Ridley Scott

Ridley Scott (b. November 30th, 1937)

Ridley Scott Joins Producer Jerry Bruckheimer for a Black Hawk Down DVD Briefing
In Black Hawk Down, director Ridley Scott and producer Jerry Bruckheimer (Pearl Harbor) used documentary-style realism to tell the story of the U.S. military's doomed 1993 mission in Somalia -- including a battle that turned out to be the American military's longest and bloodiest firefight since the Vietnam War. As harrowing in its depiction of modern warfare as Saving Private Ryan, Black Hawk Down earned Oscars for Best Sound and Best Film Editing, as well as nominations for Best Director and Best Cinematographer. In this transcript from a recent teleconference, Scott and Bruckheimer discuss the challenges of bringing recent events to the screen without the buffer of historical distance and about the new life they envision for Black Hawk Down on DVD.

Question: Could both of you talk about the sense of responsibility you had in telling the story of Black Hawk Down faithfully, since it was based on a true incident?

Jerry Bruckheimer: We were very fortunate because Mark Bowden, a terrific writer, adapted his book [Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War] for us. Mark interviewed over 150 of the soldiers who were involved in the operation and got all different sides of the story. Ridley and I felt that we should be as true to the book and true to what happened to those young men as possible. So we hired Lee Van Arsdale, who was the commander of the Delta Force and actually walked in front of the tanks to get his own men out. We also had Tom Matthews, who was the head of the air operation and was in the air for 18 hours during the battle. They were with Ridley all the time during the filming to make sure he was being as accurate as possible in his re-creation.

Ridley Scott: I've had some surprising reactions from fellow producers and directors who called me up after seeing the movie, and said, "That never happened." Instead of recalling and reconstructing history from a safe distance of 30 years, 100 years, we rattled the cage at bit by making a film about a recent event. But I think we should be looking at the news today and making films about what is going on in the world, and be as instructional or opinionated as we can be in a good way. And we really have to give credit to Sony for making what is essentially a big mainstream movie about a subject like this, which doesn't have a love story or the conventions of a drama but is really more in the form of a documentary.

Q: Mr. Scott, as a director, what sort of films do you prefer making -- more reality-based, documentary-style films, like Black Hawk Down, or science fiction and fantasy films, like Legend and Blade Runner?

RS: Everything. Anything. I like films such as American Beauty, and I like Spider-Man.

Q: Mr. Bruckheimer, your producing style has been described as very American, very patriotic. Do you think your style clashed with Mr. Scott's on Black Hawk Down, or did they complement each other?

JB: No, I don't think our styles clashed at all. Ridley made the picture he wanted to make, and I'm enormously proud of it and thrilled with his work. I think it's brilliant.

Q: How important is the DVD release of Black Hawk Down for you as a director, Mr. Scott; and for you as a producer, Mr. Bruckheimer?

RS: I think certain segments of the audience were nervous about going to see Black Hawk Down in theaters because of its subject matter. The DVD gives you a second opportunity to attract those viewers who now might venture into their living rooms and take a look at it. Secondly, from a purely artistic point of view, DVD allows me to maintain the integrity of the movie as it was seen in theaters, with all its original pictorial and sound qualities intact, so the audience gets to see a very high-quality version of the film in their homes. Another great thing about DVDs is that they allow the viewer to get into the minds of the filmmakers - to see how they solve problems, what they have to cut out on a daily basis, how they maintain a budget. With the DVD you are really getting in the backdoor, and staring over the shoulders of the people who are making the film.

JB: I think the DVD is another way to enjoy the movie: You can have it in your own living room; you can study parts of the movie; you can rewind them; you can listen to the filmmakers talk about what they did. It's a great teaching tool for kids, to see how the film was made, see how we did it. Also, it gives you more background on the history of the event, fills in some of the blanks that a two-hour movie can't. With the DVD you get to hear from the author of the book the film was based on, you get to hear from some of the soldiers.

Q: If you could return to any of your earlier films, which ones would you like to put on DVD, and what would you like to do with them using the disc format?

JB: I would love to have all my movies on DVD -- I'm chagrined that some of them aren't. It would be great to visit some of those films that we made back in the '80s that haven't made it to DVD and give kids and adults the chance to see them on disc. We could get the sound a lot better with digital technology. At least from a historic standpoint, I think that would be really valuable.

RS: I'm actually going back through all my films now and reprinting and remixing them. I'm now as far back as my first film, The Duellists, which is being digitally remixed. We revisited the original negative and it was like it had been shot yesterday.

Q: I understand you're working on Blade Runner as well.

RS: Yes, that's done and will, I hope, come out as a three-disc pack, which will have Cut 1, which was '79; Cut 2, which was '81; and then the current version, which has certain additions, though the voice-over has been removed. One of the discs will contain all sorts of interviews, which are really interesting. I don't know how they managed to dig into all that old material and find all these people still in the woodwork, but it's fascinating -- it's like a library inside the disc.

Q: What DVDs are in your players right now? What have you been watching?

JB: God, I'm traveling, so I've been watching anything. I'll leave this one to Ridley.

RS: I just watched the DVD of Billy Liar, John Schlesinger's film. I know John, so it was interesting to hear what he had to say about the film on the commentary track. I was talking about that film and some others with a 32-year-old director at the DGA, and he started to look blank. And I wasn't talking about Eisenstein. I was talking about films made since '59. So I said, "Get your pen out, get a piece of paper, write these 12 movies down, mate. Start watching them, and you won't leave the DVD player till next weekend!" That's what's great about DVD. Instead of looking at some creaky old print in some gloomy little theater, you can watch Billy Liar in the form it was intended to be watched. And you'll find it as entertaining today as it was then.

Q: John Schlesinger's commentary on Billy Liar was extraordinary. Do you think that there is an increasing sense of competition among filmmakers to create DVDs that are just a step ahead?

JB: Well, I think that all of us like to do things to the best of our ability, and it has nothing to do with the competition factor, it has to do with quality. And when you make a quality movie, you want to make a quality DVD. And if there are ways that we can be inventive and better inform an audience about the painstaking process we go through, we want to exploit that.

Q: Are there any specific films that made you both want to become filmmakers?

JB: I'm a big fan of David Lean. Bridge on the River Kwai, Lawrence of Arabia, and Doctor Zhivago are movies that were seminal films for me when I was growing up. I admire the filmmaking and the storytelling ability of Lean and [screenwriter] Robert Bolt, so that's what I look toward for inspiration.

RS: Because I was a kid from the north of England, I didn't have access to a lot of alternative cinema, which in those days, was foreign cinema. I would watch all the Hollywood movies that came around. And the ones that were most impressive to me were always the westerns. I was absolutely enamored of the world in those films. And the westerns that always seemed to rise above all the others were the ones by this guy John Ford. At quite an early age, I began to notice that his films were different than all the other westerns, though I couldn't analyze what made them different. All I knew is that I was a big fan of his.

Q: Mr. Scott, do you think that the events of September 11th had any kind of effect on the release of Black Hawk Down?

RS: Once Jerry and I recovered from the shock -- if recovered is the word --our first thought was that we had to, as Bush said, get back to work. We asked ourselves, "What do we do with this movie? Should we put it back 11 months?" Then we all looked at it and decided, "This film is entirely relevant, let's get it out as fast as possible."

Q: Are there any other events going on in the world right now that you would like to make a film about?

RS: I'm interested in these recent revelations about how the FBI and CIA dropped the ball in preventing the 9/11 attacks, how they ignored critical information. How in the world could that happen? Now, that right there, to me, is a film. But the question is, how close to the truth do you want to get?

--June 11, 20002

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