SCOTT’S SEQUELS

THE DIRECTOR GIVES US SOME STATUS UPDATES

GLADIATOR 2

Twenty-three years in the making, the follow-up to 2000’s Roman epic, starring Paul Mescal, has been filming in Malta. What is it that kept Scott, who has returned to direct, excited? “Well, I would say financially it’s a no-brainer, innit?” he laughs. “I mean, are you kidding me? So that’s the first answer. Secondly, the first Gladiator landed so well, and just kept going. So it was silly not to see if we could come up with what to do, and what the story is. It was hard. The trick is to avoid the usual corny nuances.”

BLADE RUNNER 2099

Scott devised the script, he says, for Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049, the sequel to his sci-fi masterpiece, but couldn’t direct it because of a schedule clash. “I shouldn’t have had to make that decision,” he says now. “But I had to. I should have done Blade Runner 2.” Coming up next, though, is Blade Runner 2099, a TV series for Amazon Studios. “I’m one of the producers,” he says. “It’s all set years on. To me, it circles the idea of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.”

ALIEN(S)

Having made his name in genre cinema with 1979’s Alien, Scott has kept the franchise close to his heart. With 2012’s origin story Prometheus, he “wanted to reinvent the wheel, and to see how it all came about. Then I did Alien Covenant, trying to push it in another direction.” Now, there’s a new Alien film, which Fede Álvarez has just shot, and a TV series set on Earth, that Fargo and Legion’s Noah Hawley is spearheading. Scott is a producer on both, although neither continue the Prometheus/covenant chronology, he says: “They’re all new.”