Ridley Scott

“'Blade Runner' was a comic strip. It was a comic strip! It was a very dark comic strip. Comic metaphorically.”

“But Gladiator is one of my favourite adventures because I really loved going into the world. I loved creating the world to the degree where you could almost smell it.”

“It's very difficult to find good scripts in Hollywood any more.”

“Sci-fi films are as dead as westerns.”

“On 'Black Hawk Down,' I was employing 1,000 Muslims. 'Kingdom of Heaven,' same deal except bigger, probably 1,500 Muslims.”

“I didn't want to go down the route of spending a year of my life making a movie that would never be seen. I may as well go down a route making a film that a lot of people will see, which is the whole idea behind cinema.”

“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.”

“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.”

“I'm a yarn teller. My job is to engage you as much as I can and as often as I can.”

“As soon as you're at the higher levels of budgeting, you've got to get the film made, and the only way to support the film is to have actors who can support the budget.”

“The great attraction to 'American Gangster' is these two great characters who are absolute paradoxes within their own sphere.”

“Cast is everything.”

“Because I was a kid from north of England, the only films I had access to was not alternative cinema, which in those days would be foreign cinema; I would be looking at all the Hollywood movies that arrived at my High Street.”

“I think one of the successes of Gladiator is how we manage to turn on a dime the character from one thing to another where you believe he is one thing and he is something very different.”

“Same thing with film, by the time you've finished shooting and you've really been into everything, you've touched up everything in the editing room. You've gone in there and taken little bits from everything.”

“Sacred texts give no specific depiction of God, so for centuries, artists and filmmakers have had to choose their own visual depiction.”

“If you ever have a kid who doesn't know what to do, stick him in art school. It's amazing what evolves.”

“When you think about it, 'Avatar' is almost completely an animated movie.”

“The hardest single thing you do is get the bloody screenplay right.”

“By going to a preview, a director becomes insidiously infected by the process, so by the end of it, you're thinking, 'It may be a bit too long.'”