We’ve seen seasoned filmmakers weigh in on superhero/comic book films with Denis Villeneuve and Martin Scorsese, expressing how they’re not exactly for them for various reasons. British director Ridley Scott (“House of Gucci,” “The Last Duel“) hasn’t been shy about sharing his thoughts about superhero movies either, despite trying to make a feature adaptation of the comic book “Queen & Country“ for 20th Century Studios.
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In a new interview with Deadline, Scott pin-points his main gripe with those kinds of films. His rant starts unprompted when he’s talking about his upcoming “Kitbag” Napoleon project and talking about Stanely Kubrick‘s unmade “Napolean” film. “Almost always, the best films are driven by the characters, and we’ll come to superheroes after this if you want because I’ll crush it. I’ll fucking crush it. They’re fucking boring as shit.”
“Their scripts are not any fucking good,” Scott continued when asked what specifically he didn’t like about superhero films. “I think I’ve done three great scripted superhero movies. One would be ‘Alien‘ with Sigourney Weaver. One would be fucking ‘Gladiator,’ and one would be Harrison Ford,” he said, alluding to ‘Blade Runner.”
Scott continued to express his displeasure with superhero films, “They’re superhero movies. So, why don’t superhero movies have better stories? Sorry. I got off the rail, but I mean, c’mon. They’re mostly saved by special effects, and that’s becoming boring for everyone who works with special effects if you’ve got the money.”
So obviously, don’t approach Scott for a Marvel or DC movie anytime soon. However, there is a genre Scott would like to tackle on his bucket list, a Western, and the director shared his love for “Rawhide” to Clint Eastwood, who forgot he was even in the Western series.
“Oh, my God, I’d love to do a Western,” Scott excitedly told Deadline. When pressed if he had any westerns in mind, Scott cites films such as “Dances With Wolves” and “Jeremiah Johnson,” both featuring a rugged setting in nature and would want to explore the plight of Indigenous populations.
“There’s a couple of Westerns that circle the wagons,” he explained. “I think Kevin Costner had the right thing going where he wanted to respect what has happened to the Native Americans. I’d like to go down that route because the western should be about the wilderness. I love the wilderness, going that far back. ‘Jeremiah Johnson’ was another I’ve watched several times with Robert Redford. That was a story of evolution, how a man comes in to try and make his way in an unforgiving territory, and fundamentally, people who didn’t quite understand why they were there. But they weren’t bad people. You’ve got to sort that out. Who did what to who, and it’s a massive case of xenophobia, right?”
Going back to 2004, Ridley Scott had attempted to adapt Cormac McCarthy‘s 1985 western novel “Blood Meridian” with screenwriter William Monahan (“Kingdom of Heaven,” “Body of Lies”) at Paramount Pictures. “Blood Merdian” is a brutally violent western that was once considered “unfilmable” and remains unproduced despite multiple filmmakers hoping to make it. Scott and McCarthy would later work together on the 2013 cartel thriller “The Counsellor” that starred Michael Fassbender.
We’ll have to wait to see if Scott will ultimately tackle a western in the future.