The direct approach works well for Scott

By Sam Allis, Globe Staff, 9/10/2003

Ridley Scott is the man with the golden eye. He has made good and bad movies but never an ugly one. You know his work when you see it: cruiserweights with sumptuous cinematic visions that can mask a dearth of substance. He could care less.

Scott is one of Hollywood's grand money players, a director whose 14 films over a 38-year career have grossed about $1.5 billion -- from "Alien" and "Blade Runner" to "Thelma & Louise," "Gladiator," "Hannibal," and "Black Hawk Down."

He has never won an Oscar despite three nominations, and no one will ever accuse him of being a great artist. Instead, he will be remembered as a good one, a supremely professional director of strong commercial movies. Studios and audiences love his stuff, and the hell with the critics.

Take "Hannibal," the sequel to the Oscar-laden "Silence of the Lambs." Who in his right mind would have the gall to follow such an artistic and commercial success? He did, in a New York minute. While filming "Gladiator" in Malta, Scott was approached by Dino De Laurentiis to make "Hannibal." Scott read the book and found it "great fun." He spent 22 days wooing A-list screenwriter Steve Zaillian. Zaillian then wrote the script in six weeks. What Scott ended up with was an over-the-top performance by Anthony Hopkins and a critical bomb.

"Who gives a [expletive]," says Sir Ridley, a Brit knighted this year. "You've got an opening weekend, a two-day opening weekend -- in February -- of $48 million. Give me a break. It wasn't even a holiday weekend. It was great."

This bald answer, refreshing as it is politically incorrect, tells us that the making of money -- large money -- matters hugely to him. (More on that later.)

A fierce competitor Scott was in town on Sunday for the screening of his latest movie, "Matchstick Men," which opens Friday. At 65, he is trim, bearded, and proud. (To call him "leonine" would be a bit much.) "I'm in a youth-oriented business, and I can still beat the [expletive] out of this 23-year-old tennis pro," he says in a way that merely hints at his competitive juices. The man talks seamlessly, swears with brio, and riffs in a blunt funny way.

The eyes are worth studying. They're small, sharp things that radiate hardness and cunning, tempered by rows of laugh lines on each side that spread like a peacock's feathers. This is a man who grasped the absurdity of life some time ago.

"Matchstick Men" is utterly un-Ridley-like. No sweeping landscapes, no physicality. It is a small movie made in and about Los Angeles, where he had never sited a movie before. He read the script, which he took as a "beautifully cut" three-act comedy, and was hooked.

"I hadn't done this before," he says. "But then I'd never done a Roman epic before either. I went into `Gladiator' without even knowing what the script was. Walter Parks from DreamWorks pitched me the idea. It wasn't even an idea. He put a piece of paper on his desk and said, `Turn it over.' It was the representation of a very beautiful painting by a 19th-century French painter named Jean Gerome called `For Those About to Die.' (A gladiator scene.) I was immediately in."

Then comes the look. Always the look. How did he create it in, say, "Blade Runner," the landmark 1982 sci-fi thriller that spawned the dark, wet, steamy atmospherics we later saw on MTV and in rock 'n' roll shows?

"I can draw. I did seven years of art school, so I damned well should be able to," he says, relaxed in jeans and an open shirt. "I can draw a really, really, really good storyboard. I can start drawing buildings, and I can start putting people in them. I start thinking about clothing and where would we be in 2019.

" `Blade Runner' was wholly influenced by my frequent trips to New York. [Scott owns RSA, a successful international agency that makes commercials. He made 3,000 himself before escaping to movies.] I always thought of New York as a city of constant evolution and overload. In those days [the '70s], it was quite grim. I loved the grunge and the rain and the steam.

"I always thought of "Blade Runner" as a dark, romantic comic strip. You guys invented comic strips, and they're not funny. `Orphan Annie' is the blackest thing I've ever seen. Daddy Warbucks? He's like a serial killer. Annie has no pupils to her eyes. `Superman' and `Batman' are very dark inventions."

Twenty-one years after "Blade Runner," in "Matchstick Men," he found the look for an agoraphobic scam artist who survives in that existential LA gray somewhere between the streets and security.

"I start off reading the material, and by the third page I'm seeing -- I've got a screening room in here," he says, pointing to his head. "I see a dark, cool, clean apartment. I see this guy wandering around in stocking feet. Then I'm thinking Nick Cage for the part. He later said to me, `I was thinking this guy must play Sinatra.' That's exactly what I was thinking. Nothing particularly unusual about Sinatra, but it was the key that triggered everything else.

"Then I'm thinking, this is about suburbia. This guy is going to dress in a certain way not to be noticed. Very neat. Doesn't like TV. Does he read? A little bit, but probably cheap airport books. Music -- probably very important to him. Probably Sinatra. If his best jacket is a houndstooth check with gray slacks and a nylon turtleneck, he probably smokes Slims. (Newport in the movie.) You start to build this whole coloring book on the character profile."

So is there such a thing as a Ridley Scott movie? "I hope not," he says. But there is. What he likes to do, he concedes, is create entire worlds. "They really get my creative juices going," he says.

Making history Indeed, his next projects will include "Tripoli," an early 19th-century adventure flick starring that sailor for all seasons, Russell Crowe. And on Jan. 12, he begins shooting another monster about the Crusades. "I keep looking back all the time," he says. "When you really delve into history, it's far more remarkable than anything you can think of off the page. What we've done is exhaust the dramatic ideas. It's a kind of sickness: murders and serial killers, hideous brutality, and grotesque behavior are now forms of entertainment."

Scott says he is "desperate" to make a western. And a comedy. He giggled through "Dumb and Dumber" on an airline flight. (He felt like he was caught watching pornography when the stewardess came around.)

There's another thing Scott has not done: sex. There is really none of it in his work at all. Why?

"Sex is boring unless you're doing it," he says flatly. "Unless the passion is valid. They really did it well in `The English Patient' -- that scene where they can't help themselves: the English are celebrating Christmas outside while they're inside. You never see sex with A-list directors because it's never justified."

What Scott has done is business. A lot of it. "I love the business side," he says. "It's the game. I love the chase." With his brother Tony, a director in his own right of vacant hits such as "Top Gun," he has built a small empire. "The word is `small,' " he cautions. Really?

He set up his own company when he was 27 and financed his first feature film, the highly regarded "The Duellists." He has produced most of his own movies and others ("The Gathering Storm" on HBO) as well. RSA, his lucrative advertising arm, remains strong. There is Scott Free Productions, which he formed with his brother to produce feature films. He is cochairman of Pinewood-Shepperton Holdings in London, a vast operation that boasts 42 soundstages and back lots. And he is the former cochairman of Mill Film, an Academy Award-winning digital post-production house in London that recently fell on hard times. Last year, it folded its movie business and now concentrates on other media such as DVDs.

What Ridley Scott does is make millions of dollars. And he keeps score. He knows the studio sleight of hand. Asked how well "Alien" has done over the years, he replies with slits for eyes and a tight grin, "I'll never know, will I? That's another story."

Sam Allis can be reached at allis@globe.com.