In 1977 a brash young British ad man called Ridley Scott, who’d made a bit of a name for himself with the nostalgic “boy on a bike” Hovis commercial, went to Los Angeles. His mission was to flog his first film, an arthouse Napoleonic number called The Duellists, and plot his planned follow-up, a take on the medieval romance Tristan and Isolde.
Within days Scott’s hopes were dust. The studio had ordered only seven copies of The Duellists. To cheer himself up the director went to see a new film that was creating a buzz. It was called Star Wars — and it changed his life. He was sitting near the front of the cinema, he recalls. “I’d never experienced such audience
