Sir Ridley Scott claims his Bee Gees biopic has been set aside after Paramount Pictures "charged the goalposts".
The 87-year-old filmmaker has been attached to the film exploring the life and career of the 'Stayin' Alive' hitmakers, but despite being "scheduled to begin shooting in early 2025", the project has now stalled.
Scott told GQ magazine: "The deal — the studio changed the goalposts. I said, ‘You can’t do that.’ They insisted.
"I said, ‘Well, I’m going to warn you, I will walk, because I will go on to the next movie.’ They didn’t believe me, and I did.”
Scott - known for his work on the likes of 'Gladiator', 'Blade Runner', the 'Alien' franchise and more - insisted while he knows he's "expensive", he's worth the money.
He added: "I was being asked to go too far. And I said, ‘No. Next!’
"They didn’t like my deal. So I said, I’ll move on. I’m expensive, but I’m f****** good.”
Scott is still expected to direct the Bee Gees film around September time, with the filmmaker swapping the order over his upcoming projects.
Elsewhere in the interview, he opened up on the appeal of a movie about the 'Night Fever' legends.
He explained: "I liked the working-class side of the Bee Gees. It’s all about competition with brothers...
"And then they lose Andy — Andy OD’d at 30… It’s more about the gift than the luck, right? It’s a fantastic story.”
He almost worked on a different Bee Gees project decades earlier, when there manager Robert Stigwood pitched a film to help repair their relationship as the group were "refusing to work together".
Scott suggested "something medieval" and met with the group, but he later found out the necessary funding wouldn't be available.
Scott recently suggested 1982 movie 'Blade Runner' flopped because of "industrial espionage" despite an all-star cast featuring the likes of Harrison Ford.
In a roundtable interview for The Hollywood Reporter, Scott said: “It enters the realm of industrial espionage. You’re destroying the subject before it’s out and [Kael] wrote this for the very posh …The New Yorker.
“I was actually kind of distressed, I mean enraged, so I wrote to the editor, saying, ‘If you hate me that much, just ignore me, don’t write anything.’ I never got a reply.”
While its release didn’t impress financially, ‘Blade Runner’ got a second chance after it was discovered at the Santa Monica Film Festival roughly a decade later which ultimately allowed the movie to become a cult classic.
The ‘Gladiator II’ director continued: “Then it was discovered in the Santa Monica Film Festival about 10 years later. There had been one or two die hards who quite liked it when it came out.
“So they called up Warner [Bros.] for a print and they had lost the negative. And so they went to a drawer and pulled out the drawer, didn’t look at it, sent it to the festival.
“It was minus the voiceover, had a bit of Vangelis, a bit of Jerry Goldsmith on it, and it ran and that reignited the whole thing. That’s the craziness of Hollywood.”
