Ridley Scott

Biography: Successful British director whose artistic signature is an elaborate visual style, developed through years of experience as set designer and director of TV commercials. Scott studied art and film at the Royal College of Art in London before landing work as a set designer for the BBC. In the mid 1960s he began directing BBC TV shows, but soon left to pursue a freelance career, helming hundreds of commercials before his first feature in 1977, The Duellists This pet project was critically noted as a sumptuous visual feast, and although it appealed primarily to a small cult following, it was enough to earn the director a shot at helming the graphic scifi/horror film Alien in 1979. It was an exceptionally good vehicle to display Scott's visual talents, albeit to the exclusion of plot and character development. The same charges were leveled against the director and his next picture, the elaborate Blade Runner (1982), in which he created a bleak, futuristic Los Angeles that served as the inspiration for a generation of cyberpunk literature, music, and art. This science fiction opus has built a devoted following over the years, even though Scott complained that his original vision was subverted by studio tampering. (In 1993 he finally got the opportunity to re lease a "director's cut" of the picture, which won even stronger reviews than it received a decade earlier.) Another elaborate fantasy saga, Legend (1985), fizzled badly. For his next film, Scott moved to entirely different turf, but the first-rate romantic thriller Someone to Watch Over Me (1987) failed to find much of an audience. Black Rain (1989), a cop thriller set in Japan, reinforced his reputation as a visual stylist with its recurring images of neon and smoke. Continually accused of favoring style over content and character, Scott then piloted Thelma & Louise (1991), a feminist take on the buddymovie genre whose title characters were the talk of the country the summer it was released. The film also earned him his first Oscar nomination as Best Director. Since then he has directed the lumbering saga of Christopher Columbus, 1492: Conquest of Paradise (1992) and produced the remake of The Browning Version (1994).… Expand