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Is it funny, wry-not-haha, that there’s so much excitement about the new Blade Runner when the first one… “Bombed?” Scott says. Scott couldn’t find the time to direct – Denis Villeneuve, who made Sicario and last year’s Arrival, has been anointed – but his fingerprints are all over the reboot. He sets out to track down the disillusioned, long-vanished blade runner Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford, reprising his role from the original). He says, “Alcon Entertainment were about to buy the title and they said to me, ‘Look, we’re about to pay God knows how many millions – do you think there’s a sequel here?’ And I said, ‘Absolutely.’ They said, ‘What is it?’ And I said, ‘I’ll tell you when you pay me!’”īlade Runner 2049 is set 30 years on and follows a new LAPD blade runner – the special police operatives charged with “retiring” rogue replicants, androids indistinguishable from humans – played by Ryan Gosling. Before the end of 2017, we’ll have the long-awaited follow-up to his 1982 film Blade Runner, based on a concept by Scott and writer Hampton Fancher. Already this year, Scott has been executive producer on Tom Hardy’s BBC drama Taboo and now there’s Alien: Covenant. Why, I wonder aloud, don’t we see more of Scott? He looks perplexed by the inquiry, perhaps understandably, but answers gnomically: “I do enough.” He’s 5ft 7in, give or take, and is dressed today in his standard film-set attire: black fleece jacket and sensible shoes. His hair, once rusty red, is gradually turning metallic silver, his moustache holding out longest. “They’re no good for my back.” If, as Alan Parker suggests, you are struggling to place the face, Scott has something of the Bryan Cranston about him. “I can’t have those soft chairs,” he explains, his accent a bit Stockton, a bit Hollywood. Walking into the suite, I find him rearranging the furniture. Mulling this over, I get the nod that Scott is ready for me. “He doesn’t frequent the usual watering holes – he wouldn’t be seen dead there, wasting his time.” “Most people in Britain don’t even know what Ridley looks like,” Alan Parker, the director of Bugsy Malone and The Commitments, once told me. But somehow he doesn’t receive the fond affection reserved for Ken Loach and Mike Leigh, or the reverence that Stephen Frears or even Danny Boyle get.
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He’s a long way from underrated or starved of appreciation. Scott, who grew up in Stockton-on-Tees, was made a Sir in 2003 and Peter Blake honoured him a spot on an updated lineup of his Sgt Pepper’s cover in 2012. His last film, The Martian, from 2015, starring Matt Damon as a homesteader on Mars, was actually his most successful: banking $630m worldwide and winning a Golden Globe for best comedy or musical (an exceptional feat, given that it was neither). And as he’s got older – he’ll turn 80 in November – he’s kept working at a demented pace, rarely letting his standards slip. His work is era-defining, stylistically pioneering: Alien, Blade Runner, Thelma & Louise and Gladiator are all in the canon. It’s certainly not hard to make a case that Scott is Britain’s greatest living director. This makes me think, and leaves me a little unsure.