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.
— Ridley Scott
Conscience, the power of conscience, can unearth all kinds of things.
Dad entered the Second World War like any other man, trying to do the right thing.
I would make a film with a political point of view if I agreed with it, and even, perhaps, if I didn't.
'Prometheus' was a great experience for me.
As a filmmaker, deep blacks are essential, and in my experience, no technology captures those attributes as well as Plasma.
I tend to watch a lot of lower-budget movies to find out what's doing down there and find out who's coming up.
I've seen some of James Cameron's work, and I've got to go 3D.
'Blade Runner' was a comic strip. It was a comic strip! It was a very dark comic strip. Comic metaphorically.
There's a big film industry in Egypt, and quite a big one in Syria, and there's a big Muslim community in Paris.
I am a science fiction enthusiast, really, deep down.
When I started the original 'Alien,' Ripley wasn't a woman, it was a guy.
I think sci-fi can easily be PG.
I always shoot my movies with score as certainly part of the dialogue. Music is dialogue. People don't think about it that way, but music is actually dialogue. And sometimes music is the final, finished, additional dialogue. Music can be one of the final characters in the film.
I was always aware that this whole Earth is on overload.
The ego is there, but I'm learning to channel it.
Yes, obviously, there's this degree of wanting people to accept other people faiths and philosophies.
Technology continues to bring us wondrous advances in filmmaking to improve how we view movies.
'The Man In High Castle' is one of Dick's most imaginative and captivating works, and certainly one of my favorites.
I'm an Englishman who did a film on Mogadishu, 'Black Hawk Down.'
The best stories come out of the truth.
You always worry before your movie opens that no one is going to come out.
Perhaps because of my background as a graphic designer, I'm drawn to rich and beautiful colors.
I don't go to the cinema often anymore - I'd rather just pop in a disk and get the biggest monitor you've got, and if the quality is superb, I can watch a film, and if I don't like it I can pop it out.
On rare occasions, Dad used to reminisce about when he met Eisenhower and how Churchill would pop in, in the late hours of the evening or night, carrying a cigar, when he'd obviously had a good dinner.
Taking a comic strip character is very hard to write. Because comics are meant to work in one page, to work in frames with minimalistic dialogue. And a lot of it is left to the imagination of the reader. To do that in film, you've got to be a little more explanatory. And that requires a good screenplay and good dialogue.
I am in a constant stage of development.
Fire is our first form of technology.
Egypt was - as it is now - a confluence of cultures, as a result of being a crossroads geographically between Africa, the Middle East and Europe.
Doing science fiction at a high level is tricky. It's really tricky.
'Alien' is a C film elevated to an A film, honestly, by it being well done and a great monster. If it hadn't had that great monster, even with a wonderful cast, it wouldn't have been as good, I don't think.
People have no idea how physically tough doing a film is.
I started late. I didn't make my first movie until I was 40.
Life isn't black and white. It's a million gray areas, don't you find?
Stanley Kubrick's '2001' was the door that opened up the possibility of science fiction for me. Everything else up to then was fine, but didn't quite work for me.
I grew up in the North of England at a time when Stirling Moss was a hero. Everyone wanted to be a racing driver.
When you're watching a documentary, the danger is to romanticize.
I like Wadi Rum - it's the best view I've ever seen of what could be Mars.
The U.K. has to keep investing in new technology, skills, and infrastructure to keep pace with international competition.
In science fiction, we're always searching for new frontiers. We're drawn to the unknown.
Your landscape in a western is one of the most important characters the film has. The best westerns are about man against his own landscape.
Churchill strikes a note in my life because my father worked on Mulberry Harbour, which was the code name for the temporary concrete harbours which were towed across the Channel to make the D-day landings in France possible.
When you think about it, 'Avatar' is almost completely an animated movie.
I think Phil Dick was particularly interesting in that, first of all, he was a very modern man and a very modern thinker, but I don't know what demons drove him.
I've always avoided sequels, unless I felt there was something fresh.
It's hard writing screenplays.
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.
There's some politicians who still seriously believe that we haven't got global warming.
I try to make films, not movies. I've never liked the expression 'movie', but it sounds elitist to say that.
If you believe, you believe; if you're faithful, you're faithful. I don't care what your religion is. The same if you're agnostic. That should be accepted, too.
