Ridley Scott on whether the real Frank Lucas still has money from dealing drugs:

"The appearance is no. I think he's pretty well close to the... he's not close to the bone, exactly. I think he's probably on some kind of pension or whatever. But you cant really tell, actually. He's on the set every day and his family are always around him, but you dont really get any clues of any wealth there. I dont think so."

Scott on wherher he looked at similar period films like Panic in Needle Park to help American Gangster:

"I was there. 1962. I used to walk the streets of Harlem and do a lot of big black and white photographs in Harlem. And the war zone was The Bowery. It was a total war zone, bodies lying the streets, alcoholics drunk and dying... drunk and dying! And no one was doing anything about it, you know, because there was no real serious AA then. At that point it was knitted into an infrastructure. The United States is excellent for AA and abuse, but in those days it was criminal to get drunk when actually you didnt realize the guy's an alcoholic. Its a disease."

Scott on Richie switching from prosecution to defense:

"He used his bar for prosecution. He decided he wanted to be defense and so he could just do that. By doing that, he could then say to Frank, 'Right. Were gonna talk turkey. Youre going to get 72 years. Youre going to die in jail. Otherwise Ill get you out in 15. I want all the corrupt cops.' And thats what Frank did. Now Frank said, 'Don't tell.' I said, 'Thats what you did.' So he did 15 years, which is not a lot for what he did. I think in the short small years, there's half a million addicts in New York City. So imagine that's compound interest."

On whether he thought of Richie's transition could be more prominent:

"Thats four hours. You cant do service to... I think the reason why this is a really good script, and therefore that can very often define the movie, is that it's very selective. It's complex. It's 360 scenes. It's 180 locations and you're able to follow it. It's a nightmare to shoot. To follow it with its density - it is dense, there's no question about it. If you then go to the CIA, you get diffused."

On whether he had Laurence Fishburne and Eric Bana as back-up if he didn't get the right cast:

"No. I always knew I was going to get Denzel, and I always knew I was going to get Russell. And even though they play it like a big tuna, I know I'm going to get them one way or the other."

On why he was so confident and sure he'd get both stars:

"I knew he [Russell] had nothing better in front of him, first, and I knew he liked it. As soon as Russell goes, 'Hmmm...' then you know that's the first, thats the one, so you know there's something there. It's too intelligent to ignore it. And Russell likes to always do something that, you know, he's very, very, very cautious about. Say something like Gladiator because it has the perception of being a movie rather than a film, whereas The Insider is a film."

Ridley Scott on the difference between a movie and a film:

"A movie, I think, is ephemeral, a film is more serious. Sometimes they crossover. I think Gladiator was a good crossover movie that then reaches everyone, had enough element of truth in it where historians write to me and thank me for doing it, because it's reawoken interest in the Roman Empire at universities and schools. Thats serious. So when that happens, thats really cool. I really like that when that happens."

Scott on what he sees as a director that other people don't see:

"I dont know. I mean, I think it's all to do with art, original background, art school, seven years of art school. I painted very seriously for two years. I have a studio about this big when you're like that. And you're all by yourself in the room with the smell of turpentine and oil paint, every bloody morning and cigarettes and you sit there staring at the canvas hating yourself for what you did yesterday. So then you scrape that all off, and this is when you're doing serious work; this is not painting cottages in the Cottswails. I mean, this is where you're agonizing over what the subject is going to be. And the tutor will come in with his pipe and go, 'What'd you do that for?' And so you have this intellectual discussion about the painting, and I hated it. So then, transferred over to graphic design would give me a target and a, well, bigger canvas, funnily enough. Probably I'd go into advertising and maybe be a still photographer. I wanted to be a big still photographer like Richard Avedon, Irving Penn, Burt Stone."