Ridley Scott talks Prometheus

Prometheus

As workers were returning to work after the Easter break, hundreds of excited film journalists were being drawn towards Leicester Square like moths to a light. What cinematic delight could have possibly enticed them at this uncustomary early hour? Only one of the most anticipated films of this summer, Ridley Scott’s Prometheus. This wasn’t a full screening, but a taster of some of the opening scenes and an extended trailer, with the great man and some of the stellar cast in attendance to answer questions about the film.

Most (informed) people will agree that 3D is not much more than a ploy by the studios to enhance their films’ box office takings, and the use of post production conversion would support the argument that there is not really much artistic consideration given to its use. However, it is the old masters that are having the most success, not only because they understand how to make films, but also because they have chosen to shoot in 3D. James Cameron’s Avatar set the benchmark, but Werner Herzog’s documentary Cave of Forgotten Dreams, and Martin Scorsese’s Hugo both showed how to do it with completely diverse subject and shooting styles. Now Ridley Scott has embraced it.

Prometheus
As Scott pointed out in the Q&A after the screening, “It’s not science, it’s not brain surgery. It’s actually pretty straightforward. And yet it is science, because it’s science to actually make 3D occur and to be shootable and capturable on a daily basis. But I’m sitting in a studio with four huge screens, which are all 3D, in a little black tent and I’m looking at them. If there’s four monitors there are four cameras, if there are six monitors then there’s six cameras, and because I’m a visual person anyway, it was dead simple and very straight forward. You could easily allow things to turn into major conferences where you ask anyone, including the tea lady what she thinks, but I don’t do that. I had a wonderful camera man called Dariusz Wolski. I talked to him and said, ‘We’re going to do 3D’ and he said, ‘Yeah, that’s fine’. So we went with using the RED camera, as opposed to the other one, and the RED was superb. The quality was fantastic, whether it’s 2D or 3D, it’s amazing and it wasn’t a problem. So anyone who says, ‘Oh, you’ve got to add sixteen weeks’ means they don’t know what the bloody hell they’re doing! ‘There’s a lot to it’. No, it’s dead simple, straight forward. If you know what you want, you know what you want. That [holds up finger] could be hanging in the foreground, and you can have a forty-five minute discussion about something hanging in the foreground. Say ‘I hate it; get rid of it’ or ‘I love it; fuck off!’ It’s that simple!
Prometheus
From the opening shot in the preview clips it was clear that Scott knows what he is talking about, with some great use of 3D without it being intrusive or gratuitous. The initial clips set up the story and introduced the characters of the story and the premise for the journey. Charlize Theron is the steel-cold captain; Michael Fassbender is an android, who bears an uncanny resemblance to the idealised Nazi Arayan ubermensch. The rest of team is a motley crew of scientists led by Noomi Rapace. After the scene-setting we were treated to a montage of action from the rest of the film that intrigued and excited while not giving a lot of the story away.

Having directed two of the most iconic sci-fi movies, as well as plenty of human drama movies too, it is great to see him return to the genre that put his name in the spotlights. While Prometheus has been touted as a prequel to Alien, Scott was very clear about the film’s origins and intentions.

“I watched the three subsequent Aliens being made, which were all jolly good in some form or other. So I thought the franchise was fundamentally used up. I must have thought about it for three or four years and thought in all of the films nobody had asked a very simple question, which was; who is the big guy in the chair, who was fondly after Alien called The Space Jockey? I don’t know how the hell he got that name. There was this big-boned creature who seemed to be nine feet tall sitting in this chair and I went in to Fox with four questions. Who are they? Why are they there? Why that cargo and where were they going or had they in fact had a forced landing? So off I went with two writers, John Spaihts and Damon Lindelof and we came up with the screenplay, the draft. It’s interesting when you start off with an interesting idea like that and you don’t know whether it’s going to be a prequel or a sequel, it gradually adjusted itself into much larger questions and therefore, now, the actual connection to the original Alien is barely in its DNA. You kind of get it in the last seven minutes or so. That’s about it.”

Scott also talked about his absence from the genre for so many years.

Prometheus
“You know, 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. So what you try to do is lean more heavily on the story and on the characters, to make that really, to give you lift-off, bad pun! But then during the design process, I think we come up with a lot of fairly, to use that awful word ‘cool’…cool looking things which evolve from the drawing board with the designers saying, ‘I’ve seen that, you can’t do that, you can’t do that’. Then you suddenly start to come up with evolutions of different looks so that as a total package, the film feels quite different.”

Prometheus will be in cinemas in June.

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