LAST WINTER, two Columbus movies were filmed almost simultaneously on the Spanish mainland. While Scott shot his in Salamanca, Caceres and Seville (utilizing locations visited by the real Columbus), a rival production, headed up by Superman producing father-and-son team Alexander and Ilya Salkind and starring Marion Brando and little-known Greek-French stage actor George Corraface -- who inherited the lead role three days before filming began from original choice Timothy Dalton - used Segovia and Siguenza, just 75 miles away. Add in the woeful British "comedy" Carry On Columbus, and cinemagoers, at least, will find the 500th anniversary of Columbus' first landfall in the New World on October 12, 1492 somewhat difficult to ignore.

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"You know something?" says Scott the next morning over a less than healthy breakfast of coffee and cigarettes, his Geordie lilt long-since rounded - though not obliterated - by his sojourns in Hollywood. "In a funny sort of way I wasn't even aware of the anniversary. You go through cycles as a filmmaker - well I do anyway - and I found that the experience I enjoyed, not the most, but nearly the most was my first film, The Duellists. I love working in the past tense, I simply enjoy the process on a creative level. Eight films later, I still hadn't done a period film, and I wanted to go back." The Salkinds, of course, had initially approached Scott to direct their version of Columbus tale, with the answer coming back as a resounding negative. "Personally I didn't think it was dense enough," explains Scott of his decision to boot the Salkind script into touch. "It was leaning towards the adventure, and I felt it couldn't be as simple as that. They wanted to do the voyage, the arrival, find it, go back, triumph, end of movie. Voyages have been done before, and I couldn't see how you were going to make it interesting enough to hold up for two hours. I mean, what happens when you get there? You shout 'Land Ahoy' and that's it. In our film, the most interesting things occur after that. Clearly, with anyone who decides, in 1492, that they want to sail across the world into unknown waters you're going to have an adventure what ever you do. But I just thought the politics, the movement of the Moors out of Spain, the state of Europe at that particular time - it all made a very interesting, colourful background, and was also important to understanding the man."

Four-and-a-half months after Scott turned down the Salkinds, independent producer Alain Goldman showed up at Scott's Los Angeles office bearing a 20-page proposal penned by French journalist Roselyne Bosch - supplemented by copies of letters from Columbus uncovered from archives in Seville - offering an entirely fresh perspective on the story.

"My initial reaction was, 'Not another one,'" laughs Scott. "But they persevered." Bosch, then a political scribe for the French news magazine Le Point, had been in Seville in 1987 researching a story about the early preparations for the Columbus quincentenary when she became consumed by the wealth of information she'd unearthed about the man.

"He's such a legend you're not quite sure whether he really existed," states Bosch, "but seeing his handwriting was surprisingly moving." Scott was immediately infected by Bosch's passion for Columbus, his interest in the project at last aroused by her version of events. "Everybody knows who Columbus is - his name is as well known as Jesus Christ or Elvis Presley - but very few people know anything about him," he considers. " All you have is a popular, actually not even popular, historical conception of an adventurer who sailed west and changed the world. I found that Roselyne's approach of following the man through all his voyages and 23 years of life was completely different."

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Having nimbly jumped aboard, Ridley Scott began the development of a script with Bosch, honing down what he felt had the makings of a five-hour movie into something workable for the world's cinemas. His labours were unceremoniously interrupted, however, when he found himself on the receiving end of a lawsuit courtesy of the Salkinds.  "Alexander Salkind tried to sue me for what he called stealing an idea," he scoffs incredulously. "I'd only met him for one-and-a-half hours, exactly. That was my only conversation with him. It's a bit like turning down one Western, then somebody comes to you in six months' time, and my argument is, 'Am I never allowed to do another Western again?' If I'm approached with something and I say no, especially when it's about a known historical character, it's not an original idea, right? When it's a historical fact and it's generic, there's no case. It was absolutely ludicrous."

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