Deadline has published a great interview with Ridley Scott in which he talks about how Star Wars got him to do Alien instead of Tristan & Isolde. This is a really interesting interview which also let’s us know how he’s makes some of the decisions he does when he films.
The reason to why he’s not directing the next Blade Runner seems to be having or wanting to continue working on the next Prometheus film.
DEADLINE: Why didn’t you direct the sequel?
SCOTT: Alcon bought the title, and asked if I had any ideas. I did. So fundamentally it’s my essay about what happens and what the film is about. I was going to get writers, but decided to call up my old buddy Hampton Fancher because he walks the walk and talks the talk, albeit in these awful sandals. We came up with a nice tight target. He said he wouldn’t write the screenplay, but wrote a short novel. This was one of the writers I had the best experience with, on the original Blade Runner, meeting him every day, polishing the script. We’d solve one problem and there would be another. It drove him crazy but what happened is that what started off as a small contained play inside an apartment, and into an epic. The new one, we’ve got a very good director in Denis Villenueve. He has taken my script, from Hampton and Michael Green, and that’s what he’ll make. I can’t direct them all, and I have to do Prometheus.
You can read the whole interview at
http://deadline.com/2015/09/ridley-scott-the-martian-star-wars-2001-alien-blade-runner-prometheus-toronto-film-festival-1201522484/