Ridley Scott

I think one of the successes of Gladiator is how we manage to turn on a dime the character from one thing to another where you believe he is one thing and he is something very different.

There's still a lot of investors wondering what to invest in. And, of course, I think entertainment looks attractive when you read the few films that make these insane amounts of money. What they don't know is they don't always do that.

Alien' is a C film elevated to an A film, honestly, by it being well done and a great monster. If it hadn't had that great monster, even with a wonderful cast, it wouldn't have been as good, I don't think.

I think over time I've learned to stop being a screamer and get interactive; otherwise, you get killed in Hollywood. I stopped being a screamer shortly after 'Blade Runner,' kicking doors and things like that, because I wasn't actually getting anywhere.

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.

Scaring someone's the hardest thing to do, and that's why most of these scary movies are not scary. They're sick, but not scary. There's a lot of sickness out there, of people who then sit there and watch it, which I think is absolutely dismaying.

I think there are a lot of men who feel they're being emasculated by having the woman be in charge; I've never had that problem.

I'm a very practical person.

The very first film I ever saw was a pirate movie called 'The Black Swan' with Tyrone Power. And I thought that was great stuff. Of course, in those days, Technicolor was really Technicolor; there was no such thing as desaturation. Everybody looked super suntanned.

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.

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.

People have no idea how physically tough doing a film is.