Ridley Scott on Getty’s Millions—and Replacing Kevin Spacey in Ten Days
A kidnapped grandson, a billionaire who refuses to pay, and a director who replaced his leading actor at the last minute. Ridley Scott and his cast discuss the human cost of All the Money in the World.
In 1973, John Paul Getty III, grandson of one of the richest men in the world, was kidnapped in Rome. His captors demanded $17 million. His grandfather, J. Paul Getty, refused to pay.
Getty’s explanation was brutally practical: if he paid a ransom for one grandchild, the others could become targets. He sent his security adviser, former CIA officer Fletcher Chase, to investigate, suspecting that the teenager might have arranged the kidnapping to extract money from him. The kidnappers answered by cutting off their hostage’s ear and sending it to an Italian newspaper.
Ridley Scott turns that confrontation between wealth and human life into All the Money in the World. When we meet in Los Angeles, he tells me that the screenplay arrived unexpectedly from someone he trusted, rather than through the usual development process at his company, Scott Free.
Scott is celebrated for journeys into space and the distant past, from Alien and Blade Runner to Gladiator and Kingdom of Heaven. But greed, crime and violence run through films such as American Gangster and The Counselor. The Getty story brings those concerns together.
The emptiness of having everything
“I am always looking for different things,” Scott says. “This script landed on my desk. I read it and liked its tone. I knew about Getty because he was famous in London in the sixties and seventies. The story had a journalistic quality, and I like that.”
He compares the attraction to American Gangster: the sense of approaching an elusive truth through reporting. The material suggested an expansive, almost documentary treatment, but with the suspense of a thriller. The violence was part of what made the stakes impossible to ignore.
For Scott, the central figure is a man so absorbed in building and administering a fortune that he neglects his family. The result is a portrait of what the director describes as the emptiness of wealth: enormous financial success accompanied by damaged relationships.
Getty’s fortune was built in oil, with his Middle Eastern business interests playing a decisive role. Scott also has a long working relationship with the region. He has made films there and returned repeatedly to its landscapes, particularly those of Morocco and Jordan.
For All the Money in the World, he went back to Wadi Rum, which he had used for The Martian. He knew the landscape, the railway and the visual possibilities of introducing Getty through a train journey into the desert. Those practical memories helped him turn a familiar location into part of another story.
A mother becomes the film’s moral centre
Scott’s cinema has also made room for women who act rather than wait to be rescued, from Ripley in Alien to Thelma & Louise. Here the film’s moral centre is the kidnapped boy’s mother, Gail, played by Michelle Williams.
“The foundation of this story is how the mother deals with the situation,” Scott explains. “How she can be brave and strong in order to get her son back.”
When I speak to Williams, she expresses admiration for the director’s understanding of women and his willingness to put one at the centre of a major film.
“Here is a man of eighty who doesn’t need to take a chance on me, or on a woman, or on a film about a woman,” she says. “But he does it because he believes in it.”
Gail’s predicament is that her surname makes her appear wealthy while her circumstances leave her unable to meet the demand. Divorced from Getty’s son, she has given up financial support in order to keep custody of her children. The kidnappers see the name Getty and assume that she controls the money. The grandfather who actually has it will not listen.
“She is in a real bind,” Williams says. “Her last name is Getty, so everybody thinks she can pay, but she can’t. Her hands are completely tied. It is almost a case of mistaken identity. They think she is the person in charge.”
Towards the end of the film, she says, Gail begins to turn that mistaken assumption into a source of resolve: if everyone insists she is responsible, she will start acting as though she has the authority to make things happen.
What would you do to save your child?
Gail’s struggle moves Chase, played by Mark Wahlberg, to challenge the man who employs him. As the danger to the boy grows, he demands action and becomes involved in negotiating with the kidnappers.
I ask Wahlberg about the conflict between that response and the principle of refusing to negotiate with terrorists. He insists that the family circumstances matter.
“When you understand that this is a family matter, and the immediate danger facing young Paul, I think you have to make some compromises,” he says. “Every situation is different.”
He is reluctant to extend the answer into a general judgement on American policy towards hostage-takers. That, he says, is a serious and complicated subject. But he returns to the question at the heart of the film: what would a person do to protect a child or somebody they loved?
From the outside, Getty’s refusal is almost impossible to comprehend. A man willing to spend millions on a work of art will not release the money that could save his grandson. Stories of his extreme frugality sit alongside his vast art collection and charitable giving.
Christopher Plummer, who plays him, wanted those contradictions to remain visible. A simple monster would be easier to condemn, but less interesting to understand.
“There were many colours, a tremendous variety in his character,” Plummer tells me. “I felt an identification and sympathy with him, and that was what I wanted to achieve. Ridley and I looked at him closely and tried to make him approachable, or at least give him some humanity.”
Replacing a star in ten days
Plummer’s performance arrived through a production crisis that became a story in itself. Kevin Spacey had originally played Getty. After sexual misconduct allegations against him emerged, Scott decided to replace him and reshoot his scenes with Plummer.
The prospect seemed almost impossible so close to release. Scott nevertheless completed the new filming in ten days, adding millions to the cost and requiring the cast and crew to return at extraordinary speed.
It was not the first time he had faced the loss of a principal actor. During Gladiator, Oliver Reed died before completing his work as Proximo. Scott finished the role using existing footage and digital techniques. Why not use a comparable solution this time?
The director says the situations were fundamentally different. Reed could not return, and the task was to complete the performance he had already given. With All the Money in the World, Scott could cast another actor and shoot the scenes again.
“The digital difficulties of bringing Oliver Reed back were harder,” he says. Replacing an actor meant more filming, but the practical work was something he understood and could organise.
He credits the professionalism of the team that assembled around him once the decision had been made. Laughing, he compares them to a formidable unit of Navy SEALs.
The achievement has a curious parallel with the subject of his film. Getty and Scott are very different men, but both possess an extraordinary confidence in their ability to carry out a plan that others consider implausible. One pursued a fortune; the other rebuilt a film on the brink of release. Perhaps that shared refusal to accept impossibility is part of what drew the director to the billionaire.
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