Petit Bulletin LYON - Cinema Lyon: The Last Duel - Ridley Scott: "all the characters are important to me" - article published by Vincent Raymond

Your first feature film was called The Duelists and this one, The Last Duel. What fascinates you so much about duels?Ridley Scott: But…every day of my life is a duel! I'm in a duel with the studios, or with one or the other… If you can't stand the stress, don't do the same job as me! (smiles) When I shot Les Duellistes, I was 40 years old and already quite successful in the field of advertising. Because of this success, I was afraid of losing the desire to make films. As I had gone all over France for the ads, for the book transformed into a screenplay, I could only think of the Dordogne. On the side of Sarlat, on the place where we wanted to shoot, I had to go to the town hall with the script of the film for validation. The town hall had asked me: “um… you want to make a film here? - yes. — dealing with sexual matters? - Nope. — with Brigitte Bardot? — like Michael Winner? — no. - Okay that's good. »

How did you proceed with the reconstruction, which was extremely precise both in terms of the clothes and the sets? I just opened books and drew, like a small child, and then I said to myself: this movie" — it's true! You know, I was trained as an artistic director at the Royal College of Arts for seven absolutely fabulous years; I worked as such in England. There, as with every film, I did things a little backwards: I do my storyboard, I layer the text, I film this storyboard and I look at the dynamics, the geometry of the text. It is only from there that I will see the filming locations.

Matt Damon called me

How do you choose your actors? Usually, when I prepare my projects, I have to identify and select all the actors; here, the actors chose me. Matt Damon called me; he told me a bit about the subject, what the film was about and asked me: “would you like to do it? ". Then, when I start a film, all the roles are written and all the characters are important to me. So I really take the time it takes for the cast, to identify actors who are technically good but also inventive because my goal is to be surprised by them as well. The biggest compliment I can give them is: “Ah, that's great! when they do something I hadn't thought of.

It is said in the film that there is no justice, only the power of men; yet we realize that despite the just fight of women and improvements in society, homophobia, sexism, racism and anti-Semitism are resisting. Does the future make you optimistic? I think you have to be optimistic, even when times are dark, when there is so much pessimism and things are changing very slowly — or not fast enough, anyway. A film like this participates in this process.

Despite the pandemic, you shot this film and another, House of Gucci, which will be released in just over a month... We finished them in less than two years, finally, including the editing phase from the end of filming. But that can only be done with a great editor — and I probably have the best editor in the business. No sooner had we said “cut” than we had our film edited three weeks later, whereas it usually takes twelve to fourteen. I worked with “fresh”, recent memory… That's how it should be. Especially when you have a story like this.