RIDELY SCOTT IS NOT LOOKING BACK

NOBODY IS MAKING BIG MOVIES WITH THE SPEED -OR THE CONFIDENCE- OF THE GLADIATOR AND ALIEN MASTERMIND, NOW 87. HE DOESN'T CARE WHO NOTICES.

- BY CHRIS HEATH

ON bookcase in the London offices of Ridley Scott Associates sits a framed memento: a Pupil's Report Book from the County of Durham Education Committee's Stockton Grammar School. On the front cover, filled in by hand, is the name of the pupil in question: “R. Scott.” At a casual glance, that's all you'd see—nothing more than a sentimental keepsake from Ridley Scott's childhood long ago in the northeast of England.

Thing is, Ridley Scott isn't necessarily the man for unnuanced keepsakes. On the wall of another of his offices, for instance, he keeps a framed copy of the four-page evisceration his 1982 film, Blade Runner, received from the New Yorker's legendary film critic Pauline Kael. “Blade Runner” has nothing to give the audience, Kael wrote. And: If anybody comes around with a test to detect humanoids, maybe Ridley Scott and his associates should hide. And much, much more.

“Dude, four pages of destruction,” Scott tells me. “She destroyed me.” The memory clearly still lingers. “I never even met her!... It's insolent. At my level, it's insolent...” Anyway, it should probably come as no surprise that the decision to display this Pupil's Report Book is rather more loaded than it might at first appear. Its secrets only begin to reveal themselves once you've realized that the picture frame is double-sided. Scott turns the frame over to show me the inside of the report he received 74 years ago for the autumn term of 1950, when he had just turned 13. It lists his grades, annotated with occasional comments—judgments which sit in almost comical counterpoint to the life they have come to preview.