No Kevin Spacey? No problem!
Ridley Scott’s bold decision to reshoot his new movie in six weeks flat is typical of his fearless approach to film, writes Robbie Collin.
Few of us would choose to spend our 80th birthday in the teeth of an unprecedented workplace emergency, with US$50 million riding on our every twitch. But Sir Ridley Scott isn’t the type for a nice sit down with a slice of sponge cake. The director of Alien, Blade Runner and Gladiator, who entered his ninth decade last month, has just completed an extraordinary last-minute reworking of his new film All the Money in the World, a thriller based on the kidnapping of the billionaire oil scion John Paul Getty III by Italian mobsters in the
70s.
After allegations of sexual assault were made recently against Kevin Spacey, who had played Jean Paul Getty Sr in the film, Scott hauled the rest of his cast and crew back to reshoot every one of the actor’s scenes with Christopher Plummer instead, all in time for its original US release date, in December.
There is a topsy-turvy kind of pragmatism to this. With Spacey in situ, even buried under old-age prosthetics, the project would have been tainted by association – and no studio has yet tested cinemagoers’ appetites for scandalhit stars in the post-Weinstein climate. But for a director to respond to such a crisis by remaking his film in six weeks flat – as opposed to, say, postponing or shelving it – takes the kind of nerve you more often see being admiringly sized up by vets at cattle markets, with the help of a measuring tape.
Scott’s solution to the Spacey problem is just the latest astonishment in a career that brims with them. Since 2012, the director seems to have gone into creative overdrive, hammering out film after film – Prometheus, The Counsellor, Exodus: Gods and Kings, The Martian, Alien: Covenant, and now the Getty biopic – that are as bold and uncompromising as anything he previously made.
Slowing down does not seem to have been an option. This is, after all, the man who spent four years developing a sequel to Blade Runner – perhaps his crowning artistic achievement – only to decide he was too busy to direct it, so tossed the keys to Denis Villeneuve and executiveproduced from a distance.
Scott was a late starter, and spent a decade honing his craft in advertising: a significant mini-career in itself, which peaked in
1973 with his immortal pairing of Hovis with Dvorak. His debut feature, a decorous swashbuckler called The Duellists, came along in
1977, the year he turned 40.
The 24 films he directed over the next 40 years more than made up for that. But his most recent output – the stuff that we should probably call late-period Scott – stands tantalisingly apart from the rest. These films span a wide range of genres and tones, but that’s always been the Scott way: three science-fiction blockbusters, a dark crime thriller and a biblical epic in as many years is just a balanced directorial diet. But all five share a preoccupation with mankind’s significance in the great order of things – and don’t draw many comforting conclusions.
This new fixation inescapably coincides with the death of Scott’s younger brother, the director Tony Scott, who leapt from a Los Angeles suspension bridge in 2012 while Ridley was in the middle of filming The Counsellor. It’s too simplistic to say the tragedy prompted a wholesale creative rethink. But the loss weighed extraordinarily heavily on Ridley, who had remained close to his brother, the director of Top Gun, The Last Boy Scout and Crimson Tide, throughout their half-parallel, half-rivalrous professional lives.
So the fact that his recent films all cast such heavy shadows makes a sad kind of sense. Look at his apocalyptic, revisionist treatment of the well-worn Old Testament story in Exodus: Gods and Kings, which he recasts as an allconsuming brotherly clash between Christian Bale’s crackpot Moses and Joel Edgerton’s psychopathic Ramses, while a probably imaginary God eggs on the former in the guise of a petulant child, spreading plague and catastrophe for sport.
‘‘For my brother, Tony Scott,’’ reads its closing title card – moments after you’ve just watched a fraternal rivalry tear apart an entire ancient civilisation. It’s a rare moment of heart-baring candour from a typically standoffish director, but it leaves you shivering in your seat.
There’s an unmissable skin-prickling chill to The Martian, too – even though the Golden Globes named it the best ‘‘musical or comedy’’ of 2015 (they never specified which). It’s by far the most upbeat of Scott’s latest films, with Matt Damon’s stranded astronaut jauntily pledging to ‘‘science the s...’’ out of his extraterrestrial predicament. But while the film pays rousing tribute to human enterprise and pluck, its broader world view is supremely unsettling. The surface of Mars – and, by extension, the entire universe – is an existentially terrifying expanse of empty space, where human life could hardly matter less.
Which brings us neatly to Prometheus and Alien: Covenant, Scott’s two prequels to date (a third is planned) to Alien, his 1979 career-making haunted house film in space. Scott says he’d always felt the original Alien film posed a question – who created the alien, and why? – which had been overlooked by all three of its direct sequels (none of which he directed). By returning to the franchise 33 years on, he was picking up a gauntlet thrown down by his younger self.
That’s why approaching Prometheus and Alien: Covenant as straightforward ‘‘Alien films’’ is, I think, a mistake – although 20th Century Fox did its best to persuade you otherwise with the trailer for the latter, which promised a no-fuss return to the days of soft humans being pierced and split by monstrous spines and tendrils. Instead, they’re films with a very high-fuss content indeed – intricate allegories that rework the Christian creation and nativity stories into horrific future-gothic fantasias.
In Prometheus, Noomi Rapace’s Dr Elizabeth Shaw experiences an immaculate conception, which is shortly followed by a miracle birth – albeit one that’s unlikely to be memorialised in a primary school Christmas production any time soon. And in the prologue to Alien: Covenant, Michael Fassbender’s mercurial android David is serving in heaven – compliantly pouring tea for his creator Sir Peter Weyland in a gleaming, sterile chamber filled with devotional artwork. Two hours later, David is reigning in hell – aka the crumbling necropolis on Planet 4, surrounded by his demonic creations. That’s a Satanic character arc straight out of Milton’s Paradise Lost. As for Covenant‘s final scene, I can’t recall another recent blockbuster that sends its audience out on such a soul-sinking downer.
And on that note, we need to talk about The Counsellor, Scott’s 2013 thriller about a drug deal gone gut-churningly wrong, which stars Michael Fassbender as the titular cartel lawyer out to make a quick buck, and Cameron Diaz, Javier Bardem and Brad Pitt as three underworld grotesques he encounters in the process. Of all Scott’s recent films, this is the most relentlessly nihilistic – perhaps unsurprisingly so, since the screenplay was written by Cormac McCarthy, whose epic western novel Blood Meridian Scott had struggled for some time to adapt into a script, without success.
When I first saw The Counsellor I was equal parts mesmerised and dismayed – the film’s cynicism became just too tiring to bear. But I recently tried Scott’s director’s cut, which is 21 minutes longer and immeasurably better: the film’s most outrageous moments have space to echo and resound, while McCarthy’s monologues are allowed to drift and meander, creating a hypnotic, pendulating rhythm that never establishes itself in the tighter edit.
On the Blu-ray commentary track, Scott throws out a nugget of insight. ‘‘When you’re in the editing room, the danger is it’s like telling a joke again and again, and eventually the joke doesn’t seem to be funny,’’ he says. ‘‘You have to take great care you’re not throwing the baby away with the bathwater.’’
It’s from experience he speaks. Scott has been cursed by too-snug theatrical cuts before in his career – the original version of Blade Runner was compromised by a dreary voice-over, crucial missing clues, and a tacked-on happy ending that obviously didn’t belong. And his 2005 Crusades epic Kingdom of Heaven feels like a completely different film in its fulllength, 194-minute form to the muddled 144-minute version that was panned by cinemagoers and critics on its release.
But Scott has learnt to play the studio game. He has an exacting reputation, but is a consummate planner, well-known for bringing in the most elaborate productions on time and under budget. Alien: Covenant came in at $97 million – around half the cost of a typical Marvel superhero film, though it has a complexity and a grandeur that purringly suggest no expense was ever spared.
But let’s give John Ford the last word on Scott here. ‘‘People are incorrect to compare a director to an author,’’ the great western director once observed. ‘‘If he’s a creator, he’s more like an architect. And an architect conceives his plans according to precise circumstances.’’ Long may Sir Ridley’s towers dominate the skyline.
❚ All the Money in the World (TBC) opens in New Zealand cinemas on January 4.