Ridley Scott admits regret that he wasn’t given the opportunity to helm sequels to both Alien and Blade Runner.
Ridley Scott is starting to do press for his upcoming historical epic Napoleon and you know what that means: nobody is safe. Scott tends to say whatever’s on his mind and has little regard for the delicate or obtuse wordplay that we often see creatives adopt when they’re speaking on the record.
As such, we already saw Scott state last week that his Napoleon star, Joaquin Phoenix, had no idea what he was doing two weeks out from production. Now the veteran filmmaker has looked a little further back into history and had a dig, seemingly at Warner Bros for not being amenable to his schedule when it came to making a Blade Runner sequel.
Scott was developing 2017’s Alien: Covenant at the same time as a Blade Runner follow-up, with both planned to be sequels to iconic science fiction films that he helmed. Things didn’t go quite as planned though, with Scott telling Empire (via Slashfilm)that the studio wouldn’t work around his scheduling of the two films which forced him to pick one over the other.
He doesn’t seem best pleased about it either, telling the outlet, “I shouldn’t have had to make that decision, but I had to.”
Given that the Blade Runner sequel would be the project that he’d be forced to step away from, we’d imagine that it would be the studio behind it, Warner Bros that would refuse to work with Scott’s hectic schedule.
That wouldn’t be the first time Scott would ‘have words’ with the studio over Blade Runner. When the studio was preparing the 1992 director’s cut of the film, Scott reportedly had to make a few threats to get the version of the film cut as he wanted, and he’d still end up disavowing it eventually.
As you likely know, when it came to Blade Runner 2, Scott wouldn’t get to direct it. Denis Villeneuve would step in and take over Blade Runner 2049 and do an impressive job too. Scott would make his Alien sequel and both films would come out in 2017. In hindsight, how does Scott feel about the choice he made?
“I should have done ‘Blade Runner 2,” he tells Empire. Ouch.
Both Alien and Blade Runner have new instalments coming at some point, although the latter is a TV series. The Alien franchise has a film and a TV series in development and Scott is executive producing these projects. We’ll bring you the next interesting soundbite from the Napoleon press tour as we hear it.
Image: BigStock
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