Started by 𝔗𝔥𝔢 𝔈𝔦𝔤𝔥𝔱𝔥 𝔓𝔞𝔰𝔰𝔢𝔫𝔤𝔢𝔯, Nov 14, 2023, 07:14:35 PM
Quote from: DeadlineDEADLINE: We've spoken about the hardships of shooting some of your earlier movies, like having your actor in the Alien costume lug around this headpiece that weighed more than 5 pounds. Will this continued push into AI make that unnecessary. Many look at AI as a threat though. How do you see it? SCOTT: You're talking about artificial intelligence as opposed to digital. On artificial intelligence, I hit on two very important AI characters in Alien. There was Ash; having a robot on the ship in the form of a human being was genius. Suddenly there was the shock of that, on top of the alien shock. The alien was shocking, but just as you get used to the alien, oh my God, there's a f**king robot then. AI, you can defeat the greatest chess master in 25 moves, because you can input every move ever recorded, into a computer. It will take four minutes and then it will be ready to beat your ass, beat a chess master in 425 moves, mainly because you can input every move ever recorded into a computer. It'll decipher that in four minutes and then be ready to beat your ass. But what a computer hasn't got is emotion. And will that be the difference? In Blade Runner, we had a computer, Roy Batty [played by Rutger Hauer] that had emotion. That's why he was angry; he was only given four years. Right? Now, I can't claim that was unique and enrich because Stanley Kubrick had Hal and Hal went, oh my God ... to make a machine more important than the crew is fantastic. That's where we're going right now. So Stanley was 40 years ahead of his game. Mine were emulations of that, and not original. We wouldn't have thought about that if it hadn't been for Stanley, I don't think.DEADLINE: Between the way you used AI and the stories James Cameron told with the Terminator films, these are cautionary tales. Is AI something to be feared?SCOTT: Completely. Who's in charge of the AI and how smart is the person who's in charge of the AI when he thinks he's controlling something he's not. And the moment you create an AI that's smarter than you are, you'll never know until the AI decides to do its own thing, then you're out of control. If I had an AI box I could say, I want you to figure out how to turn off all the electricity in London. Bam. Everything was dead. That's a f*cking time ... no, it's a hydrogen bomb. The world would close down if I switch it off, and we are all completely f*cked. We're back to candles and matches. Do you have candles and matches at home? I live in France, so I do. DEADLINE: Sounds like you've thought this through.SCOTT: You know I'm a dramatist, so I can't help myself. I think that is what's amazing about Kubrick, he was good at choosing an impossible situation, and the equation around it gradually settled into what it has to be. It's not necessarily really happy. 2001 wasn't a happy ending. I talked to Stanley twice. First time, I'd just done Alien, and the office says, Stanley Kubrick is calling. I said, holy f*ck. He says, hi there. Listen, I just watched your movie. I need to ask you a question and I'll get straight to it. How do you get that thing coming out of his goddamn chest? He said, it scared the s*it out of me. That was the first exchange. I said, well, what I did, put him under the table very impractical, made an artificial fiberglass chest, screwed the table, put a T-shirt on, raised bit so it would break. He said, I got you. I got you. I got you. Next time, I'd just finished Blade Runner. And the film is essentially a film noir. He walks out, you're going to walk away with his love, and on the floor. And there's this origami unicorn. He picks it up and nods. This is a confirmation that he may be a replicant. He goes into the elevator and boom, finished. They f*cking hated it.They say, you can't do this. We've got to preview it again with a happy ending. I said, why a happy ending? They said, driving into mountains or something. I go, what are you talking about? Why would you live in a city if there was a mountain range just around the corner? You go live in the f**king mountains. They say, we need a preview with a happy ending. I called Stanley, I said, Hey, I know you've just done The Shining last year, and I know you hate flying. You must have six weeks of helicopter footage in those mountains. Can you let me borrow? So I've got 70 hours of footage the next day, and that footage went into the movie. That was Stanley, that was his material.DEADLINE: Stephen King didn't love what Kubrick did to his book The Shining...SCOTT: Well, I honestly have to say I thought the book was better. Stanley somehow mucked around with the House, the place and the light, and the book was, I think King's best book.DEADLINE: You mentioned the gladiator's hand through the wheat field. There are so many indelible images in that from, from the boy on the big wheel going over the carpet and wood floor, the bloody elevator, the twin girls murdered by their father. The author once told me Kubrick would call him at all hours, asking questions like, did he believe in God? Did he believe in evil? You can only imagine how Kubrick's brain worked.SCOTT: King's book had a much darker and gloomy hotel. The Boiler Room is a monster in the book. All boiler room. are scary as shit. Stanley chose deliberately to go very bright, very modern. And I thought, why? So immediately, it didn't work for me. It made it an uphill battle on what was a very scary book. He didn't really want to get into the shining, where Scatman Crothers says, you shine boy. He didn't really use that enough.DEADLINE: That was a thankless role Scatman Crothers had, driving all the way to the Overlook in a blizzard to take Jack Nicholson's axe to the chest...SCOTT: Some great stuff, too. I cast Tyrell in Blade Runner, from the bartender in the ballroom scene [Joe Turkel], the one he talks to there in the bar. He worked with Stanley four or five times. DEADLINE: Ever figure out why Alien so haunted Kubrick?SCOTT: Well, I think part of it is he didn't make movies like I would do, and vice versa. I'd always admired Stanley, from when I was a designer. I was a designer and after Royal College I got a job drawing storyboards. I remember sneaking out at two o'clock one Friday afternoon because 2001 was on just down the road, in 70 mm. So I went in there with my packet of cigarettes because you could smoke in those days, and sat through 2001. The theater was empty. But I walked away mesmerized feeling, this is the threshold of real science fiction and, in essence, science fact. But also it felt real because he'd been working with some guys who had been associated with NASA. So he was in a race with NASA, concerned that NASA was going to beat him to the moon before he finished the movie.The sets were spectacular. And the most memorable thing about the thing for me was the first time it was a mention of something called a computer, and AI, and that this computer was more important than the crew. I just thought that was incredibly perverse, marvelous idea. That felt logical. So we jumped in later with Alien, and Ash became the humanized version of the box. We stole the idea in that sense, with great respect to Stanley, that Ash was more valuable than the crew.We'd almost worn out the creature, this marvelous beast that H.R. Giger gave me. You don't want to overuse that. It's a bit like being prudent, and don't show the shark too often. So I was kind of saving Ash for that perfect moment in the story where there's a fight and he gets his head knocked off, and holy moly, he's a robot. I think Stanley was enamored by something about Alien, that it feels real and logical that a mining vehicle coming in from outer space carrying God knows how many dollars of natural phenomena. It's actually what we're going to do today. First guy on Mars is going to be worth a fortune, right?DEADLINE: Had Kubrick seen his HAL in your Ash character?SCOTT: Only when I told him. You get two filmmakers together, they just open up and there's nothing pretentious in there whatsoever. That continued when I had the Blade Runner issue and they wanted a happy ending, and Stanley gave me The Shining footage.DEADLINE: They didn't ask you back for the Alien sequel, which James Cameron directed. It's very different, more of a rollercoaster ride.SCOTT: Well, Jim is about that, the way he designs, his whole process is The Ride. As I learned somebody else was doing this, I actually had been trying to develop something. When Jim called me up and said, listen...he was very nice but he said, this is tough, your beast is so unique. It's hard to make him as frightening again, now familiar ground. So he said, I'm going in a more action, army kind of was. I said, okay. And that's the first time I actually thought, welcome to Hollywood.DEADLINE: What was it like to learn about a sequel to your movie when your replacement calls you?SCOTT: Jim and I talk often. We're not exactly friends, but we do talk and he's a great guy.DEADLINE: How did you feel after you hung up that time?SCOTT: I was pissed. I wouldn't tell that to Jim, but I think I was hurt. I knew I'd done something very special, a one-off really. I was hurt, deeply hurt, actually because at that moment, I think I was damaged goods because I was trying to recover from Blade Runner. Which I thought I really got something pretty special, and then the previews were a disaster. And [my cut of] the film lay on a shelf for almost, I think 10 to 12 years after that until it was discovered by accident at a Santa Monica Film Festival. Somebody said, let's dig out the old print and run it for fun. And they called Warners. And with the greatest respect to Warners, they'd lost the f**king negative, which is like, what? And somebody panicked and went into a drawer, yanked up the first can that had Blade Runner on it, never checked it, sent it to Santa Monica.They ran it. It was a cutting copy with partly Jerry Goldsmith on it, and partly my great musician on it. And it was a copy where we were getting reached to the end of the short strokes and trying to cut and recut to, as it were, save the movie. And this version had no voiceover and had what I call the film noir ending, which is Deckard stares at the origami in his hand, which is a unicorn, nods his head as if to agree and he goes off with his gal. So that got rediscovered. It came right out like a cannon shot, and went everywhere. And of course I know it. I knew it then that it was a very special form of science fiction. It hadn't really been done like that ever and became a kind of copycat benchmark for most of the TV shows and science fictions. I mean, I got the social order of dystopian society really well, and I think that had never been done before. Now it's copied again and again.DEADLINE: But at the time Cameron called you, that's enough to rattle the confidence of anyone. How did you get yours back?SCOTT: Did a lot of pushups, play tennis, thrash the shit out of a tennis ball and look at the next movie. And I was already prepping Legend with Tom Cruise, Tim Curry playing the Lord of Darkness, and Mia Sara, who only did a couple of movies and decided no more. What I decided to do was something that ironically Disney hadn't done at that point. And I always thought, why not do a live action kind of cartoon, kind of fairy story, which they didn't go for. And of course, they do it now again and again, 25 years later. But in those days, I made it literally as the fairy story, with very little help from any digital work. I had to build the forest and the makeup on the fairies had to be real made up, makeup applied on the day. It's remarkable. Tim Curry playing the demon...it was a success for me, just great.
