His latest, The Counsellor, may star Michael Fassbender, Penélope Cruz, Cameron Diaz, Javier Bardem and Brad Pitt, and sure, Cormac McCarthy may have been on script duties, but Ridley Scott is not resting on his laurels. Speaking to Empire for this month's issue - out on Thursday - he elaborates on what's next.
"Prometheus 2 is written," says Scott, but doesn't indicate when it might start shooting. "I have already got the next two films ready to go. That will be 2014, 2015…"
One of those is biblical epic Exodus, which has already lined up Christian Bale (Moses), John Turtorro (Pharaoh Seti), Alien alum Sigourney Weaver (Tuya, Seti's wife) and Joel Edgerton (Pharoah Ramses), but the other is "this science-fiction thing."
"There is also this very well written piece, one of the last great science-fiction books called The Forever War [the bureaucracy and space battle masterpiece by Joe Haldeman] – we’ve finally got a very good draft of that for Fox," he adds. "I thought I’d left science-fiction for too long, that I had better climb back in. Prometheus was a great experience for me. Chasing number two, we can start evolving the grand idea…"
And what sort of scale can we expect from** Exodus**? Scott has two words for you: "Fucking huge." He'll have to part the Red Sea, then... "Have to."
Blade Runner **2**, meanwhile, is still in the works, as anyone who's listened to the Harrison Ford interview in this week's**Empire Podcast **will tell you. "Yeah, we're working on [Blade Runner 2] right now - that will happen sooner or later." Not one of the 2014/2015 projects then, but still on Scott's increasingly large back burner.
The Counsellor is out in the US right now, hitting UK cinema screens on November 15.