When you hear the word influencer, chances are an 88-year-old man responsible for Alien, Blade Runner and Gladiator isn’t the first person who comes to mind. You probably picture someone holding a phone, standing in front of a ring light, telling you about the skincare product that has apparently changed their life. There may be a welcome discount code involved. Possibly a carefully positioned cup of coffee. Ridley Scott has other ideas.
According to Variety, the legendary director has declared that he doesn’t really consider himself a filmmaker anymore, but an influencer. Now before you start searching TikTok for Ridley Scott’s morning routine, here’s his explanation. Speaking to The Times of London, Scott said he has frequently been ahead of the game throughout his career and believes that if you’re ahead of the game, you’re influencing what comes after you. Therefore, in his mind, he’s an influencer. Dang it, looks like he’s got a point. Although it’s something I never saw coming.
We have somehow allowed social media to hijack the word influencer. And the fact is that we associate influence with followers, likes, shares and viral videos. But influence existed long before social media became a thing. Scott has spent almost five decades doing exactly what the word describes.
When Alien arrived in 1979, it didn’t simply give audiences one seriously terrifying creature. It helped redefine what science-fiction horror could look and feel like. Then came Blade Runner in 1982, a movie whose neon-soaked vision of the future has influenced science-fiction films, television, games and visual culture for decades. Thelma & Louise arrived in 1991. Gladiator followed in 2000 and helped revive Hollywood’s appetite for enormous historical epics.
So perhaps Ridley Scott doesn’t need 20 million Instagram followers when it’s clear to see that Hollywood has been following him for years. That’s also what makes his definition of influence considerably more interesting than the one we’ve become accustomed to. Social media has done a good job of convincing us that influence is something you can measure on a dashboard. It’s plain to see. If you have a million followers? You are considered influential. Rounding up twenty thousand likes? Also influential. But if your video gets twelve views, three of which were your mother? Perhaps give it another day.
So genuine influence isn’t necessarily about how many people are watching you at any particular moment. Sometimes it’s about whether something you create changes what other people create afterwards. And Scott has certainly done that. He also doesn’t appear particularly interested in slowing down. His latest film, The Dog Stars, stars Jacob Elordi, Margaret Qualley and Josh Brolin, while he’s preparing to shoot his Treasure Island adaptation with Hugh Jackman. He has also spoken about wanting to make a Western, a musical and a film involving an African elephant. At 88.
Meanwhile, some of us need a small motivational speech just to get out of bed each morning. But the most interesting part of Scott’s comments is that they arrive at a time when Hollywood itself is struggling with originality. Scott didn’t exactly hold back on that subject either. He complained that modern movies keep returning to familiar formulas. Everything you see involves crime stories, FBI agents and superheroes. He argued that there must surely be other stories left to tell. Coming from somebody who has spent nearly five decades jumping between science-fiction, historical epics, crime, war, thrillers and dramas, you can understand his frustration.
And maybe that’s what he really means when he calls himself an influencer. Not being someone who follows whatever happens to be trending, but
someone who creates something and watches everyone else follow. Therein lies the difference. The internet may have changed what the word influencer looks like, but Ridley Scott is reminding us what it originally meant. You don’t necessarily need followers to have influence. Sometimes you just need to create something people are still talking about forty years later.
So yes, Ridley. You can have this one.
But if an unboxing video suddenly appears on his Instagram, we’re going to need another conversation.
