Q: Has an actor ever surprised you?
A: Well, I was waiting to meet Harrison Ford for the first time and show him the storyboard drawings for Blade Runner. And I wanted his character to be like Philip Marlowe with a kind of a trilby, a fedora with a slightly wider brim. Very sharp. He’d been shooting Raiders of the Lost Ark, so he arrived at this posh piano bar in London wearing a leather jacket, khaki shirt, and baggy khaki trousers and a hat—fully dressed from the set. I said, "There’s our hat!" He said, "No. This is why I came like this—this is how I am as Indiana Jones. Let’s think again." We did.

Q: You became the father of the director’s cut with Blade Runner. And then did a few more versions—including the final cut. Stuff didn’t work out. Did it?
A: You know, it went off the rails, but not hugely. Frankly, I look back on it and think, Actually, it was pretty normal. The only two things about the film that were marred were the voice-over and the ending. When we finished, I really thought I nailed the motherfucker, and I did. But then somehow it didn’t test well, and then Harrison’s not happy, and if Harrison’s not happy I’m not happy, because I like my artistes to be happy about what they did, right? Yet Harrison’s wife at the time, Melissa Mathison—she was the writer for E.T.—she was the one person who took my side and said "Fantastic movie. This will stand up the way it is." So she’s a smart lady and she got it, but the rest of them ... Everyone’s in the room with their opinions, including the financiers, and my problem, being a well-brought-up Northern English boy, is always being respectful of the money that’s been put into my expenditure. So I changed it.

Q: The dark, industrial look of Blade Runner—it sort of seems like the Northern English steel mills and chemical plants near where you grew up.
A: It does. I had a quite unconventional childhood, in the sense that I traveled a lot and I went to 10 or 11 schools. I was completely confused academically, but wherever I went, I could paint. I painted an inordinate amount. Ended up I went to the Royal College of Art. If you ever have a kid who doesn’t know what to do, stick him in art school. It’s amazing what evolves. For the first time I was absolutely focused, passionate about everything. My parents couldn’t tear me away from the art.

Q: I heard you signed on to direct Gladiator after seeing a painting.
A: Walter Parkes called me, saying, "I don’t want you to read the script. I want to pitch you an idea." I was defensive, because swords-and-sandals films have, over the years, been downright cheesy. So he flipped out a reproduction of a Jean-Léon Gérôme painting, To Those About to Die. It was a detailed representation of an andabatae, an armored gladiator with a pitchfork, standing over a victim he’d netted, looking up for permission to slaughter, and there’s a lunatic with his thumb down—"Kill!" It was so vividly expressive that the penny just dropped, and I went, "I’ll do it."