1. A Taste Of Films To Come (Boy And Bicycle, 1965): dawn from Scott’s debut short, made while still at the Royal College of Art (using the college camera), this shimmering image of brother Tony on bike, shows a flash of natural visual adventure and a touch of the French New Wave.
2. Hovis: Scott had made thousands of ads before be made a feature film, it was his film school. The most celebrated being this 1973 slice of a fantasy England to sell a loaf of bread. Note that fine eye for historical nuance and shimmering light on cobbles, and the touch of euphoria in the delivery boy plummeting back down the hill, another boy dreaming on his bike.
3. Landscape Artist (The Duellists, 1977): in his debut feature, Scott framed Conrad’s episodic duels against existing ruins in a pungent Dordogne. Add a waft of dry-dice and an instinct for mythic grandeur takes a bow.
4. ‘Napoleon’ In Sunlight (The Duellists, 1977): that’s not Napoleon, of course, that is Harvey Keitel’s Feraud surveying the flooded valley, but Scott wanted the blurring of identity — the evocative sunbeam was pure serendipity in an otherwise moody shoot, God serving as gaffer.
5. Ghost Ship (Alien, 1979): Scott’s immortal science fiction-horror hybrid begins with almost as a haunted house movie. Drifting silently through space, the Nostromo is a ghost ship, with the crew still cocooned in hyper sleep. Scott’s camera roves the decks in search of life. It’s a ship awakening to a distress beacon, and this startling shot of a helmet with a scarlet read-out reflected in its visor stops you short. What is it: a taste of life, a signal of ensuing calamity, a whispered hint to artificial life…
6. Ash On The Observation Deck (Alien, 1979): the chestbursting will be an eruption in cinema, but here the sublime Ian Holm giving notice of his true nature, warming his servers with a jog, hungry for his forthcoming cargo, commences Scott’s career long obsession with AI.
7. Birth Of A Legend (Alien, 1979): the most famous scene of Scott’s career, and in all of genre cinema. The creature erupting from a John Hurt shaped cocoon was designed as a shock to the system, it felt real in way movie violence never had before (Scott wanted to show what The Texas Chain Saw Massacre only suggested). Audiences reeled and the medium never recovered. We have never trusted Scott again. He has a devil in him, ready to pounce. Now so familiar, we still cower at the chestburster’s visceral power. The flying offal, the cowering cast, the scarlet ink-blot despoiling the white t-shirt, the primal sound effects.
8. Star Child (Alien, 1979): we tend to neglect Scott’s eye for talent, yet he has helped midwife the careers of Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt, Viggo Mortensen, Oscar Isaac and more. But it is not only his discovery of Sigourney Weaver, but the way Ripley sprang to life as the true survivor. At once, gender was completely irrelevant and the whole point. This moment from the final confrontation also confirmed a classic Scott motif – light bouncing off the curve of a space helmet.
9. Los Angeles, November, 2019 (Blade Runner, 1982): an obvious choice, but the “Hades Shot” is poetry. Sublime in its fusion of music, sound, vision and story, it establishes the film’s timeless marriage of dystopia and dream. It throws us headlong into wonder.
10. Down These Gleaming Streets (Blade Runner, 1982): our first sighting of Harrison Ford’s Deckard speaks to all of Scott’s temporal distortion. A film, as he put it, “set forty years in the future and 40 years in the past.” So this is pure Raymond Chandler, the lonely private eye, long coat and paper. But positioned against the neon-lit cityscape of LA to come: a world of cultural ferment, overpopulation, technology, decay and invitation.
11. Tears In Rain (Blade Runner, 1982): whatever the provenance of Blade Runner’s signature moment (screenplay or Rutger Hauer improvisation), the key to the haunting power of Roy Batty’s mesmerising valedictory lies in the combination of what have seen married to the possibility of what will never see (“Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion.”). What sights could be more marvellous than what we have already witnessed?
12. Dance of a Dark Princess (Legend, 1985): Mia Sara’s sensual awakening to her dark half, dancing with abandon in the treacle-rich Dickensian gloom, is worthy of Powell & Pressburger. Indeed, Scott had first imagined Legend as a ballet.
13. Darkness Revealed (Legend, 1985): having heard Tim Curry’s Stentorian voice and sensed his looming shadow, the revelation of Scott’s succulent devil in his full sunburnt raiment still goes beyond anything we could have pictured. Scott wanted his villain, this embodiment of evil (tragic too in his forlorn calls to a distant father) to appear healthy, even sexy. He is pure seduction, Freudian to his cloven hooves, and Guillermo del Toro, for one, owes him half a career.
14. Castaway (Someone To Watch Over Me, 1986): Tom Berenger’s salty Queens cop is assigned to protect socialite murder witness Mimi Rogers among the glittering towers of Manhattan. His exposure to the absolute wealth of her penthouse is like a man stepping into the future. You can feel an afterglow from Blade Runner’s high-end real estate as Scott lights up his interior designs from within.
15. Urban Samurai (Black Rain, 1989): for the real world (Osaka) connection to Blade Runner’s neon splashed cityscape, the cool juxtaposition of Samurai and biker gangs, the nod to Kurosawa and the visual kick of sparks leaping between sleek steel and damp tarmac.
16. Oncoming Traffic (Black Rain, 1989): this shot of Michael Douglas veering in front of an oncoming juggernaut on foot is the perfect homage to a Tony Scott moment, as the whole film surely sets out to be a homage to a Tony movie.
17. Outlaws (Thelma & Louise, 1991): the cool bravado and mock-male swagger as Louise and Thelma confront the leering tanker driver speak of their final transformation to Western outlaws. They have crossed the border into myth. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid had been a key touchstone for Scott, who saw the underlying spirit of his getaway movie as the Western longed to make.
18. Cut To The Chase (Thelma & Louise, 1991): with dust contrails like jet planes, the two fugitives finally cut across country (and this is Utah, John Ford country at that) pursued by a phalanx of male authority in the form of the police. It’s a classic Scott image, caught from on-high, the entire film written into a wide shot.
19. Let’s Not Get Caught (Thelma & Louise, 1991): the ending was sacrosanct for all concerned, especially Scott. To dare a mythical finish – the T-bird soaring out of reach, against an sandstone skyline as old as the movies.
20. Three Ships (1492: The Conquest Of Paradise, 1992): to recreate Columbus’s epic voyage, Scott filmed with three full-sized recreations of one nao and two caravels, the Santa Maria, the Nina and the Pinta. And how photogenic – as are all Scott’s great vessels. Set against a crepuscular, burnt-orange skyline, pennants (which are very Ridley) and sails billowing, this is an image thrilling to a sense of adventure, a voyage beyond the edge of knowledge.
21. Two Worlds (1492: The Conquest Of Paradise, 1992): no film so graphically depicts the great Scott theme of cultures in collision than 1492: European modernity has landed in a new world. Gerard Depardieu, who was derided by critics, wholly sells the magic of this encounter with the tribespeople of what we now know as Haiti – a momentary glimpse of human connection, before the forces of history intervene.
22. Storm Front (White Squall, 1996): no one does weather like Scott. He was raised on Teesside watching the clouds roll in. And now, on film, he conjures up tempests for fun. Case in point, the roiling power in the capsizing of the Albatross.
23. Close Shave (G.I. Jane, 1997): a practical decision in terms of the gruelling SEAL training regime, an act of feminist defiance and a vivid gesture of movie star inversion, as Demi Moore, famed for her long dark locks, shaves them off in the film’s signature moment. A one take only deal. The excellent Moore gives everything to her clenched expression.
24. Fields of Elysium (Gladiator, 2000): Scott’s revival of the Roman epic was due to begin in battle, but during the edit composer Hans Zimmer suggested moving a fragment of a later flashback sequence (with its the hint of the afterlife) with Maximus running his hands through golden corn to the very. Almost as an ethereal prologue. Scott was in full agreement. It was a hint of the poetic to underscore the monumental.
25. Are You Not Entertained? (Gladiator, 2000): it is the defiant cry that defined Scott’s resuscitation of an entire genre, resounding to all of Russell Crowe’s thrilling furies. But it was a cry from the heart of the director too. What more do you want?
26. Win The Crowd And You Will Win Your Freedom (Gladiator, 2000): drawing inspiration from the Jean-Léon Gérôme 1872 painting Pollice Verso, there can little argument Scott lives up to his film’s central promise — the scales of gladiatorial combat in the heart of the Coliseum, with Russell Crowe heavily involved in choreographing the dance of camera and conflict. Sleepy tigers notwithstanding (they had to be encouraged with raw meat) this exotic confrontation is arguably the most memorable.
Ridley Scott A Retrospective - Out now from Thames & Hudson
27. Lecter’s Quarters (Hannibal, 2001): compare Hannibal’s antique Florence residence to his former cell. Filmed in the Capponi Library, home to Dante’s manuscripts, it’s a classic Scott tableau: painterly, candlelit, sumptuously menacing, with time out of joint
28. Food For Thought (Hannibal, 2001): come now, you’ve surely never forgotten it. The Grand Guignol dinner party thrown by Hannibal Lecter for Clarice Starling, with FBI bad apple Paul Krendler (Ray Liotta, convincingly devoid of clarity) both fellow guest and entrée. The big reveal of Krendler’s fate, in a flash of gleeful, winking revulsion (a dinner table sequence that descends from Alien) is a splendidly dark joke about a taste for cerebral matters.
29. Chaos Theory (Black Hawk Down, 2001): the perfect encapsulation of Ridley Scott’s mix of visceral docudrama, thrill-ride, brutal irony, technological fetish and the mythology of the modern American warrior.
30. The Mogadishu Mile (Black Hawk Down, 2001): After the exhaustion of battle, the remaining rangers and Delta Force sprint to their freedom, in full gear. In Scott’s portrayal of real events, a film thriving on frenzy, it becomes a moment of almost eerie calm as the crowds spill onto the streets to watch the departing soldiers.
31. Detail Orientated (Matchstick Men, 2003): no one was about to make a direct comparison, but there is a certain humorous analogy to be made between OCD conman Roy Waller (Nicolas Cage, who gives his twitching alter ego the physicality of silent cinema) and the director himself. Both are rather obsessed with visual perfection.
32. Knight Moves (Kingdom Of Heaven DC, 2005): the first brutal skirmish of this underrated epic is quintessential Scott. The metallic light and snowy atmos, the tang of lived-in history, the ready violence. And Liam Neeson’s irritated twitch is just magnificent.
33. The Siege of Jerusalem (Kingdom Of Heaven, 2005): the Muslim siege of the Christian held city not only embodies the same clash of ideologies that resonates through Scott’s histories from Exodus to Black Hawk Down, but also presents the dawning of new form of warfare – the devastating use of explosives. The battle is vast (thanks to the proliferating power of computer software), but it’s the up close detail of burning stuntmen that lands the punch.
34. Fish Out Of Water (A Good Year, 2006): romantic comedy was not Scott’s natural habitat, but he brings an advertiser’s rapture to Provence and dares to look for the goofball in Russell Crowe. The telling image: an uptight London banker glued to his mobile while standing on a diving board. He is as stranded as Matt Damon on Mars.
35. Streetwise (American Gangster, 2007): Scott brought a documentarian’s finesse to the sleazy Harlem of the early seventies, but its the space he gives to his stars, particularly Denzel Washington as drug kingpin Frank Lucas, which make this step into crime work so well. This is another shot that could have come from Tony’s universe, or maybe Scorsese’s, and a reminder of Ridley’s versatility.
36. Sun King (Body Of Lies, 2008): we tend to think of Scott’s look as dark and densely urban, but he adores images of modern men adrift in the ancient, bleached-out immensity of the desert. To wit: Leo in this stylish, topical spy drama and thematic sequel to Black Hawk Down.
37. Nut King (Robin Hood, 2010): from Roy Batty to Sato to Roy Waller to Rameses II, there has developed a fine tradition of lively fruitcakes opposite Scott’s stoic heroes. And Oscar Isaac’s petulant King John is the chief pleasure of this otherwise flat rendition of Robin Hood (some myths need myth not realism). There is also the sneakiest likeness to Disney’s leonine version voiced with infant self-pity by Peter Ustinov.
38. Cosmic Gardening (Prometheus, 2012): whatever your ultimate feelings on Scott’s tangential Alien prequel, the opening sequence is a stunner. Our first glimpse at the godlike engineers at work, seeding a barren world (only assumed to be Earth) with their own DNA mixed with the oil-black catalytic at the heart of the saga’s mutant biology. The striking look of the engineers is its own creative cocktail: one part Michelangelo’s David, one part Elvis, the impenetrable eyes of a shark.
39. Storm Warning (Prometheus, 2012): another choice demonstration of Scott’s meteorological talents has LV-223 brew up a frenzied hailstorm. A reminder of the atmospherics of Alien, which serve as the herald of dramatic chaos.
40. David In the Orrery (Prometheus, 2012): this glittering mix of CG and 3D, a direct reference to a 1766 Joseph Wright painting, A Philosopher Lecturing On The Orrery (an orrery being a clockwork model of the Solar System) is more than a flash of the Engineers’s godly holographic tech. You imagine Scott as David taking worlds in his palm of his hand.
41. Strangelove (The Counselor, 2013): surely this counts as the most surreal image of Scott’s career. Not renowned for the erotic charge of his movies, at least not head on, this dreamlike encounter between Javier Bardem’s sleazy nouveau Reiner, Cameron Diaz’s malignant Malinka (the Devil in leopard print) and his sports car borders on the pornographic (though it is mostly left to our imagination), but suggests a world beyond moral borders.
42. Death By ‘Bolito’ (The Counselor, 2013): Brad Pitt’s throat-slicing execution via Cormac McCarthy’s industrial garrotte serves as another savagely realistic reminder that Scott is cinema’s virtuoso of death.
43. Monumental Thoughts (Exodus: Gods And Kings, 2014): with the aplomb of Cecil B. De Mille, Scott steps up to the recreation of Old Testament era Egypt using all the means available, set and CGI. The joke with this splendid vista is that this a world building depiction of a world being built as if it were indeed a gigantic movie set.
44. All Hail (Exodus: Gods and Kings, 2014): admittedly less of a single image than a montage, but surely the root of Scott’s desire to adapt the story of Moses was the chance to step into God’s shoes and bring his own quasi-scientific spin to the seven plagues visited upon Egypt.
45. Lonely Planet (The Martian, 2015): after filling his future gazing with darkness, what is so startling about this buoyant Robinson Crusoe adventure is the brightness. Here in a symphony of sand are the desert hues of Thelma & Louise and Kingdom Of Heaven transferred to Mars. And the vivid contrast of Matt Damon’s stranded astronaut, imprisoned in his space suit, shot against the mythical reaches of Jordan’s Wadi Rum, where David Lean had filmed Lawrence Of Arabia.
46. Deadly Planet (Alien: Covenant, 2016): in a bravura demonstration of Scott’s ability to escalate eeriness into tension into catastrophe (and a reminder of that tilting toward horror), the landing party of the Covenant take a gulp of ‘Paradise’s’ poisoned ecology. It’s a hideous acceleration of Alien’s steady build designed to shatter our familiarity with the material. We knew this was going to happen, but so soon and so swiftly? And who else but Scott would transform Middle-earth into Hell?
47. David & Walter (Alien: Covenant, 2016): in another of the stranger scenes Scott has mounted (and with such silken craft: that familiar soft aura of a Renaissance painting, the seamless FX), he has his identical synthetics (replicants, if you want to cross streams) share an existential tete-a-tete. You suspect the director was far keener on capturing this confrontation than the more formulaic alien encounters. There’s also that sly in-joke at the expense of original Alien producers Walter Hill and David Giler.
48. Motherlode (All The Money In The World, 2018): this real-life kidnap thriller, undeservingly mired in its own scandal, features another of Scott’s magnificent female leads. Michelle Williams creates astonishing depths beneath the emotionally reserved surface of Gail Harris, a mother desperate to save her stolen child, up against the reptilian coldness of grandfather John Paul Getty (Christopher Plummer). It is almost an echo of Alien, only here Ripley is a prim English mother and the creature an old man with acid for blood. In this particular scene, we catch her, a dash of fraught life amid Getty’s statues (poised like Engineers).
49. Quotation Marks (All The Money In The World, 2018): another passing homage to David Lean’s widescreen Arabian vistas, this sighting of John Paul Getty roaming the oil-rich barrens of Arabia reminds you that Scott is a visualist greatly influenced by the history of cinema. As Blade Runner harkens to film noir, Black Rain to Kurosawa, Gladiator to Spartacus, this sixties-set thriller alludes to Lean and Orson Welles (in the dusty Xanadu of Getty’s domain) and to the neo-realist Italian cinema of the era in which it is set.
50. Replicant Dreams (Raised By Wolves, 2020): moving into his eighties, but showing no signs of slowing down, Scott is at liberty to homage Ridley Scott. Once again far from home for this ethereal but affecting television show, we are back in the jurisdiction of artificial life, with the fallen angels of Blade Runner a deliberate touchstone, only these creations are far more human than human.
Ridley Scott: A Retrospective is out now.