| Before Ridley Scott started making feature films, he was a respected maker of British television advertisements. He learned his trade after spending seven years at the West Hartlepool College of Art and the Royal College of Art in London. It was at the latter that he learned how to design sets and the necessary imagery for feature films. He worked in television at first, and then became a prolific and successful advertisement producer in England. His company, Ridley Scott Associates, has been responsible for making many hundreds of high quality television and cinema advertisements. At forty-one, Ridley Scott made The |
despite this success, the general critical reaction to the film left Ridley a little put out. He "wanted to back off the hard-core blood and gore" and that "except for the chest-burster sequence, ALIEN [sic] is almost totally devoid of blood and gore" (Cinefantastique, p. 28). Although Ridley Scott insists that Alien is not a "manipulative" film ("I had deliberately set out not to do that" (Ibid)), he does admit to his background in advertising teaching him how to hook an audience. Claiming that commercial advertising teaches you more things than you learn in film school, he commented that "film schools tend to deal only with very esoteric subjects", and that "people seem to forget that the end result has got to somehow communicate with the audience" (Ibid). After the completion and successful release of Alien, his name had been associated with several other film projects, which never came to fruition, including an adaptation of Frank Herbert's science fiction novel Dune, which was eventually completed by the American director David Lynch, and cinematographer Freddie Francis. Ridley was shown the script for Blade Runner (which had |
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