At 71 North-East film-maker Ridley Scott has made some of cinema’s most iconic movies, but, as he tells Steve Pratt, he still hasn’t fulfilled his teenage ambition.

IF Ridley Scott were my teacher, he’d be giving me a gold star. “Very good,” he says approvingly, looking towards me after I’ve supplied the answer he was looking for. He’s been talking about his early days directing live television shows like police drama Softly, Softly, but his recollections come to a halt over the name of a TV series starring Michael Rennie.

“What was it called?” he asks.

“The Third Man,” I suggest.

It’s the right answer and, while not matching answering correctly the final question on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?, there’s pleasure in earning the praise of the North-East’s most successful Hollywood film-maker.

Scott is at the top of his game. At 71, his filmmaking schedule is fuller than it’s ever been, while he admits to being “pretty fast” at developing and shooting projects.

“I’m a nine till nine guy. I’m in the office at quarter to nine every morning and I get home at quarter to nine in the evening, every day. It’s a continual process. Fortunately, I live about eight minutes from my office, which helps.

“But the day is full. It’s like two things become available and I have to decide what I want to do. I have to read the synopsis quickly and make a decision on whether to buy it. That’s all going on when I’m not making movies.”

In quick succession Scott has directed Kingdom Of Heaven, A Good Year, American Ganster and now the terrorist thriller Body Of Lies to add to credits that include Alien, Gladiator, Blade Runner, Thelma And Louise and Black Hawk Down. It’s an impressive list for the former award-winning commercials director who made his feature film directorial debut with The Duellists in 1977.

Not all his movies have struck a chord with the public. Body Of Lies had a lukewarm reception in the US as audiences continue to shun films, even those directed by Scott and starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Russell Crowe, that touch on the war against terror.

Predicting audience reaction through the Hollywood practice of test screenings drives him crazy although generally he tolerates it “because it helps the studio with their marketing and their insecurity,” he says.

“But any film you take in you’re going to get 95,000 experts, and right there you’ve the beginning of confusion. And so a testing session is not a means to an end, it’s a tool to maybe underscore what you may be feeling intuitively about two or three things. If you’ve got a nagging thought then the testing might tell you something.

“But, other than that, where it gets chaotic is where you’ve really messed up with a movie. It means that probably the script is terrible, it’s been badly done and they’ve somehow patched it together thinking it was okay.

“Then the audience absolutely decimates it and that’s when you’ve got to go back to the editing room.”

It happened to him on the science fiction drama Blade Runner with arguments over the use of a voiceover and the ending. “Just because they didn’t get it, we were fiddling forever and it was always right,”

he says.

DVD has given him the opportunity to tinkle with past films. Extra footage was added to Alien, Blade Runner was re-released with the original ending and Kingdom Of Heaven in a longer cut. Yet he claims not to like revisiting his films.

“I hate doing it, but Blade Runner is redone again and it’s constant revenue. A new one comes out and they all go out and buy it again, that’s nice. It’s nice for them, not me. I don’t have a piece of Blade Runner or Alien.

“I recognised early on that in Hollywood, they’re some of the smartest and some of the toughest mothers you’re ever likely to meet.

Also, the most uneasy thing is they recognise passion as weakness, so if they know you want to do something you’re going to pay for that.

“So you have to hide the fact that you’re desperate to do it. You pretend you don’t really give a damn, but you’re desperate to do it.”

Body Of Lies continues his interest in the history of the Middle East, previously explored in Black Hawk Down and Kingdom Of Heaven.

“I just love the culture,” says Scott.

“I have this real passion for the period films, particularly in the Middle Ages. I think I just like reconstructing universes. I relate to it, I don’t know why but I do.”

While US cinema audiences aren’t overkeen on seeing films dealing with the current situation in the Middle East, Scott is more than willing to talk about their unwillingness to embrace the war on terror.

“There’s a large bird with a long neck and a big beak that used to do a lot of Guinness ads that used to stick his head in the sand. I think a lot of that is happening. I’d heard that only seven per cent of the people want to know what’s going on in the Middle East.

“I think they’re angry and they wonder, like all the families do, why are their sons going to war when we shouldn’t even be there. Obviously, there’s all kinds of itineraries going on in that, not withstanding something to do with that black stuff that comes out of the ground.”

Other directors might want to throw a smoke screen over the more controversial aspects in order to make a movie more box office friendly. Not toughtalking, hard-working Scott.

His take on the Robin Hood story, Nottingham, might well do for the Sherwood Forest legend what his Gladiator did for the swordand- sandals saga – reinvent it, give the genre a shot in the arm.

Shooting begins in February with Russell Crowe starring after several false starts, although he denies the delicious rumour that he’s been waiting for the leaves on the trees to turn the right colour.

But he’s still not fulfilled his long-held ambition to make a western. “I’m talking to one of the best of the writers actually, Larry Mc- Murtry. He’s got one of the biggest libraries in the United States, thousands of books on fundamental western culture. So I’m trying to find something that bypasses the reason why did we lose the western?

“I don’t know. Is it because cop films took over, and then science fiction took over? And yet cop films are still holding position and westerns have never returned.”

He has a particular interest because a love of the western inspired him to get into his line of work. “My parents thought I was retarded. At 18 I wanted to be a cowboy,” he says.

How fortunate for cinemagoers he opted to shoot with a camera not a six-gun.

■ Body Of Lies (15) opens in cinemas on Friday.