Quotes from Ridley Scott

But Gladiator is one of my favourite adventures because I really loved going into the world. I loved creating the world to the degree where you could almost smell it.

Do what you haven't done is the key, I think.

Doing science fiction at a high level is tricky. It's really tricky.

I think if I'm going to do a science fiction, I'm going to go down a new path that I want to do.

Some people like to do everything always the same thing. That's another way: To do the same thing.

'Alien' is a landmark. One of the really good science-fiction films.

Egypt was - as it is now - a confluence of cultures, as a result of being a crossroads geographically between Africa, the Middle East and Europe.

The Gulf of Mexico, they believe, is a huge asteroid. That was an impact zone, you know that? Yeah, for that big a thing to actually hit our globe, it would have had to adjusted the spin, the axis.

In film, it's very important to not allow yourself to get sentimental, which, being British, I try to avoid. People sometimes regard sentimentality as emotion. It is not. Sentimentality is unearned emotion.

Sometimes you can do a TV show on a subject you just can't do in film. Either it's too long or studios will perceive it as not being commercial.

When you're at a certain point in your time - age, that is, when you're older - you start to realize that, actually, what you leave behind you does count, and so you start to become fundamentally aware of your own destiny, which sounds very grand. It's not grand at all, actually.

One of the problems with science fiction, which is probably one of the reasons why I haven't done one for many, many years, is the fact that everything is used up. Every type of spacesuit is used up, every type of spacecraft is vaguely familiar, the corridors are similar, and the planets are similar.

I made the mistake of saying I was an atheist at one point, when I was doing 'Kingdom of Heaven.'

When you're doing a big movie, you're gone for 10 months to a year.

What's interesting to me about Moses isn't the big stuff that everybody knows.

The 3D world allows you to engage even more with a film because you're somehow drawn into the landscape or the universe of that scene. Even when it's two people talking at a table, you feel like you're a third party.

Dad entered the Second World War like any other man, trying to do the right thing.

I also love Australian movies. I love Muriel's Wedding - I've seen in six times. Baz Luhrmann's best movie is strictly ballroom... without question.

The great attraction to 'American Gangster' is these two great characters who are absolute paradoxes within their own sphere.

I like a film such as 'American Beauty,' and I like 'Spider-Man.'

Sometimes I find I'm wearing a divided, split brain in terms of drama and humor.

I always shoot my movies with score as certainly part of the dialogue. Music is dialogue. People don't think about it that way, but music is actually dialogue. And sometimes music is the final, finished, additional dialogue. Music can be one of the final characters in the film.

On 'Black Hawk Down,' I was employing 1,000 Muslims. 'Kingdom of Heaven,' same deal except bigger, probably 1,500 Muslims.

If you go back and look, a completely underrated film is 'Quest for Fire.' That was one of the most genius, simplistic but incredibly sophisticated notion of what it was. The evolution of that was just fantastic.