Life isn't black and white. It's a million gray areas, don't you find?
Ridley Scott
I think, at the end of the day, filmmaking is a team, but eventually there's got to be a captain.
In my view, the only way to see a film remains the way the filmmaker intended: inside a large movie theater with great sound and pristine picture.
How can you look at the galaxy and not feel insignificant?
When you're in the editing room, the dangerous thing is that it becomes like telling a joke again and again and again. Eventually, the joke starts to not be funny. So you have to be careful that you're not throwing the baby out with the bath water.
In science fiction, we're always searching for new frontiers. We're drawn to the unknown.
That's part of the policy: To keep switching gears.
In film, it's very important to not allow yourself to get sentimental, which, being British, I try to avoid. People sometimes regard sentimentality as emotion. It is not. Sentimentality is unearned emotion.
On rare occasions, Dad used to reminisce about when he met Eisenhower and how Churchill would pop in, in the late hours of the evening or night, carrying a cigar, when he'd obviously had a good dinner.
A hit for me is if I enjoy the movie, if I personally enjoy the movie.
I'm a yarn teller. My job is to engage you as much as I can and as often as I can.
I always shoot my movies with score as certainly part of the dialogue. Music is dialogue. People don't think about it that way, but music is actually dialogue. And sometimes music is the final, finished, additional dialogue. Music can be one of the final characters in the film.
The word 'religion' is only a label. What lies behind that, the most important thing of all, is the word 'faith'. You either have faith, or you don't have faith, or you have degrees of faith - and if you have degrees of faith, then you become agnostic. You're kind of in-between, or you're on the fence.
People say I pay too much attention to the look of a movie but for God's sake, I'm not producing a Radio 4 Play for Today, I'm making a movie that people are going to look at.
Choosing location is integral to the film: in essence, another character.
Digital is a different world because you are sitting at home and a hi tech piece of equipment today is within reach of most people, so they are watching a pretty hi tech version of whatever you've done.
History is only conjecture, and the best historians try to do it as accurately as they can. They try to accurately reassemble the facts and then put them down on paper.
The great film editor is not a cutter, he's a storyteller, right?
I'll reshoot a corridor 13 different ways, and you'll never recognise them.
Fire is our first form of technology.
I think one of the successes of Gladiator is how we manage to turn on a dime the character from one thing to another where you believe he is one thing and he is something very different.
Because I was a kid from north of England, the only films I had access to was not alternative cinema, which in those days would be foreign cinema; I would be looking at all the Hollywood movies that arrived at my High Street.
As a filmmaker, deep blacks are essential, and in my experience, no technology captures those attributes as well as Plasma.
If I have to, I'll go and direct theater and talk till the cows come home.
It doesn't matter how much faith you have or don't have. I just don't buy the idea that we're alone. There's got to be some form of life out there.
There's a big film industry in Egypt, and quite a big one in Syria, and there's a big Muslim community in Paris.
I like Wadi Rum - it's the best view I've ever seen of what could be Mars.
Your landscape in a western is one of the most important characters the film has. The best westerns are about man against his own landscape.
One of the problems with science fiction, which is probably one of the reasons why I haven't done one for many, many years, is the fact that everything is used up. Every type of spacesuit is used up, every type of spacecraft is vaguely familiar, the corridors are similar, and the planets are similar.
I think there's nothing worse than inertia. You can be inert and study your navel, and gradually fall off the chair. I think the key is to keep flying.
If you ever have a kid who doesn't know what to do, stick him in art school. It's amazing what evolves.
Try writing a book, dude. That's difficult.
I was one of those kids who tended to stay in on Saturday nights. My mother used to come and say, 'Why don't you go to the dance with the boys?' And I'm going, 'No, I'm perfectly happy.' I think my parents thought I was definitely weird.
'Alien' is a C film elevated to an A film, honestly, by it being well done and a great monster. If it hadn't had that great monster, even with a wonderful cast, it wouldn't have been as good, I don't think.
I used to agonise over what to do next, but now I'm making a movie a year. It's insane, but it's only a movie after all. You just hang in there, and occasionally you might make something which you can call art... briefly.
I come out of TV. I come out of live television, BBC drama: that's where I started first as a designer, then a director. Then I went independent TV, then television advertising.
I was always aware that this whole Earth is on overload.
The best stories come out of the truth.
And anyway, it's only movies. to stop me I think they'll ahve to shoot me in the head.
Good FBI officers are not noticeable. You would never look at them.
Conscience, the power of conscience, can unearth all kinds of things.
I get so used to working with writers that my prime occupation is development.
MPC, Moving Picture Company, they're really excellent, they did the majority of the effects.
I try to make films, not movies. I've never liked the expression 'movie', but it sounds elitist to say that.
I would make a film with a political point of view if I agreed with it, and even, perhaps, if I didn't.
People have no idea how physically tough doing a film is.
I watched Someone to Watch Over Me the other night. I thought it was a really good movie. It's a great movie.
Taking a comic strip character is very hard to write. Because comics are meant to work in one page, to work in frames with minimalistic dialogue. And a lot of it is left to the imagination of the reader. To do that in film, you've got to be a little more explanatory. And that requires a good screenplay and good dialogue.
For 'Prometheus,' I came back to a very simple question that haunted me that appears in the first 'Alien,' and no one answered in subsequent Alien films: who was the 'Space Jockey' - the big guy in the seat? If you really go into that, it becomes the basis for a pretty interesting story.
It's everything and I always make decisions about the cast.
