The Talented Mr. Ridley

Film director Ridley Scott's triumphs, among them Alien and Blade Runner, may have made him famous, but sometimes a director is only as good as his last movie or two. And after Thelma and Louise in 1991, the British-born director had languished nearly a decade without a hit, turning out the reviled White Squall in 1996, followed the next year by the overbaked, overhyped Demi Moore vehicle G.I. Jane. To some, it looked as though Scott's neck was bared to the swordsman.

Now, like Maximus, the hero of his movie Gladiator, the British-born director, 62, once again gets to hear the crowds cheering his name. In the U.S., his sword-and-sandals epic topped the box-office charts with a $34.8 million debut weekend, and across Europe it is proving to be a similar success.

In Rome to oversee Gladiator's European roll-out, Scott knows he is back on the A-list. But, he says with a smile, he is used to the cut and thrust of the fight. "Back in the seventies, when I had been making TV commercials for 10 years, I was desperate to do a film. But Hollywood would never give me anything. They doubted ad directors could handle long-form. So I got my own projects together."

The breakthrough came with 1977's The Duellists, a bizarre tale of two French soldiers who duel at every meeting. It won a special jury prize for best first work at Cannes, and attracted the interest of 20th Century Fox, which offered him Alien. To date, that film has grossed about $165 million worldwide and spawned three sequels. Blade Runner came next, with its futuristic, neon-lit cityscapes. Scott was suddenly a major filmmaker.

Since then, he has had his high points (an Oscar nomination for Thelma and Louise) and more than his share of lows (1985's Legend was a disaster that even Tom Cruise couldn't save). The Duellists' producer David Puttnam, while acknowledging Scott's "erratic greatness," says the problem is that "Ridley is always in a hurry to shoot. And, although he knows that a script may have flaws, he will rely on his immense technical virtuosity to cover them over." Scott started as a set designer, and, 13 feature films later, he still has that designer's vision; his work offers plenty to keep the eyes, if not the brain, dazzled. There are always the trademark brooding skies, edgy camera tracks, characters at the mercy of vast, overpowering landscapes.

As he mines certain themes, his collective work has also, over the years, acquired a certain depth or at least a fascination for Scott watchers. If there's a significant female character, for instance, she'll be one tough cookie. Remember Sigourney Weaver (a Scott discovery) blasting holes in E.T.'s bigger, badder cousin as Ripley in Alien? Or Susan Sarandon shooting a rapist in Thelma and Louise? Scott was influenced, he confesses, by "my mum. She's 95 and still going strong. During World War II, when my father was away fighting, she had to do the work of both parents. That's where I get this admiration for powerful women."

His personal life has affected his choices in other ways. Gladiator brings out most vividly a theme present in all his movies: mortality. In 1980, Scott's older brother Frank died of cancer. Soon after, Scott began work on Blade Runner, a film whose principal characters are fighting slow deaths. Was there a link? "Frank's death freaked me out," Scott admits. "I knew that I had to work through it, had to get shooting. So I plunged into Blade Runner. It kept me occupied." And for all its apocalyptic darkness, Scott notes that the ending of the original release of that film is fairly upbeat (though less so in his later re-edit, recently released as a "director's cut"): that we will all go, but let's make the most of life. "That," Scott says firmly, "is a point in all my films. It's my philosophy, and Frank certainly believed it."

A painting of ancient Rome inspired Scott to take on Gladiator. "I have to see every detail," he explains. "The setting becomes the preparation." He describes the first day's shooting of Gladiator in London, when Joaquin Phoenix, who plays the evil Emperor Commodus, walked in full costume onto the set for the first time: "He stood, cigarettes in one hand, lighter in the other, completely shocked. Because the set recreated the Emperor's imperial chamber so perfectly. It even smelled Roman. That is very important. It's like saying to the actor, 'Let's play the Roman Empire', and then you give him the Roman Empire. He feels more relaxed in the game."

In 1995, Scott and his younger brother, Tony, himself the director of such crowdpleasing hits as Top Gun and Crimson Tide, took joint control of England's Shepperton Studios, in a move he half-jokingly describes as "payback time." "Hollywood," he moans, "is only a bloody village, yet it has a massive movie business. I thought, 'Why haven't we got a billion-dollar film industry in the U.K.?'" With the proliferation of media and the Internet, he insists, the world outside America is becoming increasingly significant. "The U.S. used to account for 75% of a film's market. Now that balance is evening out." He intends to "bring pride back to the British industry."

To that end, Scott has bought facilities, including special effects house the Mill which created effects for Gladiator as well as such films as Entrapment and Mission: Impossible 2 to add to Shepperton's portfolio. "Hollywood," he concludes, "has become so expensive that films are going elsewhere. And there's such a film culture in London that the studios are beginning to realize that they get a better bang for their dollar in the U.K. I'm not a fool, it's not sheer patriotism. It's the right time for me to get involved." Recent American films that were at least partially shot in Britain include Saving Private Ryan, Shakespeare in Love, and Star Wars: Episode I The Phantom Menace.

This new involvement on the production end does not mean Scott will slow down as a director. With Gladiator safely on the march, he is about to begin work on Hannibal, the gory sequel to The Silence of the Lambs starring Anthony Hopkins and Julianne Moore. "Partly it's the designer in me wanting to explore new worlds," he says, "but I'm only attracted by material that rings my bell. And Hannibal is a great story." And a story in which, no doubt, a tough woman will face her mortality and maybe even indulge in a nice Chianti.