Ridley Scott Quotes Page 2

“If I have to, I'll go and direct theater and talk till the cows come home.”

“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.”

“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.”

“In science fiction, we're always searching for new frontiers. We're drawn to the unknown.”

“Life isn't black and white. It's a million gray areas, don't you find?”

“Most people need the money all the time.”

“MPC, Moving Picture Company, they're really excellent, they did the majority of the effects.”

“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.”

“People have no idea how physically tough doing a film is.”

“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.”

“Perhaps because of my background as a graphic designer, I'm drawn to rich and beautiful colors.”

“Politics is very interesting and always leads to conflict.”

“Same thing with film, by the time you've finished shooting and you've really been into everything, you've touched up everything in the editing room. You've gone in there and taken little bits from everything.”

“The best stories come out of the truth.”

“The digital and theatrical markets are two different marketplaces.”

“The ego is there, but I'm learning to channel it.”

“The great film editor is not a cutter, he's a storyteller, right?”

“The hardest single thing you do is get the bloody screenplay right.”

“The key thing is you can be the only person, your own critic.”

“The Man In High Castle' is one of Dick's most imaginative and captivating works, and certainly one of my favorites.”

“The people who really resurrected 'Blade Runner' was 'MTV.”

“The story of 'Prometheus' is the idea that if you're given a gift from the gods, do not abuse it, and do not think you can compete.”

“The whole process of making movies and writing screenplays is visceral and intuitive.”

“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.”

“There's still a lot of investors wondering what to invest in. And, of course, I think entertainment looks attractive when you read the few films that make these insane amounts of money. What they don't know is they don't always do that.”

“What you do, is you gradually become more and more experienced, and more and more realistic about dramatic tolerance, i.e. about how long the play should be.”

“When I started the original 'Alien,' Ripley wasn't a woman, it was a guy.”

“When you think about it, 'Avatar' is almost completely an animated movie.”

“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.”

“You just don't know when you get all the paint across the canvas how it will turn out. When you step back after you've finished, you say, 'This one is not so good. This one is good.”