A Case of Forward March

If you knew nothing of Ridley Scott’s reputation you’d easily mistake him for a military man.

He talks brusquely while chomping on a large cigar. He carries himself smartly--shoulders back, chest out. His auburn hair, swept smartly back, has kept its color though his beard has turned gray. In chinos, heavy black boots and a T-shirt beneath a wind-cheater, he looks like a five-star general off-duty.

He isn’t, of course. For one thing, Scott wouldn’t have the time for a third career. He is already one of the outstanding directors to emerge from Britain in the last 20 years, with memorable movies like “Alien,” “Blade Runner” and “Thelma & Louise” to his credit. His “G.I. Jane” opened Friday.

And two years ago, he also became a studio boss. Scott, together with his younger brother Tony (director of “Beverly Hills Cop II” and “Top Gun”), headed a consortium that paid $19.5 million for Shepperton, a studio site 20 miles southwest of London. Along with Pinewood, a similar distance from the British capital, Shepperton is arguably the busiest film studio in Europe.

The brothers have announced their intention to consolidate Shepperton’s position as Europe’s premier facility and are spending $3.25 million a year in upgrading the studio.

“I know all about this place,” said Scott, sitting in his light, airy office in Shepperton’s administration block, known as the Old House. “I was one of their best customers. I’ve been coming here 25 years.”

By this he means he has made TV commercials throughout this period; his company, RSA, became internationally known in the 1970s for creating spots with a visual style hitherto unseen in the commercials industry. But he retains a warm affection for Shepperton for another reason: It was here that he shot “Alien,” his first hit feature, in 1979.

At 59, Scott is as busy as a director and (with Tony) as a producer, under the Scott Free banner, as he has ever been. He will produce “RKO 281,” the story of Orson Welles making “Citizen Kane,” and is looking for the right director. He will direct “I Am Legend,” a remake of the apocalyptic 1971 movie “Omega Man,” which starred Charlton Heston. This time around, Arnold Schwarzenegger will star as the last man on Earth, under threat from zombies.

So why did Scott yearn to run a studio too? “Specifically, it’s the sheer demand for material,” he said, his gruff voice still betraying his roots in England’s northeast. “It used to be that the film world was divided between the North American market, which accounted for 60% of revenues, and the rest of the world, which took the other 40%. Now it’s swung, to the extent that it’s almost the reverse.

“Certain kinds of stars--Schwarzenegger, Stallone--play well in the international market. Action and violence travel. There’s a growing demand there which doesn’t look as if it’s going away.” He shrugged. “I figure there are only two serious studios of any scale outside America in the English-speaking world. There’s Pinewood, and there’s here.”

In running Shepperton, Scott also wants to give the British film industry a boost in the international market: While some British actors, directors and cinematographers are ranked among the world’s best, most of the country’s films remain low-budget. The bigger films shot in Britain are invariably American-financed.

This is true even when a film’s source material is British. Scott believes that the recent film “The Saint” should have been British-financed; it was based on books by British novelist Leslie Charteris, which were then adapted for a British TV series. He feels the same about “The Avengers,” a U.S.-financed film version starring Ralph Fiennes, Uma Thurman and Sean Connery of the old British TV series. (As it happens, much of “The Avengers” is being shot at Shepperton.)

“Outside of America, we in Britain have the strongest creative community but the least government help,” Scott noted. But he, like many others in Britain, is optimistic because Tony Blair’s new Labor government is supportive of the film industry and has already introduced tax breaks for British-made films below a certain budget limit.

“We’ve suffered particularly in respect of film directors, who have been brain-drained to America in the last 25 years,” Scott said. “If they’re paid properly and get the right opportunities, they’ll come back to Britain to work. I’ll come back and make films here myself at some point.”

Meanwhile, most of his directing work keeps him based in Los Angeles. He is not a prolific film director (he has made only 10 movies in 20 years) and is enormously respected within the industry, yet he has had as many setbacks as commercial successes. His lavish fantasy “Legend” from 1985 was that rarity, a Tom Cruise film that flopped. His Columbus epic, “1492,” looked stunning, but its commercial prospects may have been hampered by Gerard Depardieu’s impenetrable accent. Last year’s “White Squall,” a sea-bound rites-of-passage film, performed poorly at the box office.

These films did not fail because Ridley Scott thinks of himself as an auteur, oblivious to commercial considerations: “You only have so many films in you, so it’s silly to say you don’t care if they play or not. Each film is a year out of your life, and they’re a hard process. So if a subject is going to be tough in box-office terms, there’s less reason to do it.”

It remains to be seen whether “G.I. Jane” will be tough or not. It stars Demi Moore as a U.S. Navy lieutenant chosen to endure a punishing training regime with the all-male Navy SEALs, a legendarily tough special operations unit. She refuses any concessions to her status as the sole woman among the SEALs trainees, which would include being allowed to pass physical tests at a lower performance level than men.

After one iconic scene in which she cuts her lustrous dark hair to the scalp with an electric razor, she submits to training exercises in which her unit is “captured” by SEAL soldiers posing as the enemy; one, a sergeant called the Chief (played by Viggo Mortensen), brutally beats up on Moore as the male trainees watch. At pre-release screenings in London, women in the audience winced, covered their eyes and emitted sounds of distress.

Scott, when asked if he thought the sight of a woman being viciously beaten in a prolonged attack was commensurate with entertainment, would not address the question directly. “I’m driven by my gut feeling,” he said at one point. “What would I do if I were a SEAL commander? Who are the best [trainees] and why are they the best? A chain’s only as strong as its weakest link--and the rest of this chain was weak because of [Moore’s] presence.”

He added that if he were the enemy and he had captured Moore’s unit, “yes, I’d interrogate her and let the men watch. And I know where I’d get my information from.”

Scott went on to explain that Navy SEALs were ordered to stay silent for 12 hours if captured by enemy forces, so all the information they knew could be swiftly changed. He spoke of two SEAL trainees, interviewed by Barbara Walters, who resigned, having buckled under just the kind of pressure depicted in “G.I. Jane.” But he would not discuss the unease of audiences faced with such violence.

Scott grew up near South Shields, a northern England port; his father had a shipping office until World War II closed it down, and he joined the army. “He did extremely well, and by the end of the war he was an acting brigadier,” Scott recalled. “So he stayed on in the military and we lived in Germany, from 1947 to ‘52, when my father went back into shipping.”

But in addition to that military influence, which explains Scott’s soldierly demeanor, a strong artistic streak ran in the family too. “I remember as a kid my father was great with a pen and black ink. He’d do drawings, and he might even have started me off. When I was 6 or 7, I was always drawing ships and horses.”

Ridley’s talent was evident, and art school beckoned. He was fascinated by all things military and at one stage was about to volunteer for the Marines: “But my father said, ‘No, you go to art school.’ ”

After studying at the Royal Academy he made his first short film, “Boy and Bicycle” (starring his father and Tony), joined the BBC as a production designer and left after three years to form RSA, now in its 32nd year and one of the world’s most successful TV commercial production houses. He soon established himself (along with contemporary Alan Parker) as the most innovative director in the business, a perfectionist with styling and lighting who changed the face of British TV commercials.

Feature films were an obvious progression, and he made his debut at age 40 with “The Duellists,” an adaptation of a Joseph Conrad story with Harvey Keitel and Keith Carradine; lauded at Cannes, it did not find big audiences, but remains a ravishing looking film. (Some critics sniped that Scott favored visual splendor over narrative and thematic substance, a charge that has persisted. Parker, a friend and rival for 30 years, has called him “the greatest visual stylist working today.”

But Scott’s next two films were “Alien” (in which he discovered the joys of special effects) and “Blade Runner,” a pair of sci-fi masterpieces. “Blade Runner” was too dark and brooding for the taste of Warner Bros. The studio insisted on a less downbeat ending and added a voice-over by Harrison Ford to make it more accessible. It has become one of the most exhaustively analyzed and dissected films of the last 20 years.

Yet Scott cares little for explaining or deconstructing his work: “I read the analysis, take the good with the bad,” he said with a shrug.

He has two sons, Luke and Jake, and a daughter, Jordan, from two marriages, both of which ended in divorce.

“I think I work too much, that’s the problem,” he said of his broken marriages. “I’m always traveling. But what can I do? It’s my life. What am I going to do? Teach? Go back to the BBC?” A shake of the head and a puff on his cigar: “I don’t think so. I enjoy this too much.”