How Ridley Scott’s drawing skills got him double the original budget for ‘Alien’: “The most valuable thing I’ve ever done in my life”

Posted On January 11, 2025January 11, 2025

Unlike the strictly regimented paths to becoming a solicitor or sommelier, there is no specific blueprint for becoming a film director. Even if you study filmmaking at university, there is absolutely no guarantee that you will be able to do the job professionally. In fact, you are probably more likely to end up going into sales or retraining as a GP. Even if you look at the directors who actually have managed to climb the ladder to the top of the film industry, there is no one-size-fits-all approach. Directors like George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola studied their craft at an academic institution, but many others took a more circuitous route. Ridley Scott is a primary example. 

He began as a visual artist, attending both the West Hartlepool College of Art and the Royal College of Art, before becoming a television set designer. That experience became a priceless asset when he started directing. In fact, it is largely responsible for his big break.

Scott’s feature debut, 1977’s period drama The Duellists, was well received by critics and was even nominated for the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, but it didn’t make much of an impact at the box office, and it certainly didn’t herald him as the next greatest science fiction auteur.

When 20th Century Fox invited him to a meeting to discuss Alien, they had already burned through several other directors who had promptly turned the project down. Despite the enormous success of Star Wars, there wasn’t much enthusiasm for the film. Dan O’Bannon’s script was more of a monster movie than a fantastical space opera, and the filmmakers that the studio approached simply didn’t know what to do with it.

When Scott saw the script, he instantly saw its potential. “I loved it,” he said during a 2024 interview on the Kermode and Mayo’s Takes podcast. He recognised that it was a huge opportunity, so he put his art skills to work drawing up meticulous storyboards for every scene of the script to give himself the best chance of getting the job.

Scott had started storyboarding long before he made The Duellists. It allowed him to imagine every shot of a film in three dimensions even before a single piece of the set had been constructed. When he arrived at the meeting for Alien, the studio was planning to finance the film for $4.2million. “They saw the [boards], and they could see the vision,” Scott said. “And they went to $8.4m like that.” Not only did he get the job, but he doubled the budget.

Even decades into his career, Scott traces his success as a director back to his earliest days as a student. “The most valuable thing I’ve ever done in my life,” he said, “was to go to art school for seven years.” From nabbing that breakthrough job on Alien to working out the dynamic fight sequences in Gladiator, storyboarding has been an essential part of his process. “Vision is everything,” he concluded. “If you haven’t got it, then it’s going to be harder work.”

Related Topics