The world-building auteur behind Oppenheimer, Inception and the Dark Knight trilogy on Ridley's lasting influence.
AS TOLD TO MATT MAYTUM
I think Ridley Scott's signatures have changed over time, which is one of the marks of a great artist. When he started, the painterly quality of the imagery was the primary thing that you were looking at, and there was a revolutionary aspect to what he brought to pop visual iconography in the late 70s and early 80s. The use of smoke on set. The backlighting. The use of certain motifs, like spinning fan blades. They were really taken up by the culture as a whole. But it's been amazing to see his evolution as an artist through the years. He's never really repeated himself, which is almost unique amongst filmmakers. Even with something like Prometheus, where he's actually doing a prequel for Alien, it's got a very different look and a very different feel.
My personal relationship with his work started when I was at school. I first encountered Blade Runner when I was 12 or 13, in the days when VHS was new, and I saw it in discrete chunks on a very poor-quality pirate VHS. The freshness of that vision, the world that was created: it came across, even in that format.
I think that would probably be the equivalent today of a teenager discovering a great film on their, and when the world creation is so complete and so radical and new, it just came across in any format.
