Ridley Scott recently revealed his next movie is Prometheus 2, and he also gave away a bit of the plot (road trip, sans xenomorphs). This week at the Toronto International Film Festival, Scott granted an extensive interview to Deadline about several of his movies, and he offered an update on Prometheus 2.
At the end of Prometheus (spoiler), Dr. Shaw (Noomi Rapace) took off in a ship carrying the disembodied head of the android David (Michael Fassbender), heading out to find the “engineers” who made humans. Ridley Scott tells Deadline the sequel starts production next February and Fassbender is coming back. That’s all we ever wanted. For what it’s worth, there was a rumor going around last year saying there would be multiple David androids, all played by Fassbender, and my dream journal entries haven’t been boring since.
When asked about the sequel’s plot during the very long interview, Scott waxed philosophical:
“You can either say, leave the first film alone and jump ahead, but you can’t because it ends on too specific a plot sentence as she says, I want to go where they came from, I don’t want to go back to where I came from. I thought the subtext of that film was a bit florid and grandiose, but it asks a good question: who created us? I don’t think we are here by accident. I find it otherwise hard to believe you and I are sitting here at this table, because the molecular miracles that would have had to occur were in the trillions, since the first sign of human life that crawled out of the mud with four fingers, would bloody well be impossible, unless there was some guidance system. Also, you have the sun approximately the same distance from earth as it is from maybe millions of planets and planetoids that are almost identical distance and therefore enjoy the value of sunlight on their soil. Are you telling me there are no other planets with human life? I simply don’t believe it.
“That raises the question to me, same as was depicted in 2001 when that object comes hurtling through space, and lands in Ethiopia. And an ape that had been grubbing around in the water hole with all of them bickering at each other, goes up and touches it. He has a bigger thought injected into his brain than Newton got sitting under a tree and seeing an apple fall. Stanley then picks something metaphorically poetic in its violence, as the ape picks up a hip bone and brains the anteater so they can eat him. That is one gigantic, magnificent leap of a thousand years of evolution; that is where the world begins. It is pretty grand thinking, and that’s what I want to explore. You’ve got to go back and find those engineers and see what they are thinking. If engineers are the forerunners of us, and therefore were creators of life forms in places that were possible for biology to function, who created that? Where’s the big boy? You think this was all an accident? I don’t know.”
Man, what is it with us always touching stuff from outer space with bare hands? Some things never change.
(Via Deadline)