Ridley Scott touches on his brother’s death and their “formidable” mother in career-spanning profile

When director Tony Scott committed suicide in 2012, his survivors included his older brother, Ridley Scott, who is preparing to release his 28th film—Napoleon—later this month. In honor of that release, The New Yorker has put together a lengthy profile on Ridley Scott that is largely dedicated to comparisons one could make between him and the tyrant at the center of his movie, but it also finds room for a quietly stunning aside about Tony Scott’s death. Apparently, Tony Scott had called his brother immediately before taking his own life, and Ridley, not realizing what was happening, had talked to him about his career and had tried to get Tony excited about making another movie.

The New Yorker piece mentions that Ridley Scott once said his brother’s death was “inexplicable,” but when asked about it now, he seems to have come to terms with it a little more. He says his brother was an avid mountain climber, but after undergoing cancer treatment, he could no longer do it. “I think climbing was his enthusiasm,” Scott explains, “It was his mojo.” Losing the thing that keeps you going seems to have a lot of resonance for Ridley Scott, with Paul Sammon—who has written multiple books about Scott—telling The New Yorker that Scott has dealt with depression his whole life and once said about filmmaking: “If I stop, I find myself sinking.”

Scott still seems to like making movies, and if this profile is anything to go by, he has not lost his ability to come up with a very specific vision for everything he wants his films to be. That’s where a lot of the Napoleon comparisons come from, but there’s also an aside about the relationship that Scott and his brothers had with their mother, Elizabeth, who seems to have been a role model in that respect. He says she was “formidable” (she lived to 96 and her last words to him were “This is ridiculous”), but when asked if he sees any of her in his various movie heroines (namely Ellen Ripley), he denied it and says he sees more of her in his ability to “give as good as I take.”

Perhaps fishing for that Ripley comparison, one of Scott’s sons was asked to compare his grandmother to a Ridley Scott character and offered Mother, the computer system from Alien that is singularly focused on its one goal—bringing the Xenomorph to the expedition’s corporate masters—even if it means killing everyone else.

So that’s what Elizabeth Scott was like, and Ridley Scott sees her in his personality, and it makes a lot of sense that he’s just going to keep making movies forever, exactly the way he wants to make them.