It's doubtful that someone with Ridley Scott's clout could be forced to use a writer without any say on the matter.
Sounds like scapegoating to me.
There was no coercion involved. Scott is a visual director (and possibly also an actor director), and that's all he seems to care about. Simply put, he just doesn't seem to understand writing and generally doesn't get too involved in that part of film making. He simply delegates the job to somebody else and he is good to go, whatever the results, and i think this is his biggest flaw. Indeed, the only reason his earlier films were better is that he had better writers at his disposal. But even back then some of his films turned out to be crap when the writer didn't know what the fuck he was doing. Like in Legend, where the script was an incoherent mess but the visuals were still spectacular, so that you had extreme care in one aspect of the film but complete carelessness in the other, which seems an inexplicable contradiction until one realizes that the carelessness was there from the beginning.
