The Way I See It: Rhea Scott

I was born in France, just outside Paris.

If I had to describe my upbringing, it would be ‘pink on the outside and pretty dark on the inside’. So much of it was based on appearance. My salvation was horses; our house was right next to the woods, and I used to visit the horses there. To this day, the smell of the forest is my peace of mind.

When I was 14, we moved to New York. It was quite a socialist move: it was the start of Mitterand’s second term, and my father wanted to make sure that we had the same opportunities that he’d had to become self-made and successful. He didn’t want our careers to be based on who we knew, which seemed to be the way it was going in France [under Mitterand]. In New York, I went to the French lycée, followed by art school at SUNY Purchase where I was the only math major there. Then I was shipped to a convent for a couple of years. Finally, I crawled my way back to America and went to Columbia University to study philosophy and mathematics.

The thing about philosophy is that it constantly requires you to go deeper. You can never really be satisfied at a surface level. Those lessons stay with you for life.

My personal philosophy has always been: ‘anything can happen’. While I was studying at Columbia, I ended up working for Donald Trump, as his VIP guest relations manager at the Plaza Hotel. When the time came for me to go back to university, his team said: “Just tell us how much money you want to make, when you want to work, and we'll work everything around you.”

Above: Throwback snaps of Scott.

I had no real plan [when I left New York to move to California]. I just had to get out. The survival instinct was primal: I wanted to be as far away from my family as I possibly could. Coming to California is what I think of as my ‘real’ birth, because I ended up with my adoptive family who I still have to this day.

I stumbled upon a career in production by just working, really, really hard and being annoyingly persistent. My boyfriend at the time was too lazy to get himself a proper agent, so he asked me. I started banging on the doors of people like Randy Skinner at Warner Bros, who was doing great work with the Red Hot Chili Peppers. That’s how Propaganda heard about me; this relentless little French girl.

My first job was a music video for Madonna. It was a massive job with a massive budget, and a dark theme. On the shoot, an extra ended up in a body bag for a bit too long, so there was almost a state of emergency. That definitely matched the dark theme.

Jan Wieringa, who was the head of commercials at Propaganda, was an extraordinary mentor. She gave me all of her kindness, her expertise, her wisdom, and her generosity. It was an incredibly male-dominated place in those days: out of 60 directors, Melodie McDaniel was the only Black woman. I have a Polaroid-style memory of sitting in a meeting room full of men with goatees, who were being incredibly aggressive towards Jan. The only giveaway that she was upset was that the side of her face got red.

People would probably have described me as a relentless maniac in the early days of my career, but [the 90s] was a relentless time. Even when I became pregnant with my first child, I couldn’t stop performing. Shortly after giving birth and pushing out a nine-pound baby, I was on a conference call with Michael Bay and Meatloaf. I took a week of maternity leave, which I thought was really brave, but in retrospect it was not. It was just really dumb.

Above: The David Fincher-directed Love Is Strong video.

I owe so much of my career to those days in Propaganda: it defined everything that I hated and everything that I loved. I witnessed the start of Satellite Films, and the birth of Spike Jonze [as a director]. It was incredible to be part of the mecca of music videos at the time. A moment I’ll never forget was sitting in a room with David Fincher in post for the Rolling Stones’ Love is Strong video: just being in his presence, watching what he was doing and recognizing his genius. That feeling was something I wanted to continue to seek in other directors.

I started Little Minx in 1998 while pregnant with my second child, Cuba [Tornado Scott], who is now also on my roster. I’d gone from working with Propaganda to working with Madonna for a year on music videos. Then I’d taken a month off and realised I didn’t want to work for anyone else anymore.

The phone was not exactly ringing off the hook at the time, so there were two choices. Either I would resurrect someone’s career, or I could look for interesting young talent like I’d done in the past and hope for the best.

My gift has always been developing talent from scratch. Occasionally, you feel like the stars are aligning, the timing is right and a few of them shoot up like rockets - like Malik Sayeed. He was working for Stanley Kubrick at the time, as a second-unit director of photography on Eyes Wide Shut. When I sat down with him, it was just such an incredible moment. I literally saw a golden halo around his head. I knew he was the one.

On our first job together, the video for Ex Factor, Lauryn Hill was eight hours late. As she was the only person in the video, there wasn’t much we could do without her, so while we were waiting, Malik shot some sparkles and flames. By the time she arrived, we’d burned through 8,000 feet of film. But my relationship with Malik is still an incredible one. We’ve worked together ever since.

Above: Ex Factor, Scott's first work with Malik Sayeed.

Little Minx has never been a cookie-cutter kind of commercial production company. From the start, the diversity in terms of what we were doing in short films, music videos and features made us a bit of a square peg in a round hole. Ironically, being that sort of company is actually what’s in fashion now.

My favourite work I’ve ever been involved with was the Little Minx Exquisite Corpse series of short films. Not just because it was incredibly successful, but because it was a way to develop the talent of emerging directors like Malik with no boundaries. One director would pick up where the previous one left off, with complete creative freedom.

I also loved Logorama, although I took my name off the film in the end. Of course, we didn’t clear any of the 2,500 logos, so we were all scared of getting sued, but I knew there was only one person with a recognizable last name who would actually be attacked: me.

Connection is so important. Even though some of my directors are not necessarily the easiest, it’s about working with people that I believe in. We can fight. But I work for people I love.

We can’t keep on having these conversations about diversity and inclusion. I’m much more interested in the doing than the talking. When I see a reel, I look at the work and the artistry, the culture that comes with it. Skin colour is irrelevant. It’s so important to make it about the work.

If AI is being used to unleash creativity, that is exciting. In the hands of one of the greats, like Jonathan Glazer or Chris Cunningham, we should be prepared for something extraordinary to happen. But it’s never going to replace a director like Ali Ali or David Shane, who are all about these little quirks that you observe in someone. These little stories, with those moments of silence. I don’t how [AI] could replicate that. I’m also really excited about how it democratizes certain tools, so even if you don’t have $800,000 dollars for VFX, you can create something fucking amazing. That nerdy kid sitting in his bedroom now has the opportunity for their project to come to fruition.

Above: Logorama, the Oscar-winning short worked on by Scott.

Is the industry better or worse since I started out? The bottom line is, it's different. Nostalgia will kill you. So, if you want to reminisce about the past, then it's time to pack it up. I'm eternally curious to see where things go next.

The worst and best day of my career was probably the day [Little Minx] left RSA. I was going through a divorce, I had four kids, and I had to move house and move my company too. I was the matriarch, so I had to anchor everybody down. But going independent turned out to be the best thing. One of the things that I’d struggled with within RSA – even though I'm indebted to it – is that its shadow is massive. After I left, people really got to know Little Minx. We came alive.

‘Always follow your crazy’ is what one of my dear friends, director Jeymes Samuel, always says, and it’s a great piece of advice. Being an adult and being reasonable is the killer of creativity for the most part.

If I wasn’t in production, I’d love to work with Mojave Rock Ranch, arid landscaping artists who build extraordinary worlds from cacti. Or with Francis Mallmann, the amazing Argentine chef who cooks with fire.

I used to think that my superpower as a mother of four was multitasking, but that's not true. In fact, it’s a mother’s ability to stop, block out the world around us and be completely present in the conversations that we have with our children. That ability to zone into the person who’s talking to me is something that people I work with have always noticed.

Above: French film director Louis Malle's Phantom India.

My favourite series is a triptych of films done by [French filmmaker] Louis Malle in the 1960s - at the height of his career, he took off and went to India with a Bolex camera. If I could time travel, I’d love to go back there with him.

My favourite work I’ve ever been involved with was the Little Minx Exquisite Corpse series of short films. Not just because it was incredibly successful, but because it was a way to develop the talent of emerging directors like Malik with no boundaries. One director would pick up where the previous one left off, with complete creative freedom.

If I could change anything about myself, I would add three inches to my legs.

My biggest fear is to become irrelevant. When you’ve been in the business for a long time, and it’s constantly changing, you start second-guessing your intuition. Sometimes when we lose a job, [I’ll think] how is that fucking possible? But I hope because I'm so curious all the time and always watching and reading things, it won’t happen.

I'm a little bit dyslexic, which makes me a slow reader, so I find it easier to focus on the human side of things rather than read screenplay after screenplay. I was always terrified of the people who go home with 12 scripts to read at the weekends. So music videos worked for me, but if I had to do it again, I think I would spend more time doing independent movies – the sort that studios like A24 are doing so well.

I've come close to death many times. When I first came to America, I had a major elbow injury and spent the first two months in hospital with septicaemia. Another time Malik, Andrew [Dosunmu] and I were in this underground car park in Johannesburg, South Africa, shooting a video for Youssou N’Dour and Wyclef Jean, when a car full of militia with massive weapons came towards us. They started talking to our driver and suddenly they were pointing a machine gun at Andrew’s head. I got out of the car and just pushed everybody aside, which was incredibly dangerous. I remember I was wearing a pink dress, and afterwards it became known as the lucky dress.

The worst was when I fell 20 feet off a waterfall in Hawaii and had to be airlifted out. They wouldn’t put me in[side] the helicopter because of [the risk of] Covid, so I was just hanging there. Luckily, I hit the ground with my face. My Tunisian cheekbones saved me.

Above: Scott's favourite work through Little Minx, the Exquisite Corpse series of short films.

I’m an introvert; being quiet and observing is a comfortable space for me. I live in the last house, at the end of the longest dead end in all of Los Angeles. It’s 12 minutes to Sunset [Boulevard], so I can still get to civilization. But man, you better be a good friend for me to get down that mountain on a Friday night!

The only person that I would call my hero is my brother, who passed away when he was 34 years old. He was one of only five students in the Department of Applied Mathematics at Columbia University. I thought I was a big shot, doing music videos for a million dollars. But everything he dealt with had four or five more zeroes. The craziest coincidence is that he was born two days apart from Malik, and we found out later that the place I threw my brother's ashes was where Malik was born.

Social media is the single greatest and worst human invention. It’s like crack. You can find some really incredible things there, but I regularly have to delete it from my phone.

If I was president for the day, I’d try to stop pretending that I'm relentlessly working to stop the war in Gaza.