger to create a monster that shunned the sci-fi cliché of dragonlike creatures.
Long after its release in 1979, what people remembered most about Alien, aside from the ravishing look of the thing and the hideous monster that pursued the crew of the doomed ship, was the lead role, named Ripley. Alan Ladd Jr., then the head of 20th Century Fox, said to Ridley during preproduction, “What do you think if Ripley is a woman?”
“It was not for any reason,” Laddie recollects. “I wasn’t trying to make it a women’s picture. It was just a different way to go about it.”
Ridley, heedless that Laddie was one of the only executives at the time who entertained the idea of movies with prominent female roles, and pretty much unaware that women rarely played the leads in anybody else’s Hollywood movies, didn’t see a problem with that. “Great idea,” he said. “Why not make the hero female?”
“I never thought about it,” he says. “I only think about the film. Every film is like a painting. I only think of the painting.” His mind shifted immediately to the look of the star. “We need to find somebody who is physically powerful”—a tall order in a field of actresses prized for their passivity and delicate physiques.
The casting process lasted until just three weeks before the start of principal photography. When he heard about an imposing actress named Sigourney Weaver, who had never done anything of note outside of off-Broadway, he requested a meeting over sushi in New York.
“This giant walked in,” he says, his face lighting up at the memory. “She had an Afro in those days. It made her a foot and a half taller. I thought she was about seven foot three.” Ridley was convinced.
But Laddie wasn’t, even after a screen test. As he hesitated, one of his production executives, the British-born Gareth Wigan, invited a dozen secretaries into the room to watch. “Who likes her?” Wigan asked, and all the hands went up. They told him they admired Weaver’s strength. It reminded them of Jane Fonda.
The role of Ripley is often cited as a milestone for women in film, although the intention was mostly to ratchet up the shock value by placing a woman in jeopardy, as schlockier horror movies did. “I always felt that the decision to make Ripley the survivor was not made out of any great feminist sentiment,” Sigourney Weaver said. “It was, ‘No one will ever guess that this girl will end up being the survivor.’ It wasn’t a statement of any kind, but he really made it work.”
Reviews for Alien were mixed, but its critical stature grew over time as viewers came to appreciate Ridley’s visual artistry. With $79 million at the box office, the film was considered a hit, just not on the level of the Lucas-Spielberg blockbusters that then roamed the earth. And its novel look was hugely influential. All that gave Ridley enough cachet to land his next film, the futuristic thriller Blade Runner, released in 1982, which allowed his design sensibility to run wild. The story of a Philip Marlowe–like bounty hunter on the trail of rebel androids granted Ridley license to create an original world of dense, murky layers, centered in a decayed megalopolis with elements drawn from Hong Kong, Los Angeles and the north of England—industrial noir. Smoke, grime and rain added even more depth and dimension, a stark contrast to the art direction for typical movie versions of the future—so antiseptic that one could only assume that most of the androids were Roombas.
Blade Runner wielded influence over the look of every futuristic movie that followed—it put the dys in dystopia—and eventually surpassed even Alien to be regarded as a landmark of cinema. But it was considered a cult obsession at the time. The New York Times review captured the critical consensus by calling Blade Runner “muddled yet mesmerizing,” and the movie was a flop. “Blade Runner was a disaster,” Ridley says. “When it was made, no one saw it. No one understood it, except some diehards. It was not a good result.”
Yet Ridley wasn’t humbled. To Hollywood players, he was a newcomer, but as he saw it, he had run more film through cameras in commercials than most anyone in the industry. He was forty-three on that set of Blade Runner, and he damn well knew what he was about. “They would never take into account that I’d been in business since I was twenty-seven, in New York, London and LA. I simply stood my ground because I knew I was right. I wasn’t a twenty-five-year-old to get beaten up.” He took particular heat for not communicating well with Harrison Ford, who played the lead, and later Ridley acknowledged that he paid most of his attention to the visuals at Ford’s expense.
Given all the fuss over special effects and production issues, the women in Blade Runner didn’t attract much notice. The star was a man, yet three female characters were commanding figures—Sean Young portrayed a somewhat typical love interest, but Daryl Hannah and Joanna Cassidy played androids that were fierce and physically robust. Whatever Ridley might say about his attitudes toward women, it’s clear from his choices that he admired strapping ones, not simpering helpmates. He didn’t mind showing them in their underwear, like the white cotton skivvies Sigourney Weaver wore at the climax of Alien, or in nothing but sequins and body paint, which barely covered Joanna Cassidy in Blade Runner. He liked to look at attractive women, but he invested them with personalities like his own, or his mum’s—people who got stuff done and made their marks on the world.
Witness one of his most renowned sixty seconds of footage, the 1984 Apple television ad. An Orwellian pageant that famously omitted any shot of the Macintosh computer that the ad was promoting, it ran just once, during the Super Bowl. Ridley cast actual skinheads from the National Front to play automatons listening to a ranting leader on a giant TV, interrupted when a female athlete in red running shorts heaved a sledgehammer through the screen, a powerful blow against the man. Yet once again Ridley insists that any feminist message was inadvertent.
When asked if there was any significance that the athlete was female, Ridley replies with a mischievous smile: “No—she had a great ass. ”