Hollywood on Crusade

The director of "Alien," "Blade Runner," "Thelma & Louise," "Gladiator" and "Black Hawk Down" has reddish hair, a whitening beard -- he's 67 -- and, on this azure California morning, the resigned expression of a man who'd much rather be sweating it out on location in Morocco than trapped in a luxury hotel with the entertainment press.

Born in England in 1937, Scott says he grew up worshiping John Wayne and Charlton Heston. In art school he affected Gauloises cigarettes and got drunk on Ingmar Bergman and Akira Kurosawa -- artists who, he says, "don't just consider the material, they consider what light is on the tree in the background." With both Hollywood and alternative cinema as part of what he calls his "DNA," he has combined formula moviemaking with a rich, frame-packing visual style that's kept him in demand since his first feature, "The Duellists," appeared in 1977.

He always knew, he says, that he wanted to make films about what he calls the "iconic figures" so beloved of Hollywood: outsiders who "sit on the cutting edge of society" and develop their own special ethical codes. Cops, for example, or cowboys. Or those medieval dudes with the heavy-metal body suits and codes of chivalry.

In the fall of 2001, after some false starts, it finally started to happen.

Scott was working on a different project with screenwriter William Monahan when he raised the subject. "I said, 'What do you know about knights,' " Scott recalls, "and he said, 'In armor? Hard armor or chain mail?' " The director laughs. He knew he'd found his man.

This conversation occurred "in the shadow of 9/11," he says. He's sure his knight film would have happened with or without that cataclysm or the wars that followed it -- but he also says that 9/11, and the strong reaction to Bush's crusade remark, was part of the reason he decided not to put the word in its title.

It was still going to be set during the Crusades, however. This was Monahan's doing. The screenwriter had argued that these hard-fought holy wars would offer the most dramatic context in which to develop Scott's knightly hero.

But which Crusade? History gave them a lot of options.

The historical Crusades were varied and complex, and they're difficult for a modern nonspecialist to keep straight. The Crusading era began on Nov. 27, 1095, when Pope Urban II -- sketching a horrifying though largely fictional portrait of Muslim crimes against eastern Christians -- called for armed volunteers to perform an act of penance that would help them achieve salvation. They were to march to the aid of their Orthodox brethren in Constantinople -- who'd asked for help fending off the Seljuk Turks -- and, while they were at it, take back the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem.

The end of the movement has often been dated to the fall of the last mainland Crusader bastion in the Middle East in 1291. Many historians find this definition too narrow, because it leaves out various later efforts, not to mention the closer-to-home Crusades proclaimed against assorted European pagans, heretics and political enemies of the papacy. But never mind all that: 20th Century Fox wasn't going to fund a Ridley Scott extravaganza on the Albigensian Crusade or the War of the Sicilian Vespers.

The filmmakers could have opted for the chaotic but triumphant First Crusade, which culminated in 1099 as Jerusalem fell to the Christian soldiers after 461 years of Muslim rule. A small problem: They'd have had to deal with the tendency of those pioneering Crusaders to slaughter European Jews on their way east, and with the brutal massacre of Jerusalem's Muslims and Jews after the Christian victory.

They could have gone for the Fourth Crusade, a wildly misbegotten venture that ended with the western Christian army fighting not Muslims in Palestine but Orthodox Christians in Constantinople (which they ruthlessly sacked). Or they could have picked the much-chronicled Third Crusade, in which England's King Richard the Lionhearted faced off against the legendary Salah al-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub, better known as Saladin, the Kurdish-born leader who had recently united the Muslims of Egypt and Syria.