Ridley Scott Reveals Directing Secrets to Fellow Helmer Jimmy Chin: “Don’t Listen to Anybody”

In climbing, we have a word for talking up your own accomplishments — spraying. You’re not supposed to do it. The rule makes things awkward for someone promoting a documentary about climbing, which is what I was doing in early 2016. But that’s how I wound up at an awards-circuit luncheon in New York City seated next to Ridley Scott and across from Matt Damon. The whole point of luncheons like that is to convince members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to give your film an Oscar. It’s all very uncomfortable. Publicists handle the choreography, making sure you meet the right people and sit next to the right people. I was there for Meru, which had come out the summer before. Ridley and Matt were on the campaign trail for The Martian. I already knew Matt because one of his trainers is a close friend of mine. I’d worked out with Matt while he was training for his film Elysium. I’d never met Ridley Scott.

I was intimidated. One of the first movies I’d ever seen was Alien — back in the early eighties, when I was about 10 years old and hanging out at my friend Chris’s house in Mankato. We watched Alien together and it blew my mind. I wasn’t thinking about who was directing the movie, and I certainly didn’t know who Ridley Scott was. All I could think about was the alien exploding out of John Hurt’s chest. Years later, when I was an undergraduate at Carleton, I took a film class and we all joined the professor to go see Blade Runner (The Director’s Cut) at a theater in Minneapolis. When I put two and two together and realized that this guy named Ridley Scott had directed both, he suddenly became an icon in my mind. By the time I found myself next to him at that awards-campaign luncheon, I knew that his body of work was vast and brilliant, packed with other timeless titles like Thelma & Louise, Black Hawk Down, Hannibal, Gladiator, Prometheus, Robin Hood — and thirty other unforgettable features. Ridley Scott was that rarest of beasts in Hollywood, a guy who could make one riveting blockbuster after another while maintaining absolute creative integrity. Nobody else had a body of work that large in which every frame was handmade. Sitting next to him, the question I had was not what he knew. It was how he had stayed in motion at that level for this long.

I barely spoke to Ridley at that luncheon; I was too scared. A few years later, when I started making Nyad, I found myself thinking about Ridley because of the sheer number of decisions that a director has to make every day during production, from which framed picture you want hanging on one wall of one room on one set — How about this picture? Or this one? Or maybe this one? — to which fifty out of a hundred possible extras should appear on the beach and whether one particular extra should wear the red shirt or the blue shorts. On and on: Every single detail goes through the director. The people running every production department — art, camera, lighting, wardrobe, stunts — are constantly coming to you with options inside of options inside of options. Yes or no? What do you think?

I wound up loving the sheer intensity of directing Nyad. It also drove my admiration for Ridley to a new level. Nyad is a relatively contained story, set entirely in the present day and with only a handful of characters. Compare that to Blade Runner or Alien or Robin Hood, for which the set designs alone were vastly more complicated than anything I’ve ever contemplated; then add the vast landscapes and thousands of extras for Kingdom of Heaven, Black Hawk Down, and Prometheus. In the decade since that lunch, he’s directed seven more features — Alien: Covenant, All the Money in the World, The Last Duel, House of Gucci, Napoleon, Gladiator II and The Dog Stars. Seven films in ten years, in a stretch of life when most directors have long since stopped working.

Years later, while I was working on my new book of interviews with people I admire, I reached out to Ridley. Of all the directors I might have asked to talk to, he was the one I wanted most. To my surprise, he said yes.

“My parents were great,” Ridley said. “There was no strange upbringing. Nothing odd happened. By the end of the war, my father was an acting brigadier general dealing with D-Day and then with the Marshall Plan rebuilding Germany. I spent 1947 on a troop ship in my little overcoat with my name on the label in case I got lost, and my own little gas mask, going down the Rhine to be met by my father’s driver. I was there for five years, from 1947 to 1952. My parents would turn me loose every morning and say, ‘Out you go, be back by five. Don’t kill yourself and don’t die.’ My mom was four foot eleven. She said she was five feet. But Dad was away so often that Mom was the man of the house. Tony Scott, my younger brother, was thirteen or fourteen and already rock climbing on granite when he said to me, one day, ‘Hey, you want to go climbing?’ We hit the Yorkshire Dales on bicycles. We went to this granite tower and Tony says, ‘I’ll go up first.’ So Tony nips up the wet granite with a rope. It’s probably eighty feet, it’ll kill you if you fall. And he lobs the rope over the top in the fog, so I can’t see him, and he says, ‘Ready? I’ve got you, up you come.’ I struggled up about fifty feet. Then I said, ‘My arms are giving out!’ He said, ‘You’re using too much arm! You got to use balance.’ I peeled off and swung like a dead spider on a rope. My fourteen-year-old brother saved my life.

“My mother taught me to be relentless, too. If you do what we do for a living” — make movies — “you better be relentless. You better not take no for an answer. Deal with life as it comes at you. I’ve just spent months working on a project and then the studio suddenly said, ‘It’s not the right time.’ I said, ‘What?’ So I will now bypass them and take it somewhere else. That’s the job. And very parallel to the importance of being relentless is a cool assessment of what you’re going to do.”

Ridley went to school in the 1950s at the Royal College of Art in London, where one of his classmates was the young David Hockney. After college, Ridley designed sets for the BBC and directed television commercials. He says he made more than two thousand commercials before he was done, and he credits that commercial work for his later success. Art school taught him what he wanted to say; commercials taught him how to make an audience listen.

The film I most wanted to ask Ridley about was Black Hawk Down. I’ve watched it twenty-five times. I should have probably asked about Blade Runner, Alien, or Gladiator, too, but I love Black Hawk Down. I’d always wondered how Ridley shot it, how he made everything feel so visceral. He somehow put you simultaneously inside and outside the action and maintained continuity through it all. The cameras seemed to be everywhere all at once.

When I asked him how he came to make it, Ridley said, “My best friend, the person I’ve known the longest in Hollywood, is Jerry Bruckheimer. When Jerry was an advertising-agency producer doing commercials, I’d just finished shooting one with him in San Francisco and we were driving to the airport and he said, ‘I’m going to get out of this business. I’m going to go into the movies.’ I said, ‘Yeah, sure.’ Then he did four movies with my brother, Tony Scott — Top Gun, Beverly Hills Cop II, Days of Thunder and Crimson Tide. Somehow the films Jerry was doing were not for me, I wasn’t interested, but then he came to me with Black Hawk Down and I said, ‘OK, I’ll do this.’ The story covered a simultaneous eighteen-hour action” — the Battle of Mogadishu, involving 160 U.S. soldiers in multiple helicopters and ground vehicles across an entire city — “so it took a lot of sorting out visually.”

Ridley told me this came out of something he had learned by shooting all those commercials: how to have multiple cameras shooting at once from different angles without any of those cameras appearing in any other camera’s shot. For Black Hawk Down, Ridley decided that he would, in essence, stage the entire sprawling Battle of Mogadishu, with all its moving parts, as a series of simultaneous actions, and have eleven camera units capturing everything together. “Simultaneous insanity,” he called it. “But it meant that I could crosscut between all these simultaneous events — from when the Black Hawk helicopters come into base, take off again; cut to the High Street, helicopters passing over, scattering chocolates; Night Hawk helicopters coming into base, landing, taking off; guys running into the building. Cut. That’s one take of eleven cameras but it gets every component of the action and lets me cut it all together.”

I could not imagine running a production that complex, much less walking into a financing meeting and saying, “Oh, and by the way, for my next movie, I’m going to need eleven cameras and eleven camera crews.”

Ridley wasn’t having it. “Shooting with eleven cameras simultaneously makes it cheaper,” he said. “Because it takes fewer than half as many days. That allowed me to shoot Napoleon in 42 days instead of 130. Gladiator II in 47 days instead of 120.”

When I was out raising money for Nyad, I kept running into the classic concern about anyone making the jump from directing documentaries to directing narrative — I’d never worked with actors before. People knew I could tell a story, that I knew how to frame a shot and move people through it, and that I had my own personal visual language. But still: Will he be able to get the best performance out of the actors?

Intuition told me it wouldn’t be so different from working with elite athletes, which I’d done for years. Once we got the financing to make Nyad with Annette Bening and Jodie Foster, I reached out for advice from the handful of actors I knew. They all said the same thing: “The biggest tell of a first-time director is that they won’t stop directing.” An inexperienced director is constantly saying things to the actors like “I want you to feel this, or really bring out that sense of conflict between you and her.” In other words, a first-time director just can’t shut up. One friend after another told me, “If you do that, you will lose your actors, you will likely lose everybody on set too because they will all feel it and you probably won’t make your day.”

Ridley mostly affirmed what I’d heard from friends.

“Actors don’t want the history of life between every fucking take. They want ‘faster,’ ‘slower,’ or ‘louder.’ So, ‘Jodie! Faster!’ Because an actor at that level has already thought about what they’re going to do. So my biggest compliment to an actor might be, ‘Wow, where the fuck did that come from?’ And they’ll say, ‘What, you don’t like it?’ And I’ll say, ‘No, I love it! That’s me being blown away! You got it! Want to go again?’ And when they reply, ‘No,’ I say, ‘Exactly.'”

Ridley made it clear that, to his way of thinking, this level of trust has to apply to every member of a team — any team, trying to accomplish anything extraordinary.

“You can’t do shit by yourself. You need help, and the better I get at my trade, the better the people helping me need to be so that we can all go to the next level together. You cannot do what I do without a handpicked team. Even the final stuff like editing is an art form. It’s the final rewrite. I pick my team little by little. You find out who works well with you, and cameramen who don’t mind if I position the cameras, who won’t get pissed off.”

“My unit on Napoleon was twelve hundred personnel. It’s a fucking town. Two hundred horses, five hundred extras. There’s wardrobe, makeup. One morning, I got there and they told me, ‘Joaquin [Phoenix, who played Napoleon] is in the trailer and won’t come out.’ I found him and said, ‘What’s up?’ Joaquin said, ‘Who’s all this for?’ I said, ‘It’s for you dude.’ He went, ‘Oh God,’ and then he passed out. Or take Gladiator II. We built the Roman Colosseum full scale. Paul Mescal comes on and looks around at this gigantic set with hundreds of extras and I get out in front of it. I said, ‘Forget it. It’s only a fucking set.’ I will not let him dwell in terror.”

Ridley talks a lot about decisiveness: faster, alone, less consultation with others. “As a director,” he told me, “I always have everything planned, but even now I might show up in the morning with a new thought. Another direction. You have to listen to yourself and then just say, to everyone else, ‘This is where we’re going, no questions.’ Once you’re driving the car and doing 205 miles per hour, you can’t take advice. But watch out, too. Do not lose your temper. I’ve got a real fucking temper, and I learned to rein it in pretty early. Kicking doors and punching walls doesn’t work because people don’t respect it and it makes them nervous, so they won’t perform properly. You have to be calm, ideally humorous, and always determined and sure of yourself and your vision. If you’re sure, they’re not going to question it. I worked with a very good actor recently. He said, ‘How are you so sure?’ I said, ‘I’m not.’ You gotta hide your fear.

“There’s only one critic. Yourself. It’s a bit like being a painter. Do not listen to the fucking tutor. You’re on your own with the canvas. You make the assessment, you make the decision. Blade Runner got torn apart by Pauline Kael in The New Yorker. I’d never even met her, and her article was so destructive. But now I have those four pages framed and hung on the wall so I’ll never forget: ‘Don’t listen to anybody, just yourself.'”

“The thing that’s taken me the longest to learn is, ‘Make your mind up faster.’

Ridley said that, after the production of Alien, his eldest brother, Frank, got a terminal diagnosis of melanoma. “That damaged me quite heavily. While he was dying, I was working on an adaptation of Dune. I prepped it with the company, and we were going to shoot in Mexico City, and I went to Mexico City and said, ‘I don’t want to spend the next ten months here.’ I went back and stayed with my brother. So I had a big gap before the next movie. It took me too long to decide what to make next.”

Five years elapsed before Ridley made his next film, Blade Runner. After that, though, his pace accelerated — and he has now made twenty-nine features. “Just make the movie,” he said. “Don’t overthink it. If you like it, do it. And then, ‘Next.’ And, ‘Next.’ You’re not going to make the meaning of life. I mean, you might eventually, but you’ll only do that when you climb to it.”

I told Ridley that part of my motivation for working on this book was turning fifty and looking at life’s back half. So he had advice for me there, too.

“Early on,” he said, “my idea of success was an E-Type Jaguar, but now I drive a Prius that I’ve had for ten years. People say, ‘What’s the matter, you bankrupt?’ I say, ‘No, I’m trying to save the world.’ Less is more. You can get your Rolls-Royce and your Porsche and your Land Rover, and then you stare at them in your garage and think, ‘Why have I got three cars?’ Once that thought hits you, you get sensible. But if it never hits you, then you carry on being an idiot.”

I told Ridley this was a climber’s mentality.

Ridley said, “I think of a climb in terms of a beginning, middle, and end. There’s a parallel there with life. You tend not to think about the end. I’m 88 now, and I tend not to ever think about what happens next. I really don’t dwell on it, and I just consider my good fortune about being healthy in full mind and body. That’s an incredible stroke of luck. So I just carry on with that, see how long it’ll take me. At the same time, though, it’s a bit like a climb: The nearer you get to the top is really when you got to watch that you don’t get careless.

Alex Honnold visualizes every move on El Cap before he ever leaves the ground. Ridley does the same thing on paper.

On a final note, I once asked Ridley what he knows now that he wished he’d known as a younger man. His reply stuck with me: “Nothing. I did OK. Just never forget the steps you took. It’s called experience. Little by little, you’re making decisions intuitively. Everything I do now is intuitive — even controlling my anger on my way into a meeting that’s going to be stupid. I once kicked a wall in a trailer. My foot went through the wall and I fell on the carpet. I lay there, incredibly embarrassed. I’ll never do that again.”

From Rules to Live By: How Extraordinary Lives Define What Really Matters by Jimmy Chin Copyright © 2026 by the author and reprinted by permission of Celadon Books.