“If You Show Any Doubt, They’ll Eat You Alive”: Ridley Scott, Denis Villeneuve and the Director Roundtable
From tuning out critics to reading every review, from ridiculed first-day rituals to when it’s OK not to collaborate with the crew, the directors of six of this year’s most daring movies each have their own strategies for managing their careers and their sets. On a Sunday afternoon in November, Edward Berger (Conclave), Brady Corbet (The Brutalist), Coralie Fargeat (The Substance), RaMell Ross (Nickel Boys), Ridley Scott (Gladiator II) and Denis Villeneuve (Dune: Part Two) convened for The Hollywood Reporter’s annual Director Roundtable. The filmmakers chopped it up over their wildly different working styles but agreed on at least one thing about cinema: “Time dilates if you do it right.”
Does anybody have a day-one ritual on set, a thing you do when you’re starting out to set the mood?
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BRADY CORBET Have a panic attack.
RAMELL ROSS I tested positive for COVID.
DENIS VILLENEUVE It’s an embarrassing thing, but I love to listen to Fran?ois Truffaut’s music of La Nuit Américaine. It’s an old ritual.
RIDLEY SCOTT Are you serious? That’s really sweet.
VILLENEUVE I know you will laugh at me, Ridley, and I’m really embarrassed. It’s just the fire of cinema. I love that song.
ROSS I don’t know it. Is it fast-paced? What’s the rhythm? What’s the vibe of it?
SCOTT Hum it. Sing it now. Go on.
VILLENEUVE I will not dare.
Coralie, how do you begin?
CORALIE FARGEAT I like to have a little word with everyone starting the journey because I know it’s going to be a tough one. I gather the crew and wish everyone a good shooting.
There’s this idea that a director is always confident and in control. One of the things, Edward, that I like about Conclave is it’s about doubt. Is there room for doubt when you’re a director?
SCOTT Privately. If you show any doubt with an actor, they’ll eat you alive. (Looks at Corbet, who started acting at age 11.) Do you agree? If the director looks a little anxious, does that bother you?
CORBET It’s hard for me to say. I did it at such a young age, and I was working with extraordinary people: Michael Haneke and Lars von Trier. People always ask me how that informed my own process, and it was very demystifying for me because I saw a lot of people I admired very much who were having real crises. And so when I started to face a lot of my own, I didn’t worry about it too much. I don’t think that much about how people perceive me. I am mostly just trying to get it done.
SCOTT But you have to turn up fully prepped here (gestures to his head). If you don’t, then you’re going to be truly anxious. The actor will spot it in a heartbeat.
CORBET Absolutely.
ROSS But you could have doubt and faith.
VILLENEUVE If I have doubt, I can allow myself the space to say to everybody, “Back off,” and just space to think and not be freaked out about that.
SCOTT Do you shout?
VILLENEUVE Very rarely. But if I swear, as a French Canadian, they know that they are in trouble.
ROSS (To Scott) Do you shout?
SCOTT All of this, it gets easier the older you get. Right now I don’t worry about anything. I’m totally relaxed. The film goes like lightning. But you go back 30 years ago, yeah, I would walk in in the morning, be very worried. Talking to actors last is the last thing I learned how to do. I didn’t go to drama school, didn’t go to film school. I was the [production] designer, and one day at the BBC, they said, “Do you want to do a director’s course?” Three weeks later, I was getting scripts saying, “There it is, don’t fuck it up.” I was terrified.
EDWARD BERGER [Doubt] is absolutely fine. I can have it because I’m completely prepared. I have a total plan and theoretically know what I’m doing. Then everything changes because actors come in, weather comes in, and you adapt. Like Denis says, it’s about taking space, and I’ve learned that people really respect that. They say, “Oh great, he has a weakness. Let’s go away for five minutes.” I feel like people want to help you out in a way. I saw this interview with Tom Hanks once where he said that Steven Spielberg comes in the morning and says, “Listen, guys, you’ve got to help me. I don’t know how to do this.” Of course he knows how to do it, but somehow, you bring everyone in and make everyone feel they can do their best work.
Coralie, why was horror the genre you used to tell the story in The Substance?
FARGEAT I wouldn’t call it horror. I would call it more a genre film, which is to me very wide in scope, from sci-fi to action to everything not grounded in reality. I grew up loving films that allowed me to escape real life, which I hated, felt totally unadapted to and very bored by. [Genre] is where I found my freedom and felt powerful and fully capable to express myself in a way where there are no boundaries. I love to go into the excess and craziness. For the movie, it felt totally relevant to make the audience feel that excess and craziness.
ROSS Has anybody made a documentary before? There’s something about the documentary genre that predisposes you to truth. When you watch a doc, you’re like, “I’m encountering truth.” The first film I made, [the doc] Hale County This Morning, This Evening, I tried to situate a certain type of Black aesthetics, a certain type of open poetic image in this space of truth. Because when someone sees this image that’s strategically ambiguous, you don’t really know what’s happening, you’re forced to complete the image with your imagination. Then you go out into the world and see the world with that same ambiguity.
Nickel Boys is shot from the point of view of the characters to the point where the actors are actually wearing cameras, right?
ROSS Maybe 10 percent of the time, the actors are essentially camera operators. The idea is, how do you make the camera an organ, bring it into your body? It’s based on a true story of the Dozier School for Boys, in which boys were just straight-out murdered in North Florida. It closed in 2011; they started to exhume bodies in 2013. The idea is to give life to those who lost theirs by allowing us to vicariously see from their perspectives.
CORBET It must’ve been incredibly challenging to show every single person in the movie the ropes. You are interfacing with a camera in a way that generally you’re specifically told not to.
ROSS Yeah, but I feel like everyone here would have so much fun doing it, because I’m like, “Treat the camera like a character.” And then they’re just playing a different game. They’re actually more free to be on the playground than to be in a place in which the choreography is a little bit more traditional.
BERGER It’s such an assured movie. It’s poetry. In all of your movies, I love feeling as an audience member, “Oh, I know that the people who made it, they take me by the hand and direct me.” (To Corbet) I love going to the cinema and going, “Oh, OK, it’s a different time count. I’m going to settle into Brady’s world.”
ROSS (To Corbet) You have a couple shots in your film that are un-fucking-believable, especially the opening that goes from the bottom of the ship to the top. And I guess that’s why it’s the opening, but there’s something about the immigrant experience that is expressed through that. That is just the most sweeping emotion …
VILLENEUVE It was so claustrophobic. Until the Statue of Liberty, I was totally disoriented. To be honest, I didn’t understand at first that I was in a boat. I thought I was in some kind of torture chamber. It looked like a camp. When he came out, I felt totally manipulated in a great way.
BERGER That’s one of my things, perspective, as a director. I’m really in Adrien Brody’s perspective. I’m always with him. (To Villeneuve) I’m always with Timothée Chalamet in your movie, seeing it through his eyes.
When you work in a medium where you’re making art that’s two to three hours long, how do you feel about the fact that people’s attention spans are getting shorter?
SCOTT Every cut is always too long, and you know that. If you’re going to run for three hours, it had better be worth what I call the “bum ache” factor.
VILLENEUVE There’s the physical time and there’s the mental time of a movie. We all, I am sure, have seen a five-minute short film that lasted forever and a three-hour movie that went like that. I think it’s about the emotional impact of the film. If the audience loses track of the emotional path, then you’re fucked.
ROSS Time dilates if you do it right.
FARGEAT All the movies around this table are what you’d call long. It’s great to have movies that take the time to present a universe, to present things that are more radical. It’s also great to have things that are out of the regular format. We have so many things that look the same. I’m not so sure about the audience having less attention because I think it really depends on how you make their journey. It’s also OK to sometimes be bored during a film. You don’t have to be excited all the time.
BERGER I also don’t know about the attention span. Maybe I’m an eternal optimist, but I think it’ll swing the other way. If you tell an audience, there’s this guy Brady Corbet, he made a movie that’s almost four hours long, it’s got an intermission, it’s 70mm — it somehow becomes, “I’ve got to go see it because it’s a spectacle. I don’t get that on television.” And then if the emotionality is right, it can be two and a half hours or four, it doesn’t really matter. (To Corbet) I think part of the selling point of your movie — getting people to the theater — will be its length.
SCOTT You do not want anyone to be bored in my world. Even though a scene is designed to be long, it better be interesting. You’ve got to go, “What’s going to happen next?” That’s the fundamentals of theater and film.
Denis, we had Zendaya here for our Actress Roundtable, and she described a sequence in Dune: Part Two where you could only shoot one hour each day in the desert. Can you tell us about that?
VILLENEUVE I went a bit dogmatic with the light. We shot exclusively in the desert with natural light, and we didn’t want to compromise aesthetically. So it meant that some scenes were shot over a week every night. I was in love with the idea of bringing naturalism to the screen — as much as possible to feel close to nature. It meant that we had to prep like nothing I’ve done before. The opening scenes, for instance, there’s a battle around a rock. That rock doesn’t exist. It’s like 12 different locations in Jordan. [Cinematographer] Greig Fraser was scanning the rocks with drones, and then he put that in the computer to know that if he wants the sun behind the actress when she smashes the head of the guy, the sun is going to be there on Nov. 3 at 9:45. It was a puzzle for the actors and for my first AD — but very rewarding in the camera.
ROSS You guys are doing astronomy!
VILLENEUVE A crazy coincidence: The movie opens with an eclipse, and as I was shooting, there was an eclipse.
ROSS You didn’t know that was going to happen?
VILLENEUVE No, I cannot say to Legendary [which financed the film], “You know what? We’re going to shoot in Jordan in the fall of 2022 because there will be an eclipse there.” No, no, it’s a coincidence. But we put the camera on the sun and shot the eclipse.
Usually we say to a director as a metaphor that they built the equivalent of the Sistine Chapel or Colosseum in their movies, but we actually have people at this table who did those things. What went into building these enormous sets?
SCOTT It’s actually cheaper.
BERGER (To Scott) Did you shoot in the Colosseum?
SCOTT No, I went to the Colosseum with my production designer. We stood in it. We turned to each other and said, “It’s too small.” My Colosseum is about 10 percent bigger because when you have a horse going full gallop, you want him to not run into a wall. So we built 50 percent real and digitally put in the rest. When you build more, there’s less bluescreen. Every time there’s blue, there’s money.
VILLENEUVE It’s better for the actors, too.
Brady, you had the task of showing that your protagonist is a great architect, but you didn’t have a lot of money to do that. So how did you and your crew figure that out?
CORBET If the film had been about a more ornamental style of architecture, we would not have been able to do it at this budget level because we built massive facades, real concrete, and then we did very simple digital extensions so that you had real texture, light, shadow, and essentially it’s just a big cube. It’s kind of VFX 101. The film was shot on VistaVision, and VistaVision’s field of view is just immense. So you can be physically close to an object and see from the ground to the sky. It doesn’t warp the object or on the edges. You really feel the impact of the architecture. (To Scott) I’ve seen some photos of your set, and it’s insane. That’s one of the greatest sets I think I’ve ever seen.
ROSS Did you tear it down?
SCOTT OK, I did a big film called Kingdom of Heaven years ago in Ouarzazate, Morocco. And to take it down would’ve cost me $300,000. So I said to the Ouarzazates, “Do you want to buy it? I can sell it to you for $10, but you have to take on all the responsibility of insurance.” So I sold it for $10. Fifteen years later, I wanted to rent it back to do the Numidian sequence [in Gladiator II]. I had to pay $1 million to rent my own set.
ROSS It’s inflation.
Beautiful sets are made and then often destroyed. Is there a more environmentally responsible way to make movies?
BERGER Reuse them. The Sistine Chapel set is still in Rome. It’s in storage. People are going to shoot in the Sistine Chapel again.
ROSS And they need to be built with reusability in mind. If you don’t approach it that way, then you’re building shit out of Styrofoam.
BERGER Coralie shot a movie that takes place in L.A. at home [in France]. That’s environmental.
FARGEAT We built the apartment, which was the most important decision because it’s maybe 70 percent of the film. Our main question was how we were going to do that view over L.A. I didn’t want to shoot on greenscreen because it was going to be 70 days in front of a greenscreen, which is hell. We researched whether we’re going to do it like the curtains from the old-time movies, or they now have LED screens where you can project a video. We did some tests, and I discussed it with my DP, and he said, “You know what? I prefer the old-fashioned backdrop because it’s more poetic. The old movies that I watched, they had this backdrop.” When the L.A. backdrop arrived, UPS delivery, we had to unpack it, light everything. I remember I entered the set and I was like, “Oh my God.” I felt it was going to work. It was so realistic.
VILLENEUVE It felt as fake as L.A.! For me, I built as much as I could, and I don’t want anybody to shoot there again. We destroyed everything. They recycled the wood. Is it environmental? I don’t know. I don’t want it to be reused. But the vehicles, we kept the vehicles. We kept the costumes.
Ridley, what’s Denzel Washington like to direct?
SCOTT Ahhhh … (Long pause.)
VILLENEUVE Next question! (Laughter.)
SCOTT This is my second film with him. I did American Gangster with him, so we kind of got used to each other there, but he’s probably one of the best actors we have today. He just gets it in two seconds. Doesn’t want too much explanation. I say, “You’ve got four cameras. Do what you want.” The beauty of multicamera is that each scene is like a play. So the actors are completely freed up. It’s one big theatrical scene, and it’s fast. And so at the end of it, every actor is the virtuoso of himself.
ROSS I want to know what you all do with takes. Are you all, like, “I’ll do 30 takes if that’s what it takes”?
SCOTT One.
One?!?
CORBET He’s got four cameras!
ROSS He doesn’t even need a take!
FARGEAT I do a lot of takes. Fifteen.
BERGER But you have less coverage.
FARGEAT Exactly. One camera.
BERGER My movie doesn’t work quite that way because I have so much dialogue and so much POV of Ralph Fiennes and so many people that he needs to interact with. If it’s just a shot on Ralph, it’ll be like two, three, four maximum. If it’s a scene that is two minutes, then more, up to 12, 13, 14. I usually ask, “Ralph, do you want another one?” And then he goes, “Yes, let’s try.” (To Villeneuve) Did you have multiple cameras?
VILLENEUVE Just one. I hate —
SCOTT Whoa.
VILLENEUVE (To Scott) Stop it. (Laughs.) I’m a monomaniac; I love to work on one thing at a time.
BERGER But on your movie, where would the second camera go?
SCOTT But you can take it out.
VILLENEUVE I hate that.
Denis, when you were making Blade Runner 2049, did you and Ridley talk? [Scott directed the original Blade Runner.]
SCOTT No, I kept right out of his way.
VILLENEUVE No, he was very elegant. (Back to previous question.) So I don’t do a lot of takes. But some actors want to do it again. Like Javier Bardem, he always wants to play. I give it to him. Have fun.
ROSS So do you rehearse?
VILLENEUVE No, I don’t rehearse a lot. I have a lot of conversations prior. On the day, I don’t want to have a question. On the shoot, it’s very visceral. I don’t want to have people talking to me about ideas. But in prep, I’m very open.
ROSS (To Scott) I heard The Martian was more expensive to make than it was to send a rover to Mars. Is that true?
SCOTT No, I think we cost about $80 million. The studio didn’t realize it’s actually a comedy, so it sat on the shelf for two years and then they said, “Do you want to look at this?” And I read it and said, “It’s really funny.”
What have you learned from dealing with studios or financiers? By the way, Brady, this is something your movie engages with a little bit, metaphorically.
CORBET No comment.
SCOTT I am continually amazed that people will give us money to do our dream. They’ve got to be crazy. And so that is real trust. I’m very respectful of that. So Gladiator II is $10 million under budget ’cause I move fast.
ROSS I went into the entire process deeply hesitant. I have an art practice, and I’m used to doing things on my own terms, and I don’t want to make art and argue, ever. That’s not in my blood. So the idea of working with a studio seemed that it could be constrictive. But I was left with a lot of hope. I worked with Plan B, Anonymous Content, Orion and Louverture Films, and never did anyone question any of the ideas. And I know that they’re fringe. I know that they’re going to have to say yes to things that they may not quite understand. If you’re making a poetic film, you have to be open to the idea that the meaning and the understanding will come after it’s done. That’s pretty hard for a studio to invest in. That I think was the biggest stress, in that if it didn’t work, it seemed like it would close doors because it was such a big risk for them.
VILLENEUVE When you say, “When you make a film, if it fails, it’ll close doors,” that’s part of the game. It’ll always be like that. You’re always as good as your last film.
Ridley, I’ve been to your office, and you have framed on the wall Pauline Kael’s 1984 review of Blade Runner, which she panned viciously.
SCOTT She wrote this for the very posh New Yorker. I read it and I was distressed. Enraged. I wrote to the editor, saying, “If you hate me that much, just ignore me. Don’t write anything.” I never got a reply. And then Blade Runner was discovered at the Santa Monica Film Festival about 10 years later. There’d been one or two diehards. So they called up Warners for the print, and they’d lost the negative. They went to a drawer, pulled it out, didn’t look at it, sent it to the festival. It was minus the voiceover. And that reignited the whole thing. That’s the craziness of Hollywood.
What do you take from that story?
SCOTT You’re your own critic. I’ve framed it, so I never read critique ever again. Ever.
ROSS I read everything.
FARGEAT Me too.
ROSS Every Letterboxd.
SCOTT What happens if they hate it?
ROSS I try to build language to combat it.
SCOTT Do you reply?
ROSS No, but I’ve thought about it many times.
VILLENEUVE What you said, Ridley, is very important. If people say you’re a failure or you’re a genius, you need to have your own perspective on your work.
BERGER The positive as well as the negative, equally dangerous. Because it’s going to hinder me from making my next one if they hate it.
ROSS But you don’t make bad things, Edward!
SCOTT You want to hear a story about Cannes? I did my first movie, it cost $800,000, called The Duellists. David Puttnam was my producer, he said they want us to be the English entry at Cannes. I said, “Wow, that’s good!” So I’m at Cannes, and I’m approached by a very important gentleman who was on the committee, a very big American director. He said, “Love your goddamn movie. The problem is the jury has been given $50,000 as bribery to vote for another film.” He said, “I will create a prize for you.” [Scott won a prize for debut film.] I didn’t get the Palme d’Or. Ironically, the Palme didn’t go to the guy who was paying them off. It went to two brothers who made Padre Padrone. They earned it by having a good film. I thought, “Fuck this corruption, even at this level.”
ROSS I thought you were going to be like, “And so I gave him $100,000, and that’s how I got here.”
This story appeared in the Jan. 9 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
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