Ridley Scott interview

"In this instance the enemy was the [audience] preview, which has grown and grown and grown over the years and is becoming like a science. But it's ridiculous, the whole process of making movies and writing screenplays is visceral and intuitive. When you actually go to a preview you're asking 600 people to come from different demographics, to become Siskel & Ebert by the end of the evening. It's absolutely rubbish. Normally people will come and say, at the end of the film ' liked that' or 'disliked it' or 'kind of thought it was okay'. That's it. But at the end of a preview 600 sheets go out to 600 people, a very detailed questionnaire and that night it's computerised so the following morning I'm looking at a breakdown of the information, fighting demographics of women under 22 or over 27 or guys under 18. By going to a preview a director become insidiously infected by the process, so by the end of it you are thinking 'it may be a bit too long'. That's how the original release arrived at 2 hours 23 minutes. So it was my fault. The studio aren't to be at all blamed for this, they aren't bullies. I could have said '3.08 and that's it', and they'd have backed off and said so be it."

Were there other differences in what you wanted and what the studio expected?

"Bill [Monahan] writes very dense, prosaic screenplays, some of the best I've ever read. The dialogue is very steeped in history, I would almost define him as a historian, he's so knowledgeable. But the studio at one stage said 'what's this dialogue, the guy writes in double negatives'. I said 'what's a double negative?'. I said the dialogue was actually beautiful, it was a token to being period. If they really wanted to really go period you don't want to hear William Shakespeare in a film that cost this much, so this is a good acknowledgement of the period."

The major beneficiary in the Director's Cut are the scenes returned to the film with Sibylla and her son aren't they?

"Bill and I speculated historically and fenced endlessly with historians who said that a lot of this was inaccurate. What they didn't know was that Bill had gone back to first editions of Muslim writings which were then translated from Syrian dialect into French and then into English. That's the thing about history, they're basing their findings on the priest in France in the 15th century writing about events in the 13th century. He wasn't there, so what was he basing his writing on? He was basing his writing on another historian in the 12th century, so already we're blind. History is only conjecture, and the best historians try to do it as accurately as they can. They try to accurately reassemble the facts and then put them down on paper."

So how did you bring these historical characters to life?

"Reynald was a warmonger. Guy de Lusignan was married to Sibylla, who was the sister of Baldwin the Leper King, who got leprosy at 15. Instead of being asked to stand down he insisted on becoming king. He became impossible to look at by the time he was 18. He had silver masks made and wore gloves because he was rotting from the inside out. And he functioned until he dropped down dead at 24. The boy king was then crowned, Sibylla became the Princess Regent. The danger comes from this lunatic Guy de Lusignan, to whom she was given at the age of 15. And this guy, because he's a man in these particular times, would have definitely affected the decisions on the throne. We know the boy became ill after ten months of being crowned and history said the boy was murdered by his mother."

But you disagree with this view, don't you?

"We think that was nonsense because if you're going to murder a boy for power you kill him with a bad oyster when he's five or six. Or make sure there was a riding accident. You wouldn't wait until he was already crowned. So you start to apply contemporary, sensible thinking to that idea, because it's stupid. It doesn't make sense. It's been written, historically, that the boy may have died of leprosy. This is where the clue is, this is how you assemble these screenplays and this is where historians tend not to have the imagination they ought to have. We look at that and go, that's interesting, because if the mum was rumoured to have killed the boy and I don't believe she killed the boy for power if the boy was rumoured to have had leprosy then that may have been possible. She would have performed a mercy killing on the boy because of the hideous life that her brother had over nine or ten years, that she was not ready to let her son suffer. That made sense to me. So that's where you reassemble the facts historically."

There is a final showdown at the end between Balian and Guy that you had also cut out first time round, which you describe as a movie moment.

"It's to do with revenge, the hero must avenge himself if for nothing else because of the bad behaviour of Guy de Lusignan. I was a bit uneasy about that scene because it was a little trite. The studio pleaded for this moment, so I said okay, even though we've had swordfights up to the gills in the battle for Jerusalem. I just played it out like the Duellists in the back yard somewhere."

Orlando Bloom has never been so heroic than in your film, has he?

"He did pretty good. In Troy he was asked to play Paris, who essentially would be described as weak. The others are strong, Brad Pitt and Eric Bana. They're the hunks. And poor Orlando was there playing Paris, though he did get the girl! I think he did great in this, it's a big film to walk into. He's always been behind someone else. As Paris he was behind Brad and Eric, so he was supported, but here he's right out front and I thought he did very well."

How important is it for an audience to know about the history and the characters in a film like this?

"I think the story should unfold. I think a film should always be ahead of the audience. There's no equation, a film can be an hour ahead of the audience and they're sitting there going 'what's going on' and suddenly it all falls together."

What was the reaction to the film in the Muslim world?

"I've been asked to go to Egypt and Syria to pick up awards. And I've been asked to go to New York as well, to actually go to the Muslim societies where they want to thank me. This film is about good news, in a sentence it's about accepting another man's philosophy and religion."