‘The Dog Stars’ Director Ridley Scott Fires Back at Claims He’s “Lazy” for His Signature Multi-Camera Style

Ridley Scott has never been shy about doing things his own way on set, and that stubborn streak is once again making headlines as he makes the press rounds for his new film ‘The Dog Stars.’ At 88 years old, the director shows no signs of slowing down or second-guessing the methods that have defined his career for decades.

That includes his well-known preference for shooting scenes with multiple cameras rolling simultaneously, a technique that lets him capture a scene from several angles in a single take rather than resetting for each shot. It’s a process his actors have described as demanding but exhilarating, requiring them to fully surrender to his rhythm on set.

That approach became a flashpoint back in 2024, when Scott’s longtime ‘Gladiator’ cinematographer John Mathieson described the director’s reliance on multiple cameras and heavy post-production cleanup as “really lazy” in a podcast interview, a comment that spread quickly across entertainment media at the time. Mathieson later walked the remarks back, telling Deadline the interview had been condensed in a way that made an observation about the wider film industry sound like a direct shot at Scott.

Now, promoting ‘The Dog Stars’ nearly two years later, Scott addressed the lingering criticism head-on in a new video interview, forcefully rejecting the idea that using several cameras at once has anything to do with laziness. He pushed back on the notion directly, arguing that the technique actually demands a sharper eye and more careful planning than shooting with a single camera, not less.

It’s a defense Scott has made in various forms before. He’s previously explained that running four to eleven cameras at once allows him to finish shooting days faster while giving his actors more freedom to stay in the moment during a scene, rather than repeating the same performance over and over for each new angle.

His two leads on ‘The Dog Stars,’ Jacob Elordi and Margaret Qualley, backed up that philosophy in a recent conversation with Collider’s Steve Weintraub, describing the multi-camera setup as intense but ultimately something they had to learn to trust completely once filming began. Elordi in particular said there was something freeing about handing over that much control to Scott’s process once he stopped fighting it.

The debate over Scott’s methods has only grown louder since he parted ways with Mathieson after ‘Gladiator II’ and brought on cinematographer Erik Messerschmidt for ‘The Dog Stars.’ Messerschmidt has been credited with delivering some of the film’s strongest visual work using that same multi-camera approach, which at least one reviewer noted almost felt like a direct rebuttal to Mathieson’s earlier criticism.

Even critics reviewing ‘The Dog Stars’ have weighed in on the ongoing conversation, with one Deadline review specifically defending the technique as especially useful for outdoor shoots where natural light is constantly shifting, allowing Scott to capture the same moment from multiple angles before conditions change. That reviewer went as far as calling the approach brilliant rather than a shortcut.

Clips of Scott’s latest comments have already circulated widely online, racking up hundreds of thousands of views within a day as fans and film buffs debated both sides of the argument once again. For a director who has spent nearly five decades building a reputation on his own terms, it seems fitting that he’d rather defend his process than apologize for it.

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