Steve Pratt talks to the son of South Shields Ridley Scott about his reasons for taking on character-based movie Matchstick Men after forging a reputation on blockbusters like Alien and Gladiator.

NEWLY-knighted Sir Ridley Scott is used to observers expressing surprise that he's directed Matchstick Men. This con man comedy-drama, they point out a touch patronisingly, isn't really the sort of film expected of him.

The underlying implication is that Scott's reputation casts him as the maker of flash, brash, noisy epics like Gladiator, Alien and Black Hawk Down rather than clever, quiet, personal dramas.

If he's offended, he doesn't show it. The North-East born film-maker accepts such comments with good grace. "You learn not to worry about being stereotyped because that's part of the business, and also it's part of the evolution, hopefully, as an actor, producer or director. I try and evolve, therefore I'm quite consciously looking for different material," he explains.

The film has Nicolas Cage as a confidence trickster with personal problems. He's an obsessive-compulsive agoraphobic whose life takes a fresh twist when the 14-year-old daughter he's never met turns up in his doorstep.

He found it refreshing working on a smaller, more intimate movie rather than a big budget, large-scale picture like Gladiator. "Somebody said to me, 'interesting that you're doing such a small movie', and I'm saying, 'what's the definition of a small movie?'," he says.

"I've seen more movies this year with budgets in excess of $160m which are rubbish, right? Where you've got massive amounts of money spent on special effects, where the means becomes the end in itself, as opposed to having a great three-act play which will inevitably mean some great characters. Metaphorically, that's bigger than the large movies. So it's all about the fundamental characters of the story."

Scott accepts that he shares some of the traits of Cage's screen character. "I'm anal-compulsive," he says. "I didn't go through the same education as my two sons did, which was to send them to the best possible schools, but they came out as the two biggest slobs I've ever come across.

"I used to watch in horror. I'm not like that. I'm an army brat because my father was ten years in the military. As he was always away, my mother was both father and mother. She was as militant as you are likely to get and brought all the three boys up very rigidly.

"There's almost a degree of laziness in being that anal-compulsive, because at some point you don't actually have to tidy up."

As an Englishman who has lived and worked in Hollywood for a number of years, he felt comfortable making a movie set in the LA Valley. "Twenty-five years ago you'd say, 'Englishman in America directing a film which is essentially very American? Ooh, I don't know about that'. Then John Schlesinger comes and does Midnight Cowboy. So, if you don't live with it, then what you see, is different.

"When you're walking through New York, if you live there as an American you're not seeing lots of things. When you're a stranger, you're going, 'good god, look at that, look at that, look at that'.

"And I've always found the Valley to be extremely visual. People say it's depressing, but I say 'no, it's not, it's very specific'."

What is unusual is the range of songs featured on Matchstick Men's soundtrack. Most bizarre is a George Formby song. Scott explains that the script reminded him of French film comic mime Jacques Tati.

He recognised Tati's body language and awkwardness when reading Cage's character on the page. "I couldn't think of any French music that would underscore peculiar suburbia, and George Formby is from my dad's generation," he says.

The American backers, both producers and studio heads, were bemused by the inclusion of Formby's Standing On A Corner when they first saw the movie. "At the end of the screening someone said, 'what the hell is that music?' because to Americans it must be like us hearing Tiny Tim. I kept asking composer Hans Zimmer what he thought of George Formby and he said, 'I lurve him'. So we just kept it in," he recalls.

Scott has also gone back in time to revisit his 1970s space horror movie Alien, well remembered as the one in which a monster burst from John Hurt's chest.

He supervised the director's cut being released this autumn. "I checked out the original print, which was pretty good, but I got impatient," he says. "I shaved off five minutes which makes it much more aggressive. I also added nearly five minutes of deleted footage, so the film is about 46 seconds shorter than the original."

Despite being one of Hollywood's top directors, he worked on the new Alien print for nothing. "You do it for the business," he says. "When a big film goes down or is bad, it's bad for all of us."

Matchstick Men (12A) opens in cinemas tomorrow and is reviewed on Page 10. Alien -The Director's Cut opens in cinemas in the autumn.

25/09/2003