It is sometimes said that an artist only tells one story in his life; director Ridley Scott has consistently returned to the theme of an outsider defying nearly everything and everyone around him to rescue something uniquely precious to himself. This usually involves foregoing belief in the highest good, the summum bonum, in favor of one’s own value system.
Scott’s filmography has largely always been a mixed bag financially and artistically. But as this essay will argue, two events within the last two decades have largely shaped the career trajectory and artistic acumen of Ridley Scott: the box-office disaster that was Kingdom of Heaven in 2005, and the suicide of his brother, director Tony Scott, on August 19, 2012.
Twenty years ago Scott was ensnared in post-production on Kingdom of Heaven, a gamble from the beginning. The marvelous Director’s Cut DVD package contains a detailed making-of documentary that reveals the tortured editing process that so frustrated Scott’s editor Dody Dorn: 20th Century Fox insisted on a truncated version of the film, opting for action over drama-romance — clearly attempting to evoke Scott’s 2000 triumph for DreamWorks, the Oscar winning Gladiator. In doing so, however, the film lost much of its dramatic thrust, leaving a shallow protagonist, Balian (Orlando Bloom) who lacked the gravitas to carry the Crusades film to the promised land.
Scott clearly had great hopes for the film. That he desired to undertake a medieval epic set in the Middle East at a time when the U.S. was at the outset of its War on Terror was a creative inspiration. While it could only have been made because Gladiator was so successful, Kingdom of Heaven was one of the most ambitious original historical epics of the period — with a nod to both Gladiator and Peter Jackson’s Rings trilogy, it competed against Oliver Stone’s Alexander (2004) and Antoine Fuqua’s King Arthur (2004). However, the weekend of its May 5, 2005 release — exactly five years after Gladiator premiered — yielded only a return of $19 million. It eventually grossed about $47 million domestically.
While Scott proved to be the consummate professional in accepting 20th Century Fox’s editorial decisions — unlike the more uncooperative auteur Orson Welles and his 58-page memo lambasting Universal’s edits on his Touch of Evil — the experience seemed to have deflated his artistic ambitions. Such disappointment was not unusual for Scott. Consider, of course, the years it took him directing thousands of commercials before hitting paydirt with The Duellists. And, Kingdom of Heaven was itself consolation from the disappointment from the cancellation of his Napoleonic-era adventure Tripoli (also scribed by Kingdom of Heaven’s writer, William Monahan).
However, Scott’s immediate filmography after Kingdom of Heaven suggested an output of going through the motions: the lazy Russell Crowe vanity project A Good Year (2006), the by-the-numbers American Gangster (2007), and the topical Body of Lies (2008) that somehow seems to get better with age, culminating in the final Crowe-Scott teamup, the uninspired Robin Hood (2010).
Then came the shocking suicide of Tony. Ridley was even on the phone with his younger brother encouraging him to get going on a new film while Tony was driving down to the Vincent Thomas Bridge where he would take his life. (Tony’s last directing effort was the flawless thriller Unstoppable, which earned a four-star review from Roger Ebert.)
And while Ridley dedicated his Biblical epic Exodus: Gods and Kings, a re-telling of the Moses-Ramses story — a story about brothers, essentially — to Tony, the subsequent stories Scott chose seemed to have little emotional connection to him as a storyteller. It seemed as if there was no interest in pursuing a summum bonum. “I’m an atheist, which is actually good, because I’ve got to convince myself the story works,” Scott rather ironically told the New York Times in 2013.
“I put no stock in religion. By the word ‘religion’ I have seen the lunacy of fanatics of every denomination be called the will of God. I have seen too much religion in the eyes of too many murderers. Holiness is in right action, and courage on behalf of those who cannot defend themselves, and goodness.” — Kingdom of Heaven, written by William Monahan
I became interested in Scott’s work after the massive success of Gladiator. Set in 180 AD, that film appeared vaguely tolerant of Christianity simply because it makes no mention of it at all. (There is, however, a cut sequence on the DVD featuring Christians devoured by lions in the Coliseum). Maximus is a devout pagan. He worships his ancestors and when his spirit is united with his family in the afterlife — in Elysium, where the emphasis is not on communion with the Creator but reunion with family — Scott hints that may be his own personal belief as well.
Consider Scott dedicates his 2001 war film, Black Hawk Down, to his mother: “For my Mum, Elizabeth Jean Scott, 1906–2001” the final crawl reads. Tony also dedicated his film of that year, Spy Game, to their mother.
Family seems entwined in Scott’s work, his choices of films, and the themes therein.
And more than the death of his mother in 2001, it seems Tony’s suicide changed Ridley as a filmmaker. Rather than withdraw, or selectively choose projects, Ridley Scott, Inc. the machine took over. Both he and Tony were incredibly prolific; but in the 12 years since Tony’s suicide, Scott has directed ten features. Prior to his death, he directed only twelve features in an 18 year period.
From an artistic standpoint, I submit Ridley Scott started loosening his emotional investment in his directing projects after the failure of Kingdom of Heaven (2005). In the film, Balian, a Frankish (and thus Catholic) blacksmith (Orlando Bloom) struggles with his Christian faith and over the course of his journey, which includes surrendering Jerusalem to the sympathetic Saladin and his Muslim army, continues to be disenchanted with the Church, finally informing a corrupt bishop, “You have taught me a great deal about religion.”
Interestingly, for as much as Ridley Scott loathes any kind of religion, he cannot separate his work from the Judeo-Christian tradition, even if the themes and characters possess perverse understandings of it.
Yet by now, there is a whole creative team around Scott that relies on his next directing efforts as job security — collaborators like Arthur Max, or the music school of Hans Zimmer, for instance — all rely on Scott’s work for their own livelihood. But is he himself still in charge, worrying about making the day? Or is it just a “we’ll fix it in post” mentality? Cinematographer John Mathieson, who lensed the first Gladiator, Hannibal, the wonderful Matchstick Men, Kingdom of Heaven, and Gladiator II for Scott, recently vocalized concern over Scott’s directorial style on the podcast “The Doc Fix”:
“It’s really lazy. It’s the CG elements now of tidying-up, leaving things in shot, cameras in shot, microphones in shot, bits of set hanging down, shadows from booms. And they just said [on Gladiator II], ‘Well, clean it up.’”
“Look at his older films and getting depth into things was very much part of lighting. You can’t do that with a lot of cameras, but he just wants to get it all done.”
“Ridley doesn’t care that it’s not exactly like the last shot. He does care that it looks great.”
“It’s a bit rush, rush, rush. That’s changed in him. But that’s the way he wants to do it and I don’t like it and I don’t think many people do, but people love his films and he’s Ridley Scott and can do what he wants.”
I lost my faith in director Ridley Scott after his 2013 film The Counselor, a forgettable contemporary thriller. I took umbrage over Scott’s seemingly habitual critique of Christianity, including direct assaults on the Catholic Church. There was also the problem of the film itself, which included a gratuitous confessional sequence, a cliché Catholic character played by Penelope Cruz, disingenuous sexual content, decapitations, and an overall cool boredom more deadening than compelling.
The film’s script was by Cormac McCarthy (1933–2023) and perhaps Scott was looking to parlay this opportunity into his No Country for Old Men moment. “I have to pay attention to the films that are being successful now, which I may not like very much. But I have to analyze why this film is being successful. And then — I guess, in a way — try to do my version,” Scott once revealed. Not inspiration or artistic intuition, but financial concerns and marketing angles are the motivations behind choosing works.
Business as usual.
When I staggered out of the theater after The Counselor, I was overcome with a feeling of hopelessness, of utter darkness, of being orphaned. Bleakness. Nihilism. Those are descriptives often associated with Cormac McCarthy — himself raised Catholic — but was this what Scott wanted us to feel? In spite of his hugely successful moviemaking career, was Scott happy? What exactly is he trying to say?
Whatever Scott’s personal life has entailed, he has spent his energies on his work — his overflowing output proves that. But something seems missing. I never saw that as clearly in all his films as I did in The Counselor. Why, at almost 76 years old, would one spend time producing such a film — a work summed up by the Guardian as “Blah bloody blah”?
And yet, in the same New York Times interview in which he stated he is an atheist, Scott admitted:
“[I’m] really intrigued by those eternal questions of creation and belief and faith. I don’t care who you are, it’s what we all think about. It’s in the back of all our minds.”
Ridley Scott continues to be searching for something in his remaining years, and is one of the few filmmakers in their 80s and 90s — Scorsese, 82; Herzog, 82; Coppola, 85; Costa-Gavras, 91; Eastwood, 94 — whose pictures are still events, still something that audiences hope might evoke the cathartic feeling of redemption Scott and Co. managed at the end of Gladiator.
Somehow, we still yet hope in the conversion of Ridley Scot — that a final masterpiece awaits.
“Go to them.”