UK Quartet Get Their Ridley Scott On

The very first film directed by Sir Ridley Scott, Boy and Bicycle, was a Royal College of Art short starring his brother Tony. He went on to do some TV episodes and commercials, before finally getting to his first feature, The Duellists, in 1977.

As Scott proved with that 1965 short and reminded in a recent YouTube exhortation, the key to DIY filmmaking remains to "just go and do it." That's the spark for What Would Ridley Do?, a no-budget UK indie featuring a movie poster created by New Zealand Facebook follower Kaan Hiini, with a tagline--“No Money. No Crew. No Clue.”--submitted by another social media follower, Nathan Shaw.



Twenty-nine-year-old director Ross Howieson is in the process of submitting the movie to film festivals while also looking to ideally raise 20,000 pounds for post-production. The cast and crew screening was held this past September, and some media coverage has begun, sparked mainly by the cheeky Ridley Scott derived title. In his Director's Statement, Howieson explains how the film was made:

As the actors live in London, we filmed there to begin with, whenever we could, in between shifts at various restaurants and bars! Then we took a holiday and filmed for five days in Newtonmore in Scotland where one of the actors had a holiday cottage...

I then spent the next six months editing the film to get it down to its current 97 minute length... The film still needs professionally finished with a sound dub, ADR and color grade and I am trying to find funding for this.

Music for the film comes from British band 6 Day Riot and Australian composer Ben Solo. Most of the dialogue was improvised, and certainly the plotline of a group of collaborators forced to make a film for no money should help anchor a long, fun run on the festival circuit in 2012. Not to mention pave the way for a DVD screener to eventually be viewed by Sir Ridley himself.

 [What Would Ridley Do?]