Top 225 Quotes & Sayings by Ridley Scott - Page 4

Usually, when special effects get in the way, it's because the story isn't strong enough. If you don't start with a strong screenplay, it's easy to fall back on special effects, thinking it's going to carry you. But it never works. It's just tiresome.

There's great wine from Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Chile and, of course, California. But there's nothing like a really great French wine, they're so well balanced. The better the wine, the less you feel the effects I think.

Harrison is very much part of this one, but really it’s about finding him; he comes in in the third act.

I'm very competitive. I just go with what engages or fascinates me in my work and that's it. I have no definition; I just love to do it.

Well, not totally because over the years I've probably done 2,700 commercials. So, I'm always ticking. And in a way that was a huge advantage because I was able to take my time choosing my film subjects because I wasn't relying on the fear of not being able to work.

There is an access to... people can now afford very high quality technology, where you can have a very good reproduction of a large picture on a large screen at home. People go out less. There's all kinds of reasons. I don't know that it's going to stay that way but, I think also, we've got to start making better movies.

I think going into space would be like going deep into the ocean, like 5,000 meters down. When you go down that far, it's just awfully black. There's not much there except mud and some particles. I imagine space would be a similar thing. The only difference is you're hoping to bump into some sort of intelligent extraterritorial being.

If we had written Tristan in the true vernacular the audience would have been very small. It wouldn't have even been Shakespearean. It would have been so Celtic you wouldn't understand what was going on.

A good year for me is when me and my family are in good health. I'm just lucky to have good years doing something I like to do.

I always say to people when I'm trying to get something going, bringing on other producers or other directors, "You can think of 95 reasons why not to make a movie. You've got to address why you want to make the movie and get it done. Just do it." I tend to live by that rule.

You've got to be able to know someone really well to be able to have a row and then also walk away from it and not have it matter, especially in this business. That doesn't mean to say we have many rows but I think the nearest thing to a row would be just flatly disagreeing with something .

I think I was really bored at school. I was quietly clock watching for years. I went to 10 schools because my dad was in the Army and we moved around a lot.

Some actors - you work with them once and don't even think about working with them again.

I like my wine and vodka, but that doesn't mean I fall about drunk. I know my limits.

Once you crack the script, everything else follows.

It's the best of the best. No film can hope to top it(Kubrick's 2001).

Yeah, we're working on Blade Runner 2 right now - that will happen sooner or later.

Nowadays, everything's evolved into superheroes and it's boring. If I see one more superhero movie I'm going to shoot myself.

I love different themes, different venues, different movies. I love to jump about and tackle different subjects. I have no intellectual master plan.

I think movies are getting dumber, actually. Where it used to be 50/50, now it`s 3% good, 97% stupid.

I do like to make films with a political theme, but sometimes it's nice simply to make people laugh. That's the hardest thing to do in fact.

I also love Australian movies. I love Muriel's Wedding - I've seen in six times. Baz Luhrmann's best movie is strictly ballroom... without question.

I believe all of us only use one tenth of our brain. I know people who use one per cent only!

I spend a lot of my time just developing material; or the company does. That material can come from a book, can come from a newspaper, can come from a discussion and sometimes it can come from a script that got passed over and is floating around.

Blade Runner was the godfather of all these fantastic movies that occur today. What's frustrating is that we're short of really great writing and great ideas. Blade Runner was full of them.

I went to Art College and during the summer I made a movie with my brother. I got hold of a little camera, wrote a script and dragged my brother, Tony, out of bed to help me (which he did not like), so that we could shoot a film every day for six weeks. It was made for £65 and it was called Boy On A Bicycle.

I'm a moviemaker, not a documentarian. I try to hit the truth.

I was a very earnest, hard working boy at school, but my parents were distressed because I was always bottom of the class. But I wasn't dilatory, I worked like crazy.

As I'm getting older, I want to make sure every film I do really counts.

It doesn't matter how much faith you have or don't have [in aliens]. I just don't buy the idea that we're alone. There's got to be some form of life out there.

Scaring someone's the hardest thing to do, and that's why most of scary movies are not scary. They're sick, but not scary. There's a lot of sickness out there, of people who then sit there and watch it, which I think is absolutely dismaying.

There's nothing really original. Alien was a B-movie. Five directors passed on it before me. Because I was into Heavy Metal, I read it, and thought, "Wow, I want to do this." I was on a plane to Hollywood in 22 hours. It was a B-movie and was elevated to an A-plus movie by sheer good taste.

Everyone sniggered because I was going to do a sandal and toga movie. But I knew exactly how to do it and I know how to make Robin Hood.

The time it would take me to write a screenplay it would take me the time to make two films. I would rather make the movies and I'm a better moviemaker than I a would be writer.

You don't really know what you're going to get until you're actually in Abbey Road. That's where I did all the music, in The Beatles' place.

I think moviemakers are dramatists.

Films like Harry Potter and Narnia, I'm sure they'll do another one. The biggest audience of course is the youngsters.

I think there's nothing worse than inertia. You can inert and study your navel and gradually you'll fall off the chair. I think the key is to keep flying.

That's a heavy word, but picking up a newspaper every day, how can you not despair at what's happening in the world, and how we're represented as human beings? The disappointments and corruption are dismaying at every level. And the biggest source of evil is of course religion... Everyone are tearing each other apart in the name of their personal god. And the irony is, by definition, they're probably worshipping the same god.

Audiences are less intrigued, honestly, by battle. They're more intrigued by human relations. If you're making a film about the trappings of the period, and you're forgetting that human relationships are the most engaging part of the storytelling process, then you're in trouble.

I'm just trying to think what other sequels there were. There was the James Bond movies and not many. I think sequels have become a recent idea of franchising.

I want to make films about the human condition, what we're doing to the world or ourselves.

It goes back a long way. I wanted to make Tristan + Isolde as my second movie. My first movie was The Duellists. And I was standing in a very romantic part of France looking around me thinking, "My God, this would be perfect for Tristan," and to cut a long story short it never happened because I did Alien instead.

I'm not criticizing Hollywood because I work there, I partly live there. But I'm saying this is the way it is, commerce is taking over art. Commerce has become the most important thing in the film industry. Hollywood is an industry, it's not an art form, therefore they have to address the bottom line. But in a way it's sad when you get a remake, isn't it?

You step forward and make it real for a start. You choose a sensible moment in history. Funnily enough, England was bankrupt and the moment is the death of Richard The Lionheart... Richard takes an arrow in the neck collecting a small debt from a small castle on his way home from the Crusades because he's penniless.