Ridley Scott Says Michael Fassbender Will Return For ‘Prometheus 2,’ Plot Will Focus On Engineers

"You can either say, leave the first film alone and jump ahead, but you can’t because it ends on too specific a plot sentence as she says, I want to go where they came from, I don’t want to go back to where I came from. I thought the subtext of that film was a bit florid and grandiose, but it asks a good question: who created us? I don’t think we are here by accident. I find it otherwise hard to believe you and I are sitting here at this table, because the molecular miracles that would have had to occur were in the trillions, since the first sign of human life that crawled out of the mud with four fingers, would bloody well be impossible, unless there was some guidance system. Also, you have the sun approximately the same distance from earth as it is from maybe millions of planets and planetoids that are almost identical distance and therefore enjoy the value of sunlight on their soil. Are you telling me there are no other planets with human life? I simply don’t believe it," Scott pontificated.

"That raises the question to me, same as was depicted in ‘2001’ when that object comes hurtling through space, and lands in Ethiopia," he continued. "And an ape that had been grubbing around in the water hole with all of them bickering at each other, goes up and touches it. He has a bigger thought injected into his brain than Newton got sitting under a tree and seeing an apple fall. Stanley [Kubrick] then picks something metaphorically poetic in its violence, as the ape picks up a hip bone and brains the anteater so they can eat him. That is one gigantic, magnificent leap of a thousand years of evolution; that is where the world begins. It is pretty grand thinking, and that’s what I want to explore. You’ve got to go back and find those engineers and see what they are thinking. If engineers are the forerunners of us, and therefore were creators of life forms in places that were possible for biology to function, who created that? Where’s the big boy? You think this was all an accident? I don’t know. Even Stephen Hawking now says, I am not sure. He no longer believes in the big bang."

It certainly seems the themes have expanded greatly, and it’ll be interesting to see if these movies, which are supposed to be attached to the "Alien" series, will actually do so in any concrete way. As much as I’m a "Prometheus" defender, its ties to Scott’s landmark movie are tenuous at best, at least to me.

Meanwhile, the director also addressed the casting controversy he faced for "Exodus: Gods And Kings" by putting white actors in roles that, for the sake of historical accuracy, probably should’ve been played by a more ethnically diverse ensemble. And he doubled down on his previous comments where he argued that the movie would not have been made without major A-list talent.

"Some have said, isn’t Christ black? He could have been. It depends on what part of North Africa he comes from, but how do we know? The short sharp crude answer is, I couldn’t get a film like that mounted for that kind of budget—we were $145 million, not $260 million, so that wasn’t bad– but to make Moses black and his wife Ethiopian? They never would have made the movie," he said.

That being said, one wonders how much the criticism stung considering "The Martian" is certainly a lot more diverse. That film opens on October 2nd. Watch the final trailer below.