Ridley Scott's new movie is about the end of the world, but he's far from done

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Set us as preferred Ridley Scott keeps looking down while we’re talking, a thick marker in his hand.Earlier in our conversation, which veers rapidly across his prolific career, he held up a series of storyboards scrawled on white paper.

Long known in Hollywood as “Ridleygrams,” they’re for his next project, an adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Treasure Island.” Now, it appears the filmmaker has been drawing for almost the entire hour of our Zoom call.“I’m not bored,” he says, a smile on his face.But Scott, speaking from his home in the French countryside, has the sheepish look of a kid who’s been caught not paying attention in class.

“I’m just always working on this,” he says.It’s not news that Scott, 88, is an exceptional visual director.It seems obvious that someone who creates films would be interested in pictures.

But since Scott’s early features, including his 1977 debut “The Duellists,” a historical drama about rival officers during the Napoleonic Wars, and his groundbreaking 1979 space horror film “Alien,” Scott has allowed his stories to speak through evocative, immersive images rather than unnecessary exposition.The British director says it’s because he got his start in advertising after attending the Royal College of Art in London.After 1982’s neon-coated sci-fi thriller “Blade Runner,” Scott notably made the iconic Apple Macintosh computer ad “1984,” a memorable Orwellian-themed clip that contained suggestions of the dystopias that would continue to fascinate Scott in his filmmaking.“Advertising in England at that point became a competitive art form,” he says, pointing to the notorious “Adland Five,” a group of directors that included Hugh Hudson, Adrian Lyne, Alan Parker, Scott and his brother Tony.

“I’ve got a show reel which is 50 years old ...