Ridley Scott

There are storytellers, and then there are world-builders, and Ridley Scott belongs firmly to the second tribe. Give him a doorway and he will paint the whole city behind it: rain-slicked future streets, second-century Rome, the cold corridors of a ship no one should have boarded. His Sun sits in Sagittarius, the Jupiter-ruled sign of the wandering sage, and it shows in the sheer restless reach of his work. This is the walking, mobile university, the free spirit forever on the go, forever gathering the exotic and the foreign and moving on to the next horizon, whether that horizon is medieval Jerusalem or the surface of Mars. He shines through scope, through the big-picture, top-down way of seeing everything at once.

Under that jovial sun burns a Scorpio Moon, and here is the emotional volcano the smiling surface never quite hides. His films go all or nothing, deep into obsession, survival, death and rebirth, the phoenix rising again and again. From The Duellists in 1977 through Alien, Blade Runner, Thelma and Louise and the Oscar-winning Gladiator, he has stared into darkness with a psychologist's unblinking eye. Sage and phoenix, wandering and burning. Few directors have shone so far by digging so deep.