You’ve got to hand it to Ridley Scott, he’s 87 and has a bunch of projects in development, many of which I presume will never see the light of day. The man believes he’ll live until 120.
Here’s a really interesting interview with Scott via Dazed Digital. You get the usual Scott praising himself (“I was born with a good eye”). He just finished “The Dog Stars,” shot in only 34 days with Erik Messerschmidt behind the camera. “It’s the speed of a TV show but maybe my best movie,” he says.
He does mention a new project which we didn’t know about. A World War I adaptation of John Harris’s “Covenant with Death,” a novel he has cherished for half a century. “It’s a marvellous narrative that I’ve never seen before in a war film. It’s funny and class-conscious, because you’ve got miners mixing with middle-class men. You discover: one guy dies, just like anybody else.”
And he isn’t slowing down. “Gladiator III” is already at the “conference room” stage. He is pushing for a ‘Bee Gees’ biopic, followed by a western titled “Freewalkers.”
Scott also has what he calls a “pirate movie” he wants to get going, starring Jacob Elordi.
The most intriguing out of these 7 or 8 projects is the western he’s been hinting about, written in 1980 by a mysterious screenwriter whom he says passed away during covid. He wants to shoot it next year.
All this, and Scott still has other projects percolating in development, including “Bomb,” and “Battle of Britain,” the Wall Street thriller “Big Dogs” and the spy movie “Queen & Country.”The man is a machine.
In total, that’s nine projects that Scott is currently working on. He’s obviously not going to be directing all of these films, unless he’s still healthy and active at 120 years old, but there’s definitely a lot of work ahead for Scott.