{"id":624573,"date":"2026-09-14T17:36:12","date_gmt":"2026-09-14T17:36:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/624573\/"},"modified":"2026-09-14T17:36:12","modified_gmt":"2026-09-14T17:36:12","slug":"ridley-scott-tells-jimmy-chin-dont-listen-to-anybody","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/624573\/","title":{"rendered":"Ridley Scott Tells Jimmy Chin: ‘Don’t Listen to Anybody’"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tIn climbing, we have a word for talking up your own accomplishments \u2014 spraying. You\u2019re not supposed to do it. The rule makes things awkward for someone promoting a documentary about climbing, which is what I was doing in early 2016. But that\u2019s how I wound up at an awards-circuit luncheon in New York City seated next to Ridley Scott<\/a> and across from Matt Damon. The whole point of luncheons like that is to convince members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to give your film an Oscar. It\u2019s all very uncomfortable. Publicists handle the choreography, making sure you meet the right people and sit next to the right people. I was there for Meru, which had come out the summer before. Ridley and Matt were on the campaign trail for The Martian. I already knew Matt because one of his trainers is a close friend of mine. I\u2019d worked out with Matt while he was training for his film Elysium. I\u2019d never met Ridley Scott.<\/p>\n

\n\tI was intimidated. One of the first movies I\u2019d ever seen was Alien \u2014 back in the early eighties, when I was about 10 years old and hanging out at my friend Chris\u2019s house in Mankato. We watched Alien together and it blew my mind. I wasn\u2019t thinking about who was directing the movie, and I certainly didn\u2019t know who Ridley Scott was. All I could think about was the alien exploding out of John Hurt\u2019s chest. Years later, when I was an undergraduate at Carleton, I took a film class and we all joined the professor to go see Blade Runner (The Director\u2019s Cut) at a theater in Minneapolis. When I put two and two together and realized that this guy named Ridley Scott had directed both, he suddenly became an icon in my mind. By the time I found myself next to him at that awards-campaign luncheon, I knew that his body of work was vast and brilliant, packed with other timeless titles like Thelma & Louise, Black Hawk Down, Hannibal, Gladiator, Prometheus, Robin Hood \u2014 and thirty other unforgettable features. Ridley Scott was that rarest of beasts in Hollywood, a guy who could make one riveting blockbuster after another while maintaining absolute creative integrity. Nobody else had a body of work that large in which every frame was handmade. Sitting next to him, the question I had was not what he knew. It was how he had stayed in motion at that level for this long.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tThis interview is excerpted from \u2018Rules to Live By: How Extraordinary Lives Define What Really Matters<\/a>\u2018 by Jimmy Chin<\/a> (out Sept. 29)<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tCeladon Books<\/p>\n

\n\tI barely spoke to Ridley at that luncheon; I was too scared. A few years later, when I started making Nyad, I found myself thinking about Ridley because of the sheer number of decisions that a director has to make every day during production, from which framed picture you want hanging on one wall of one room on one set \u2014 How about this picture? Or this one? Or maybe this one? \u2014 to which fifty out of a hundred possible extras should appear on the beach and whether one particular extra should wear the red shirt or the blue shorts. On and on: Every single detail goes through the director. The people running every production department \u2014 art, camera, lighting, wardrobe, stunts \u2014 are constantly coming to you with options inside of options inside of options. Yes or no? What do you think?<\/p>\n

\n\tI wound up loving the sheer intensity of directing Nyad. It also drove my admiration for Ridley to a new level. Nyad is a relatively contained story, set entirely in the present day and with only a handful of characters. Compare that to Blade Runner or Alien or Robin Hood, for which the set designs alone were vastly more complicated than anything I\u2019ve ever contemplated; then add the vast landscapes and thousands of extras for Kingdom of Heaven, Black Hawk Down, and Prometheus. In the decade since that lunch, he\u2019s directed seven more features \u2014 Alien: Covenant, All the Money in the World, The Last Duel, House of Gucci, Napoleon, Gladiator II and The Dog Stars. Seven films in ten years, in a stretch of life when most directors have long since stopped working.<\/p>\n

\n\tYears later, while I was working on my new book of interviews with people I admire, I reached out to Ridley. Of all the directors I might have asked to talk to, he was the one I wanted most. To my surprise, he said yes.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cMy parents were great,\u201d Ridley said. \u201cThere was no strange upbringing. Nothing odd happened. By the end of the war, my father was an acting brigadier general dealing with D-Day and then with the Marshall Plan rebuilding Germany. I spent 1947 on a troop ship in my little overcoat with my name on the label in case I got lost, and my own little gas mask, going down the Rhine to be met by my father\u2019s driver. I was there for five years, from 1947 to 1952. My parents would turn me loose every morning and say, \u2018Out you go, be back by five. Don\u2019t kill yourself and don\u2019t die.\u2019 My mom was four foot eleven. She said she was five feet. But Dad was away so often that Mom was the man of the house. Tony Scott, my younger brother, was thirteen or fourteen and already rock climbing on granite when he said to me, one day, \u2018Hey, you want to go climbing?\u2019 We hit the Yorkshire Dales on bicycles. We went to this granite tower and Tony says, \u2018I\u2019ll go up first.\u2019 So Tony nips up the wet granite with a rope. It\u2019s probably eighty feet, it\u2019ll kill you if you fall. And he lobs the rope over the top in the fog, so I can\u2019t see him, and he says, \u2018Ready? I\u2019ve got you, up you come.\u2019 I struggled up about fifty feet. Then I said, \u2018My arms are giving out!\u2019 He said, \u2018You\u2019re using too much arm! You got to use balance.\u2019 I peeled off and swung like a dead spider on a rope. My fourteen-year-old brother saved my life.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cMy mother taught me to be relentless, too. If you do what we do for a living\u201d \u2014 make movies \u2014 \u201cyou better be relentless. You better not take no for an answer. Deal with life as it comes at you. I\u2019ve just spent months working on a project and then the studio suddenly said, \u2018It\u2019s not the right time.\u2019 I said, \u2018What?\u2019 So I will now bypass them and take it somewhere else. That\u2019s the job. And very parallel to the importance of being relentless is a cool assessment of what you\u2019re going to do.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\t***<\/p>\n

\n\tRidley went to school in the 1950s at the Royal College of Art in London, where one of his classmates was the young David Hockney. After college, Ridley designed sets for the BBC and directed television commercials. He says he made more than two thousand commercials before he was done, and he credits that commercial work for his later success. Art school taught him what he wanted to say; commercials taught him how to make an audience listen.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe film I most wanted to ask Ridley about was Black Hawk Down. I\u2019ve watched it twenty-five times. I should have probably asked about Blade Runner, Alien, or Gladiator, too, but I love Black Hawk Down. I\u2019d always wondered how Ridley shot it, how he made everything feel so visceral. He somehow put you simultaneously inside and outside the action and maintained continuity through it all. The cameras seemed to be everywhere all at once.<\/p>\n

\n\tWhen I asked him how he came to make it, Ridley said, \u201cMy best friend, the person I\u2019ve known the longest in Hollywood, is Jerry Bruckheimer. When Jerry was an advertising-agency producer doing commercials, I\u2019d just finished shooting one with him in San Francisco and we were driving to the airport and he said, \u2018I\u2019m going to get out of this business. I\u2019m going to go into the movies.\u2019 I said, \u2018Yeah, sure.\u2019 Then he did four movies with my brother, Tony Scott \u2014 Top Gun, Beverly Hills Cop II, Days of Thunder and Crimson Tide. Somehow the films Jerry was doing were not for me, I wasn\u2019t interested, but then he came to me with Black Hawk Down and I said, \u2018OK, I\u2019ll do this.\u2019 The story covered a simultaneous eighteen-hour action\u201d \u2014 the Battle of Mogadishu, involving 160 U.S. soldiers in multiple helicopters and ground vehicles across an entire city \u2014 \u201cso it took a lot of sorting out visually.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tRidley told me this came out of something he had learned by shooting all those commercials: how to have multiple cameras shooting at once from different angles without any of those cameras appearing in any other camera\u2019s shot. For Black Hawk Down, Ridley decided that he would, in essence, stage the entire sprawling Battle of Mogadishu, with all its moving parts, as a series of simultaneous actions, and have eleven camera units capturing everything together. \u201cSimultaneous insanity,\u201d he called it. \u201cBut it meant that I could crosscut between all these simultaneous events \u2014 from when the Black Hawk helicopters come into base, take off again; cut to the High Street, helicopters passing over, scattering chocolates; Night Hawk helicopters coming into base, landing, taking off; guys running into the building. Cut. That\u2019s one take of eleven cameras but it gets every component of the action and lets me cut it all together.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tI could not imagine running a production that complex, much less walking into a financing meeting and saying, \u201cOh, and by the way, for my next movie, I\u2019m going to need eleven cameras and eleven camera crews.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tRidley wasn\u2019t having it. \u201cShooting with eleven cameras simultaneously makes it cheaper,\u201d he said. \u201cBecause it takes fewer than half as many days. That allowed me to shoot Napoleon in 42 days instead of 130. Gladiator II in 47 days instead of 120.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\t***<\/p>\n

\n\tWhen I was out raising money for Nyad, I kept running into the classic concern about anyone making the jump from directing documentaries to directing narrative \u2014 I\u2019d never worked with actors before. People knew I could tell a story, that I knew how to frame a shot and move people through it, and that I had my own personal visual language. But still: Will he be able to get the best performance out of the actors?<\/p>\n

\n\tIntuition told me it wouldn\u2019t be so different from working with elite athletes, which I\u2019d done for years. Once we got the financing to make Nyad with Annette Bening and Jodie Foster, I reached out for advice from the handful of actors I knew. They all said the same thing: \u201cThe biggest tell of a first-time director is that they won\u2019t stop directing.\u201d An inexperienced director is constantly saying things to the actors like \u201cI want you to feel this, or really bring out that sense of conflict between you and her.\u201d In other words, a first-time director just can\u2019t shut up. One friend after another told me, \u201cIf you do that, you will lose your actors, you will likely lose everybody on set too because they will all feel it and you probably won\u2019t make your day.\u201d<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tDirector Jimmy Chin, far right, on the set of Nyad in 2023. From left: Karly Rothenberg, director Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi, Annette Bening, Jodie Foster, Diana Nyad, Bonnie Stoll, Rhys Ifans.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tKimberley French\/Netflix\/Courtesy Everett Collection<\/p>\n

\n\tRidley mostly affirmed what I\u2019d heard from friends.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cActors don\u2019t want the history of life between every fucking take. They want \u2018faster,\u2019 \u2018slower,\u2019 or \u2018louder.\u2019 So, \u2018Jodie! Faster!\u2019 Because an actor at that level has already thought about what they\u2019re going to do. So my biggest compliment to an actor might be, \u2018Wow, where the fuck did that come from?\u2019 And they\u2019ll say, \u2018What, you don\u2019t like it?\u2019 And I\u2019ll say, \u2018No, I love it! That\u2019s me being blown away! You got it! Want to go again?\u2019 And when they reply, \u2018No,\u2019 I say, \u2018Exactly.’\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tRidley made it clear that, to his way of thinking, this level of trust has to apply to every member of a team \u2014 any team, trying to accomplish anything extraordinary.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cYou can\u2019t do shit by yourself. You need help, and the better I get at my trade, the better the people helping me need to be so that we can all go to the next level together. You cannot do what I do without a handpicked team. Even the final stuff like editing is an art form. It\u2019s the final rewrite. I pick my team little by little. You find out who works well with you, and cameramen who don\u2019t mind if I position the cameras, who won\u2019t get pissed off.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cMy unit on Napoleon was twelve hundred personnel. It\u2019s a fucking town. Two hundred horses, five hundred extras. There\u2019s wardrobe, makeup. One morning, I got there and they told me, \u2018Joaquin [Phoenix, who played Napoleon] is in the trailer and won\u2019t come out.\u2019 I found him and said, \u2018What\u2019s up?\u2019 Joaquin said, \u2018Who\u2019s all this for?\u2019 I said, \u2018It\u2019s for you dude.\u2019 He went, \u2018Oh God,\u2019 and then he passed out. Or take Gladiator II. We built the Roman Colosseum full scale. Paul Mescal comes on and looks around at this gigantic set with hundreds of extras and I get out in front of it. I said, \u2018Forget it. It\u2019s only a fucking set.\u2019 I will not let him dwell in terror.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tRidley talks a lot about decisiveness: faster, alone, less consultation with others. \u201cAs a director,\u201d he told me, \u201cI always have everything planned, but even now I might show up in the morning with a new thought. Another direction. You have to listen to yourself and then just say, to everyone else, \u2018This is where we\u2019re going, no questions.\u2019 Once you\u2019re driving the car and doing 205 miles per hour, you can\u2019t take advice. But watch out, too. Do not lose your temper. I\u2019ve got a real fucking temper, and I learned to rein it in pretty early. Kicking doors and punching walls doesn\u2019t work because people don\u2019t respect it and it makes them nervous, so they won\u2019t perform properly. You have to be calm, ideally humorous, and always determined and sure of yourself and your vision. If you\u2019re sure, they\u2019re not going to question it. I worked with a very good actor recently. He said, \u2018How are you so sure?\u2019 I said, \u2018I\u2019m not.\u2019 You gotta hide your fear.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThere\u2019s only one critic. Yourself. It\u2019s a bit like being a painter. Do not listen to the fucking tutor. You\u2019re on your own with the canvas. You make the assessment, you make the decision. Blade Runner got torn apart by Pauline Kael in The New Yorker. I\u2019d never even met her, and her article was so destructive. But now I have those four pages framed and hung on the wall so I\u2019ll never forget: \u2018Don\u2019t listen to anybody, just yourself.’\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThe thing that\u2019s taken me the longest to learn is, \u2018Make your mind up faster.\u2019<\/p>\n

\n\tRidley said that, after the production of Alien, his eldest brother, Frank, got a terminal diagnosis of melanoma. \u201cThat damaged me quite heavily. While he was dying, I was working on an adaptation of Dune. I prepped it with the company, and we were going to shoot in Mexico City, and I went to Mexico City and said, \u2018I don\u2019t want to spend the next ten months here.\u2019 I went back and stayed with my brother. So I had a big gap before the next movie. It took me too long to decide what to make next.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tFive years elapsed before Ridley made his next film, Blade Runner. After that, though, his pace accelerated \u2014 and he has now made twenty-nine features. \u201cJust make the movie,\u201d he said. \u201cDon\u2019t overthink it. If you like it, do it. And then, \u2018Next.\u2019 And, \u2018Next.\u2019 You\u2019re not going to make the meaning of life. I mean, you might eventually, but you\u2019ll only do that when you climb to it.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\t***<\/p>\n

\n\tI told Ridley that part of my motivation for working on this book was turning fifty and looking at life\u2019s back half. So he had advice for me there, too.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cEarly on,\u201d he said, \u201cmy idea of success was an E-Type Jaguar, but now I drive a Prius that I\u2019ve had for ten years. People say, \u2018What\u2019s the matter, you bankrupt?\u2019 I say, \u2018No, I\u2019m trying to save the world.\u2019 Less is more. You can get your Rolls-Royce and your Porsche and your Land Rover, and then you stare at them in your garage and think, \u2018Why have I got three cars?\u2019 Once that thought hits you, you get sensible. But if it never hits you, then you carry on being an idiot.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tI told Ridley this was a climber\u2019s mentality.<\/p>\n

\n\tRidley said, \u201cI think of a climb in terms of a beginning, middle, and end. There\u2019s a parallel there with life. You tend not to think about the end. I\u2019m 88 now, and I tend not to ever think about what happens next. I really don\u2019t dwell on it, and I just consider my good fortune about being healthy in full mind and body. That\u2019s an incredible stroke of luck. So I just carry on with that, see how long it\u2019ll take me. At the same time, though, it\u2019s a bit like a climb: The nearer you get to the top is really when you got to watch that you don\u2019t get careless.<\/p>\n

\n\tAlex Honnold visualizes every move on El Cap before he ever leaves the ground. Ridley does the same thing on paper.<\/p>\n

\n\tOn a final note, I once asked Ridley what he knows now that he wished he\u2019d known as a younger man. His reply stuck with me: \u201cNothing. I did OK. Just never forget the steps you took. It\u2019s called experience. Little by little, you\u2019re making decisions intuitively. Everything I do now is intuitive \u2014 even controlling my anger on my way into a meeting that\u2019s going to be stupid. I once kicked a wall in a trailer. My foot went through the wall and I fell on the carpet. I lay there, incredibly embarrassed. I\u2019ll never do that again.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tFrom Rules to Live By: How Extraordinary Lives Define What Really Matters<\/a> by Jimmy Chin Copyright \u00a9 2026 by the author and reprinted by permission of Celadon Books.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In climbing, we have a word for talking up your own accomplishments \u2014 spraying. You\u2019re not supposed to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":624574,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[321,93,61,60,17334,102708],"class_list":["post-624573","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-celebrities","tag-entertainment","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-jimmy-chin","tag-ridley-scott"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/624573","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=624573"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/624573\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/624574"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=624573"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=624573"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=624573"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}