Award-winning film maker Sir Ridley Scott has gone back to his North-East roots to talk about the home movie which set him on the road to Hollywood. Steve Pratt reports.

A teenage boy cycles along the main street in 1950s Hartlepool in a short black and white film. Legions of Roman soldiers, led by Russell Crowe's Maximus Decimus Meridus, fight a fierce and bloody battle in wide screen and colour.

Two scenes from two very different films with, at first glance, nothing in common. But there is a link - both are the work of South Shields-born director Ridley Scott, knighted in the New Year's Honours List for his services to the British film industry.

Forty years separate Boy And Bicycle, his first film made with a borrowed Bolex camera from art school, and the epic Gladiator, which confirmed him as one of today's top directors and won 12 Oscar nominations.

Scott has returned to Boy And Bicycle as the 27-minute short is released on DVD as part of Cinema 16, which also features shorts by established directors and emerging talents, including Billy Elliot director Stephen Daldry, Peter Greenaway, Mike Leigh, Lynne Ramsay and Christopher Nolan.

Boy And Bicycle was shot in and around Hartlepool, where Scott studied at West Hartlepool College of Art, over the summer of 1956. The story follows a schoolboy (played by his brother Tony who also went on to become a Hollywood movie-maker) who he bunks off school and cycles to the coast.

Scott didn't finish the film until two years later, with a grant from the British Film Institute, after graduating from the Royal College of Art.

It provides not only a glimpse of Scott's embryonic directing talent but also a reminder of the North-East in the 1950s.

In the DVD commentary, Scott talks about the making of Boy And Bicycle and how it influenced his decision to become a director. This gives a rare and fascinating insight into his thinking and obvious love for the area in which he grew up.

"Hartlepool was a very visual place, a very beautiful place. People say it's kind of ghastly but it's not. A wonderful combination of seafront and beach, and ancient sea walls. I rather liked Hartlepool. It's in a weird position, ten miles down the coast is one of the biggest industrial centres. The only thing that kept the air clear was a perpetual off-shore breeze. It was very chilly. If you went swimming in the sea, you froze to death."

Scott, 65, worked for the BBC after college and then formed a production company to make commercials. Among the most memorable TV ads was the Hovis advert in which a delivery boy pushes a bicycle up a cobbled street.

His first feature film, The Duellists, won the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival. His hits since then include Alien, Blade Runner, Thelma And Louise, Black Hawk Down and Silence Of The Lambs sequel, Hannibal.

He recalls that the summer of 1956 was the time when both he and Tony decided to pursue film-making. "I think it really began to sink in with Tony because he very soon started to follow on the route I had taken, which was great."

Boy And Bicycle was very much a home movie. As well as his brother, his mother and father (as a menacing blind man) appear. The opening scene was shot in Scott's bedroom. Props were taken from around the family home.

"I'd already got into the process of set dressing, which would undo me later in films because I'd spend more time set dressing than talking to the actors. I finally managed to get that out of my system," he says.

The Raleigh bicycle ridden by Tony in the film was Ridley's. Travelling shots of him cycling around the streets of Hartlepool were filmed from the boot of the family car. "My father was the camera car driver. He thought we were both crazy but went along with it," recalls Scott.

What his father never found out was that the brothers nearly lost his car, a Morris Cowley, in the sea while filming the final scene. The tide came in and the vehicle sunk halfway up to the axle.

"I cut the camera and screamed at Tony to get back to the car. He couldn't drive, so I had to show him how to drive while I had to heave it from the back - or we would have lost the car," he says.

Seeing "a typical redbrick school" in Hartlepool on screen reminds Scott that he used to be bored with ordinary school, but loved going on to art college. So much so that he did night classes five times a week as well as regular daytime lessons. One scene in Boy And Bicycle was shot on the seafront where he used to go, with a bottle of beer, before night school.

His commentary provides a mini-master class for aspiring film-makers, as he talks of directors who influenced him and his thoughts on how to get started in the business.

"A bit of Hitchcock coming up," he says at one point. David Lean's masterpiece Great Expectations along with the films of Swedish director Ingmar Bergman and John Schlesinger coloured his work too.

If someone asks him what it takes to make a movie these days, he advises them: "Get a piece of paper, a pen, write down a story. Borrow, beg or steal some equipment, get some friends, press a button. You've got a film. It's that simple. It's getting that ethic in your head. I love that Nike phrase, 'Just do it'."

We learn that even on that first film, he storyboarded scenes in advance of shooting. Boy And Bicycle was pre-planned in a flat in Fulham while he was studying in London.

He still uses that method on the big movies he makes four decades later. "I have a photographic memory. I can see a location oncem and six months later draw it exactly the way I want to shoot it. When you're making movies that's a very useful capability," he says.

He advises film-makers not to be afraid to be visual, recalling that he's been criticised for being too visual. "I took it to heart for a couple of films and then thought, 'that's what I'm dealing with, I'm dealing in pictures'."

He remains doubtful about the value of film school, comparing it to painting lessons. "You can't teach painting, you can only sit there as an advisor and get into discussions," he says.

"To say you must paint like that or make films like that is an absolute nonsense because you're led by your own personality, experiences and, hopefully, your own originality. What you're looking for in any form of art is originality. You can only do it - there's that phrase again."

* For more information about Cinema 16 and to buy a copy, price £20, go to the website on www.cinema16.co.uk