Iconic British director Ridley Scott (Blade Runner, Alien, Gladiator), will receive the inaugural Cartier Glory to the Filmmaker award at the 78th Venice International Film Festival, which runs Sept. 1-11, Venice unveiled on Monday.
Scott will receive his honor in Venice’s Sala Grande on September 10 ahead of the out-of-competition premiere of his latest epic The Last Duel. The period drama, starring Matt Damon, Adam Driver, Jodie Comer, and Ben Affleck, is billed as a tale of betrayal and vengeance set in 14th century France. Damon and Affleck, who last collaborated as screenwriters on their Oscar-winning script to Good Will Hunting (1997), co-wrote The Last Duel together with Can You Ever Forgive Me? scribe Nicole Holofcener.
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Venice’s Glory to the Filmmaker prize is dedicated to “a personality who has made a particularly original contribution to the contemporary film industry.”
It’s hard to argue that Ridley Scott hasn’t made a profound, and profoundly original, contribution. With such groundbreaking features as Alien (1979), Blade Runner (1981), and Thelma & Louise (1992), Scott, who started as a director of commercials, has shaped the visual imagination of a generation of filmmakers and fans.
The four-time Oscar nominee — three Best Director nominations for Thelma & Louise, Gladiator (2000), and Black Hawk Down (2001), one Best Picture nomination for The Martian (2015) — is also a TV pioneer, with nine Emmy nominations, and two wins, and production credits on such series as The Good Wife and its spin-off The Good Fight, as well as HBO Max’s hotly-anticipated sci-fi series Raised by Wolves.
Venice artistic director Alberto Barbera said Scott’s “personal approach to genre films” which “successfully reconciles the requirements of entertainment, the expectations of the general public and the demands of critics” is the most distinctive element of his filmmaking. Barbera said Blade Runner alone has earned Scott “his rightful place in the Olympus of the great filmmakers of contemporary cinema” and that he has been a trailblazer for more than 30 years.
“In Thelma & Louise he seemed to anticipate years ahead of time today’s debate on the status of women and their compulsion to assert themselves,” said Barbera. “In Gladiator he revived the sword-and-sandal genre, which had been abandoned after being thoroughly exploited in the late 1960s, whereas in Black Hawk Down he imposed a new, amazing standard in the participatory realism of war movies. In The Martian, finally, he successfully introduced tones of light comedy into a typically dystopic situation. His indisputable merits include the extraordinary visual talent and painterly taste he has demonstrated in the creation of sumptuous Baroque and graphically majestic images, accompanied by a rare and priceless talent for directing actors.”
