Ridley Scott with Russell Crowe and (below) Denzel Washington with co-stars in American Gangster

As befits a gruff, no-nonsense Teessider, Ridley Scott has always been far more in touch with his audience — the bums on seats — than with critics or cineastes. The latter have a tendency to turn up their effete noses whenever Scott’s name comes up in polite conversation. Even as audiences flocked to his latest film, American Gangster, which tore up the box-office when it opened in the States last weekend, earning a huge $46.3m in three days, the critics couldn’t bring themselves to praise Scott unreservedly. Of course they admired American Gangster, which stars Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe, for its “consummate professionalism on every level”, as the critic for the film trade paper Variety put it, but, he added: “It just doesn’t quite feel like the real deal; it delivers, but doesn’t soar.”

While no cineaste likes to acknowledge it, what has become increasingly obvious is that Scott, who remains astonishingly prolific even as he nears his 70th birthday, is among the two or three most influential film-makers of his generation. In fact, via films such as Blade Runner, Alien, The Duellists, Black Rain, Gladiator, Kingdom of Heaven, Black Hawk Down and now American Gangster, Scott’s striking and emphatic style may have had more impact on how we interpret the world visually than the work of any film-maker alive. There is even an argument to be made for him as the most influential feminist director, having created Sigourney Weaver’s iconic heroine, Ellen Ripley, in Alien —subject of reams of adulatory feminist theses — and brought Thelma & Louise to the screen.

Despite this, a grudging carping has followed Scott throughout his career, especially from those who distrust his grounding in advertising and commercials. Sight & Sound complained of his “facile eye”, and “disastrous ‘stylishness’ ”, adding that “ ‘beautifully photographed’ is a term that merges characterless proficiency with the kind of buying eye that so undermines Scott as an artist”.

Yet as Blade Runner: The Final Cut, Scott’s definitive reauthoring of what may be his masterpiece, and American Gangster are released almost simultaneously, you have to appreciate not just the astonishing range of his work, but how he has matured as a film-maker. As he has grown older and more successful, he has tempered the exaggerated visual style that Blade Runner exemplifies, although Scott says that what he now most likes about that film is “its cadence, its very deliberate pacing”.

The Sir Ridley Scott of today is far more respectful of story and character, both of which American Gangster — which is as close as anyone has come recently to evoking crime sagas such as The Godfather, Serpico and Prince of the City — has in spades. As a director who no longer feels he has anything to prove, he has been quietly reacting against the often overstylised visual world he was so instrumental in creating.

“Yes, it’s everywhere now,” he says when I ask about the effect he has had on the visual side of film-making, “to a degree that is almost damaging. There’s less emphasis on good material, a good script.... Now I tend to be less visual, because sometimes the visuals and the beauty get in the way of the story.”

American Gangster is the story of Frank Lucas, a once notorious but forgotten 1970s Harlem drug lord, and Richie Roberts, the cop who brought Lucas down. Scott persuaded Crowe, with whom he’d worked on Gladiator and the comedy A Good Year, to play Roberts, even though the Lucas role was obviously the showier part, by beefing up his role. “I always thought the Richie character had to be almost as big as Lucas,” Scott says. “Little by little, we brought Russell’s part up to what it is now, bringing in a lot of the really interesting private-life stuff. The studio said, ‘But isn’t all that stuff incidental?’ And I said, ‘No, it makes him a great character.’ The same with Lucas: it’s as important to meet his mother as to see him peddling dope.” As for snaring Washington? “I knew he’d play it like a big tuna, but I also knew Denzel had nothing better in front of him.”

Scott admits he and the volatile Crowe “have had our hurricanes, but he loves the fact that I move really fast and know exactly what I’m going to do. Somebody has to make a decision, and that’s my job. Actors like Russell and Denzel don’t want endless discussions about motivation. That’s all bullshit. It’s more about keeping it simple”.

Although Scott was attracted by the chance to make a mythic American crime drama in the style of the great films of the late 1970s, he insists his main reference was his own experience of New York, which he first visited in 1962. After studying art and graphics at the Royal College of Art, in London, he went to New York to see if he could apprentice with any of the photographers he admired, such as Richard Avedon, Irving Penn or Bert Stern. “I had no money, and was living at the YMCA on 34th Street,” he recalls. “It was pretty tough. I used to walk through Harlem and take photographs.”

Scott admits the shoot for the two-hour-40-minute film was a logistical nightmare, with “360 scenes in 180 locations”. While Scott is no doubt gratified that American Gangster has touched a nerve with audiences starved of smart, engaging entertainment, he has already nearly finished his next project, with Leonardo DiCaprio and Crowe (again), Body of Lies, a political thriller set in Washington, the Middle East and North Africa. Then he plans to work with Crowe yet again — he will play the Sheriff of Nottingham in a reimagining of the Robin Hood story.

I wonder, as he approaches 70, if he has any plans to retire. “No,” he responds quickly, “that’s out of the question. It’s a stressful job, but I feel alive doing it; the more pressure, the better.” And how does he manage to get so much done? “My mother said, ‘Get up early.’ So I do.”