At 88 years old, Ridley Scott continues to get behind the camera and this August 26 he returns to the big screen with The Constellation of the Dog, a kind of futuristic Western starring Jacob Elordi, a lone ranger who has exchanged his horse for a dilapidated small plane and who faces the dangers of a dystopian world in which a virus has devastated humanity and the few survivors are under siege by strange wild tribes.
Based on a novel written by Peter Heller in 2012 – before, therefore, the 2020 pandemic that he somehow glimpsed –, for the director of Alien, Gladiator and Mars, this is basically a story of survival and hope. "In 2008, we all faced the financial abyss due to the greed of the banks. If you add to that the covid, the wave of immigrants from North Africa...", Scott analyzed yesterday, along with Elordi, Josh Brolin and Guy Pearce, in a virtual press conference from London.
“It's already around the corner, isn't it?” the British filmmaker, who declared himself “addicted” to international news, wondered about that dark future: “Much of this is already happening, and we simply... have blinders on,” he argued in the face of evidence of climate change and the “chaos” of certain territories where people live in “catastrophe” conditions.
“The dynamics of a movie are different from those of a book,” said the director, who introduced some changes to the “terrific script” by Mark L. Smith, “either because it was too much, or because it was not enough,” based on the premise that no one has to be bored at the movies. Perhaps for this reason, despite the post-apocalyptic setting, the film drifts towards the grotesque in the disconcerting scene at the Grand Junction airport, where the American dream turns into a nightmare: “Unless you're playing Macbeth, you always have to find that touch of humor,” joked a loquacious Scott.
"However, entertainment should also make you think. You can't just sit there smiling at a stupid movie. It's great when it starts to tell you something, when the movie speaks to you. But that stays in the background, at the base. I try to find, beyond that, human behavior: empathy, sympathy. So I try to hide what I think, because I tend to be very dark being a Celtic," he continued.
Filmed in Italy because, Scott ironically said, in Canada there were bears and wolves that scared him and in the Dolomites "the food is better." Although the peaks of the Alps are not so similar to the Rockies, the beauty of the landscape is also the protagonist of the film: "Poetry here is the visual language," Scott described his translation into film of the most poetic passages of the novel. "Photography is the portrait of any film, whether it is a feature film or an advertisement. The problem is that, often, people don't know where to place the camera, right?" he boasted of his mastery, also forged, he recalled, in his beginnings as a documentary filmmaker with D.A. Pennebaker and Richard Leacock: “I try to shape the frame and make it natural.”
Jacob Elordi, who plays Hig, a mechanic tormented by the death of his wife who lives with his dog, Jasper, on an abandoned airfield near Denver (Colorado), where, along with Banglay (Brolin), he survives entrenched thanks to the supplies he goes out to look for in an old yellow Cessna, he seemed somewhat shy in front of the press: "I had a wonderful time. I can't think of anything that particularly surprised me. He's fantastic to work with and he's very open with us, the actors; obviously, he is a very visual filmmaker, but he gave us a lot of freedom within the script to do what we wanted," said the Australian actor about his first experience under the orders of a director whom he has described as a "pioneer."
“I got into trouble for saying that,” smiled Elordi, self-consciously, who was grateful for the opportunity to discover the Cinecittà studios, where sets by his admired Federico Fellini are preserved, thanks to the film.
“Ridley has incredible energy and is tremendously inspiring,” his compatriot Guy Pearce told him. "Age doesn't affect him. Normal people age, he doesn't. He inspires but he also gets what he wants. He is visionary enough to direct his actors without them feeling intimidated," Brolin added. Not in vain both had already worked with the legendary director of Blade Runner.
And it was talking about this film, from which he was "kicked out," he said, in 1982, since the producers intervened in the editing and changed the ending to make him happy, when Scott let himself be carried away by his Celtic character and lashed out at the criticism: "They crucified me for Blade Runner. Pauline Kael wrote a whole page in The New Yorker, I have it framed in my office. And what that taught me is that you don't have to read what they say about you, whether good or bad. bad. Because if they are good reviews, you think you own the world, and you are not. If they are bad, you think: 'Oh, mmmm.' And on top of that, he cut off the filter “to achieve maximum saturation.”
