By James Mottram
To come later in the year is murder-mystery House of Gucci, before he begins shooting Kitbag, about Napoleon, and then a sequel to his Oscar winning Gladiator.
For The Last Duel, he reunites Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, who not only star but also co-wrote the script, along with Nicole Holofcener.
Set in the late 1300s, in medieval France, it centres on the rape of Marguerite de Carrouges (Jodie Comer) by Jacques le Gris (Adam Driver). Her husband Jean de Carrouges (Damon) challenges Le Gris to a dual, a battle overseen by the rakish Count Pierre d’Alençon (Affleck).
With the story shown from three distinct perspectives, it draws inevitable comparisons to Akira Kurosawa’s Rashamon, a film that Scott has been clearly influenced by – perhaps even more than his own 1977 debut The Duellists.
FilmInk joined Scott and Comer to find out more.
Did you get any inspiration from Rashomon to make this movie?
RIDLEY SCOTT: Without question. Matt Damon, who called me up and said, ‘Do you want to do this film?’ and briefly described the film, which is fundamentally about the dual and why. He said, ‘But what’s interesting is… we think it’s most valuable to see the actual event that the dual causes.’ Of course, that was a Rashamon idea, which is discussed from three different points of view, in broad strokes, not in detail. Just in principle, to see it from three different points of view. Sounded to me like a great idea. Which it was. The most important context, and point of view, is clearly from Marguerite. And then I think the next one is from her husband, who simply tends to believe that she was adulterous. And which is another attitude of the time. Then lastly, of course, the man who committed the act, who believes he did no wrong. So right there, you got three very big questions.
How much is historical accuracy of importance to you?
RIDLEY SCOTT: What I’ve discovered… you read a version of history, and you read about the 19th version of a story written over the last three or four hundred years. So, the changes that must have occurred tend to be… I want to believe they’re accurate, but I also know that they’re not. So, you have to look at the story, look at the context, then decide what may have happened. The rest – wardrobe, costume, horses, that’s easy. Of course, we make them as accurate as possible. The one thing that is not accurate is because I knew that two men are going to have to be on horseback, jousting. When you do that, you can’t see anything. This is designed for a head on collision. Once you’re off the horse and you’re on foot, it’s very dangerous, because you can’t see him. So, I cut the visors in half. And the historian said: ‘That wouldn’t have been.’ I said, ‘Well, it is now.’ And I think it looked great. First of all, I can see it’s Matt on the horse and doing his thing. But when he’s on the ground, he can turn and see. So that’s where practicality kicks into what may be slightly inaccurate.
You are known for working incredibly fast. Is that simply down to the fact that time is money? Or is there also a level of impatience in the process? And Jodie, how does that affect your acting?
JODIE COMER: I mean, you become completely spoiled when you work on a set with Ridley. He can have four or five cameras rolling at any given moment, which actually forces everyone to be really on the ball and really focus and it also means, especially doing a piece like this, which does have a lot of heavy material and emotional material… it means that you’re not doing it for eight hours a day. You can come at a scene, and you can shoot what you need within three takes and Ridley’s got everything that he needs, and you can be happy with what you’ve given. So, you become very spoiled. It was such an incredible experience. And I’m really, really grateful for it.
RIDLEY SCOTT: I discovered after about ten years of working: actors don’t want to do 38 takes. They want to do two or three, and if it’s getting hard, maybe five or six. But, I noticed they nearly always get it in either take one or two. And so, I tended to start pushing for that, because any actor is a virtuoso of who they are. And so, if I feel I’ve got it, my first question will be, ‘Are you happy? You want to move on?’ If they want to go again, they go again. But normally, they think about it and go, ‘No, I think I’ve got it’. Always let them decide at that point.
Could you talk about your approach to casting?
RIDLEY SCOTT: Casting is intuitive. I have to cast everything. I didn’t cast Ben and Matt, they cast me. So, once I’m on that, they expect me to do my job. Casting to me is… when I meet an actor, I frequently don’t talk about the film. I don’t even get them to read the part. I talk to them. I want to know how inventive they are, and how at ease they are, because I want to see how they think. That’s why it was entirely artificial, to read in a room with an actor. They’re trying to do their best, they’re not loving the space. And I think once you’re on the floor, that’s where it’s really happening. And I want to see them evolve.
How much did Matt and Ben change the script as you went along? And does it change the process, working with actor-writers?
RIDLEY SCOTT: I was very respectful of what they’d written. And so, I stuck with that. Because the script was so specific, and so good, there’s no reason to change it. The key is to be very clear about what you want, how you want it to be. If you waffle, that’s where it goes haywire. But no, my respect for the material was so good, I didn’t have to change anything.
Jodie, how did you work with the character and show her inner world without revealing too much?
JODIE COMER: Hopefully, people experience it and witness her a little bit more in her own story. What I always enjoyed was seeing how she takes the control of her home when he’s not there. And the freedom that she finds in being able to do what she wants and have her own sense of agency. It was so exciting for me to be able to give this woman a voice because there was so little written about her. I really had to lean into the other perspectives and that was a huge part of my task – making sure that the audience believed in Le Gris and Carrouges’ stories when I was in them. I was a different version of self when playing in those scenes with them, which made it all the more important to make sure that when we were doing Marguerite’s take that we really felt that we’ve got what we wanted to portray.
There are more female-driven stories now. Is there also a reparation in these stories for the recent past? Is there a sense of guilt in the industry?
JODIE COMER: Hopefully it provokes conversation. I think these subject matters are difficult and you have a duty of care when you’re handling them. But I think it’s all the more reason that we shouldn’t shy away from them. It’s important to kind of hold a mirror up and people will take from it what they will, and give them the experiences that they’ve personally had themselves.
What do you think about this fight between streaming and the big screen these days?
RIDLEY SCOTT: Well, it’s horses for courses; some films are better on platforms. But there’s a few films that I think should be supported by being on the large screen because the platform will never give you anything but a large domestic scene at home. It’s not going to be the same thing as seeing it 60 feet across, with full sound, that you can’t possibly reproduce at home. So of course, the film is gonna be more powerful in cinema. It should never go away. It should not be allowed to go away.
What makes you have so many projects in development?
RIDLEY SCOTT: I don’t think about it that way. It’s just ‘Next’ and I just move on. To me, my job is not work, it’s a passion. And so, I never think about it as work. And right now, I start [a film about] Napoleon in January, and I’m already writing Gladiator 2 for the end of next year. That’s how we work. We tend to work 18 months ahead. Otherwise, you have these horrible gaps. You finish the movie, and if you haven’t thought what else you gonna do next? You’re hoping something good’s gonna land on your desk. It never does.
Would you have any more desire to go back to the Alien franchise?
RIDLEY SCOTT: We did, we tried to resurrect it…with Prometheus, and we did it, it did good. But at the end of it, I’d never showed an alien in it. And the studio, at a mere $450 million, said, ‘See, it didn’t do so well!’ Really? And then I came back with Alien: Covenant, try to put the aliens back in there and Covenant didn’t do so well. So, I think when you’ve got a marvelous beast, it does wear out and you have to actually think again, so I don’t know where they’ll go next. We are doing a TV version of Aliens, to see where we go. They’re insatiable, they have to keep it going. It’ll never be as good as the first one I might add. That’s what I’ll say. I was lucky enough to come across H.R. Giger, who came up with something very unique. And that’s why it was so successful. Without that creature, the film wouldn’t have been as successful.
The Last Duel opens on October 21, 2021