It's gratifying to see that Ridley Scott's THE MARTIAN has been receiving more praise than his last few films have, but the director won't be spending too much time celebrating as he's got two fairly large projects just over the horizon; a sequel to PROMETHEUS and a sequel to BLADE RUNNER, the latter of which will be directed by Denis Villeneuve. Despite not directing the BLADE RUNNER sequel himself, Scott told Yahoo Movies that he will still have plenty to influence on the shape of the story, including the final cut:
Oh, yeah. I mean, I always have final cut on everything, really. Partly because I’m very user-friendly. I always believe when you’re given X amount of money by someone to f–k around with and make a movie, you can’t draw lines in the sand. If I was an investor and you did that to me, I’d remove your ankles. So don’t do the auteur s–t. I respect the guy for giving the money and I respect the studio for saying, “Yeah, you want to do this, here we go.”
Ridley Scott was also the one who managed to get Harrison Ford to return for the sequel, who, after reading the script, called it "the best script I’ve ever had." The BLADE RUNNER sequel will also address the long-standing debate on whether Harrison Ford's character is or is not a Replicant. Harrison Ford has historically denied the Replicant claim while Ridley Scott has always asserted that Deckard was always a Replicant. Guess who will be getting his way in the sequel?
Of course he’s a bloody Replicant! He’s going to have to admit it.
But aren't Replicants set to die after four years? Ridley didn't comment on that but he did say that it will all make sense once you see the film. Scott has been dishing out a lot of details on his four upcoming PROMETHEUS films and it seems like BLADE RUNNER may also have a life beyond this first sequel, which will see the franchise handed over to Ryan Gosling:
Listen: Everyone else is, so why not? I love to work. The French say, “Work to live,” and I live to work. I’m very lucky to have a job that I adore. All my kids do the same thing. Some of it’s trying, but it’s like being in professional sport. It’s so competitive [that] you better keep bouncing the ball. You can’t rest.
We've already heard plenty about the sequels to PROMETHEUS, the first of which is now called ALIEN: PARADISE LOST, but Ridley Scott still had more to say, confirming that the story would pick up where PROMETHEUS left off, with Noomi Rapace and Michael Fassbender searching for the Engineer's planet:
Of course. Have you ever read Paradise Lost, by Milton? In a funny kind of way, it’s an interesting basis for the darkness of [Prometheus 2]. Where the good-looking guy, who is evil as s–t, gets all the girls and goes to the nightclubs. The other guy, who is not quite as good-looking, is boring as hell and stays home. So in a funny kind of way, we used that as the basis for it, it’ll be Alien: Paradise Lost. Which is very spooky, because it continues after the last one, where Elizabeth Shaw [Noomi Rapace] says, “I wanna go where they came from.” And you’ve got Michael Fassbender in two parts, so she’ll slowly put him back together. They will go to the world of the Engineer. That’s where they’re going to go. They will find out who would design such an awful bio-mechanoid creature, like a massive piece of bacteria
You can catch Ridley Scott's THE MARTIAN in theaters on October 2, 2015.