John Wayne’s Best Western Is To Thank For All Of Ridley Scott’s Movies

Gladiator director Ridley Scott was first inspired to pick up a camera and become a filmmaker when he saw John Wayne’s greatest western as a child. Although he’s been nominated for Best Picture once and Best Director three times, Scott has never won an Academy Award. Along with Alfred Hitchcock and Paul Thomas Anderson, Scott is one of the glaring omissions that questions the Oscars’ credibility. From Alien to Blade Runner, Scott is responsible for some of the greatest and most influential films ever made, yet his career would have looked very different were it not for one John Wayne Western.

Scott has redefined the science fiction genre, reinvented the swords-and-sandals epic, and perfected the large-scale battle sequence. At the age of 86, Scott is still going strong, helming big-budget epics like Napoleon and Gladiator II with as steady a hand as he had in the early days of his career. But Scott might have never been inspired to make a single movie if he hadn’t seen a seminal Western masterpiece as an impressionable young cinephile – John Wayne’s The Searchers.

John Wayne’s The Searchers Inspired Ridley Scott To Become A Director

Scott Was “Blown Away” By The Searchers

In a 2000 interview with Venice Magazine (via The Hollywood Interview), Scott was asked if there was a single film from his childhood that he could point to as the movie that made him want to become a director. Scott named John Ford’s 1956 western masterpiece The Searchers as the movie that inspired that decision. Scott said, “I remember just being blown away by that film.” He’s a huge fan of the Western genre and didn’t feel that anyone had captured the Old West quite as powerfully as Ford did in The Searchers and his other groundbreaking Westerns.

The Searchers stars John Wayne as a Civil War veteran who struggles to settle into post-war civilian life. When his niece is kidnapped, he embarks on a years-long journey across the frontier to find her. Whereas Wayne typically played clear-cut heroes with black-and-white morality, The Searchers was noteworthy for its darker storyline and Wayne’s more ethically dubious antihero. Scott also named Carol Reed’s classic noir The Third Man and Stanley Kubrick’s seminal sci-fi epic 2001: A Space Odyssey as films that had a profound influence on him, but The Searchers was the first movie that awakened his passion for filmmaking.

How The Searchers’ Influence Can Be Seen In Ridley Scott Movies

Scott’s Films Share The Searchers’ Antiheroes & Moral Ambiguity

The influence of The Searchers can be seen all across Scott’s films. The influence of Ford’s stunning landscape photography can be seen in Scott’s gorgeous wide-angle lensing of Ancient Rome in Gladiator and Mars in The Martian. The moral ambiguity of Wayne’s Ethan Edwards can be seen in many of Scott’s antiheroes; much like Ethan, Blade Runner’s Rick Deckard is difficult to root for, because he does bad things in the pursuit of his own skewed vision of justice, and he’s not necessarily on the right side of that quest.

The Last Duel’s Rashomon-esque notion that there’s more than one side to every story can be traced back to The Searchers’ rescue storyline about a young woman who doesn’t even want to be rescued. The Searchers also explores the corruptibility of violence and the difficulty of breaking out of the cycle of violence. Ethan was more comfortable on the battlefields of the American Civil War than he was sitting around a dinner table with his brother’s family. Gladiator’s Maximus is similarly doomed to a violent existence, having proven his prowess in battle and been forced to kill for entertainment.

Will Ridley Scott Ever Make A Western Of His Own?

Scott Has Developed A Couple Of Western Projects, But None Have Come To Fruition

In the same interview, while praising The Searchers, Scott said, “I want to do a Western some day.” But more than two decades after giving that interview, Scott still hasn’t made a Western. Scott’s films have often dealt with the Western genre’s tropes. Thelma & Louise is about a pair of outlaws riding through the desert. The Counselor is an ultraviolent Cormac McCarthy-penned neo-Western exploring the Mexican drug trade. Robin Hood is essentially a Western set in medieval England, and The Last Duel deals with the Western themes of honor and revenge. But none of these are a traditional example of the genre.

Scott had been developing a snow Western called Freewalkers, but it was canceled recently because pre-production overran and the snow cleared in their chosen filming location. The director was also attached to direct an adaptation of Wraiths of the Broken Land, but that project got delayed so that Scott could focus on other projects, and it seems unlikely to ever come to fruition. Ridley Scott is currently working on a Bee Gees biopic, but after that, he might finally get around to putting his stamp on the Western genre – honoring his original movie-making inspiration.

Source: The Hollywood Interview