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Joaquin Phoenix in Napoleon
In 1977 a brash young British ad man called Ridley Scott, who’d made a bit of a name for himself with the nostalgic “boy on a bike” Hovis commercial, went to Los Angeles. His mission was to flog his first film, an arthouse Napoleonic number called The Duellists, and plot his planned follow-up, a take on the medieval romance Tristan and Isolde.
Within days Scott’s hopes were dust. The studio had ordered only seven copies of The Duellists. To cheer himself up the director went to see a new film that was creating a buzz. It was called Star Wars — and it changed his life. He was sitting near the front of the cinema, he recalls. “I’d never experienced such audience participation. It was like a rock concert. I thought: ‘Why the hell am I doing Tristan and Isolde?’ I was depressed for a month. Then, out of the blue, someone sent me a script called Alien.” Scott never looked back. Star Wars showed him what he really wanted to do: make big films that people would watch, and boy did he stick to his guns. After Alien came Blade Runner, Thelma & Louise, Gladiator, The Martian — popcorn cinema with brain as well as brawn.
At 85 Scott is still on a roll, and now comes his latest really big one, Napoleon. “Frankly, he was one motherf***er — wow,” Scott gushes of the soldier, visionary and emperor who modernised France and terrified its neighbours. Joaquin Phoenix plays Bonaparte in a biopic that zips through his greatest hits and misses — Austerlitz, Moscow, Waterloo — while Boney mopes after his cheating wife, Josephine (Vanessa Kirby, who played the young Princess Margaret in The Crown). The movie feels even bigger than Napoleon’s ego.
Scott with Joaquin Phoenix on the set of Napoleon
Years ago Stanley Kubrick wanted to make a film about the icon. Steven Spielberg planned one too, as did Baz Luhrmann. But their versions hit the buffers, for various reasons including finances and death. Nobody could stop Scott, though. When I mention those directors who only tried where he succeeded, Scott says: “Stanley called me the week Alien opened. He said: ‘It’s Stanley Kubrick.’ I said: ‘F*** off!’ He said: ‘No, it’s Stanley Kubrick.’ He said: ‘I just watched Alien — how did you bring that creature out the guy’s chest?’”
He is on rollicking, slightly unhinged form at his home in Provence. He had been shooting a sequel to another of his blockbusters, Gladiator, before it got postponed by the actor’s strike. He has kept himself busy editing: Napoleon in the cinema is two and a half hours long, but when it hits the streaming site Apple, Scott is adding an hour. “Can cinema audiences really take more than three hours?” he asks, ever the crowd-pleaser. “But longer is perfect for streaming. You can press pause, get a beer, resume.”
Which scenes won’t make the cinema cut? “I am obsessed with the fact Napoleon had piles,” says Scott, who believes that the failed invasion of Russia in 1812 could have been different if the man in charge had not had haemorrhoids. Judge for yourself in the streaming edit. “It’s like having a migraine up your butt! I’ve never had them, but it’s a horseman’s dilemma.”
I ask about the film’s respect for history. In real life Josephine was six years older than her husband, while Kirby is 13 years younger than Phoenix. “I don’t think it matters,” Scott scoffs. “I’ve never experienced it in my life but I always see it, mature women with immature men.”
There is plenty more for historians to nitpick. At one point, in a spectacular scene, Napoleon’s cannons fire at the Pyramids. “I don’t know if he did that, but it was a fast way of saying he took Egypt,” Scott says.
“Like all history, it’s been reported,” he adds. “Napoleon dies then, ten years later, someone writes a book. Then someone takes that book and writes another, and so, 400 years later, there’s a lot of imagination [in history books]. When I have issues with historians, I ask: ‘Excuse me, mate, were you there? No? Well, shut the f*** up then.’” In July, the historian Dan Snow, commenting on the trailer, said the film “ain’t a documentary”. Scott countered Snow by saying: “Get a life.”
Scott was born into a military family in South Shields, Co Durham, in 1937. The family moved about a lot before he went down south, to the Royal College of Art to study photography. There he made a short film, Boy and Bicycle, starring his “very talented young brother”, Tony, who went on to be a director too, making Top Gun and Enemy of the State before taking his own life in 2012. No family wowed Hollywood quite like those British brothers.
The older Scott puts a lot of his success down to his early career in advertising, which he fell into because it was better paid than the BBC. “I took off in that job,” he says, learning how to communicate fast, telling stories in 30 or 60 seconds and never forgetting the need to be efficient. “My own definitive plan is that there is no plan,” he explains. “Since Gladiator I’ve made 19 movies — I’m busy.”
French connection: Joaquin Phoenix and Vanessa Kirby in Napoleon
Martin Scorsese has a fear of his time running out. Does Scott share that concern? “Well, since he started Killers of the Flower Moon I’ve made four films.” So he is not weighed down by mortality? “No, I don’t think about it. I get up in the morning and say: ‘Ah great! Another day of stress.’”
What Scott is weighed down by, though, is one review that a renowned critic gave Blade Runner, nearly 42 years ago. “My career has been paved with perceived disasters,” he rages. “The biggest? I got crucified by Pauline Kael [in The New Yorker] for Blade Runner. I was stunned. It got personal. I was furious because I knew I had done something special.” The story of Deckard (Harrison Ford), replicants and rain is an unsurpassed sci-fi noir. “It is a sophisticated view of the possible future,” he adds. “It says: ‘AI has feelings.’”
How will artificial intelligence change his industry? “We haven’t felt it yet,” Scott says. “But my concern is it getting into the hands of people with absolutely no conscience. You know who they are — so rich it doesn’t matter — and already we are experiencing global crises and these wankers are not taking it on board.” I assume he means Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg, but before I can ask he rushes off again on another tangent. “Do you have kids?” Yes. “I’m very concerned about the future. The stupidity of how we have seen global warming coming at us like a tidal wave. How stupid can you get?”
He blows a raspberry. “The world is bowling along with this blind notion that somehow it will be OK, but it won’t.” Scott grew up during the Second World War, so is no stranger to existential dread. “I’m a war baby, so I was under the stairs or in the shelter every night while we got bombed by this lunatic from Germany. He was mad, cray-zee.”
David Chase, the writer of The Sopranos, once compared the threat of climate change to Cold War fears about nuclear Armageddon, I say. “The atomic bomb is nothing compared to what is about to happen,” Scott says. “Mother Nature can shake us off like a flea — she wouldn’t even know we’re here. They’re advertising holiday resorts in places where it’s 112 degrees [Fahrenheit]. Are you kidding? We’re going to be living by night and sleeping by day.”
All of which sounds like a decent plot for a film, although the director has his plate full. Once the strike ends it is back to Gladiator 2, with Paul Mescal in the lead. Then Scott will make a western. Then a film about banks. “I always work three or four ahead.”
Does he think modern audiences, raised on simplistic superheroes, can cope with the antiheroes Scott has made a career from, even up to his recent forays into the Getty and Gucci families? Is there a lack of nuance in modern cinema? “In big movies yes,” he says. “But in TV something is changing. I have to have a bedtime story so I always watch something before bed, and little by little television is offering something challenging, not the usual suspects saving the world. I’m not someone who loves superheroes.”
This is the crux of Scott: a man who makes blockbusters with mass appeal but respects his audience’s intelligence. He goes on to argue that his own characters are heroic — superheroic even — but without the need to “fly off the screen” wearing a cape. Ford’s character, he says, is a hero in Blade Runner, fighting to find the truth about who he is. Sigourney Weaver is too, as Ripley versus the alien. And so was Russell Crowe, in Gladiator, against that bad guy the Roman Empire. His point, delivered in his own blunt way: “You can do a superhero film well or as a piece of crap.”
What an underrated director Scott is. He has never won an Oscar. Does that bother him? “Well, it’s a bit late for me,” he says, without sounding sad at all. “I care more about being well enough to cope with what I’m doing, so my health is far more important than a f***ing gong.”
He smiles. “I did get a knighthood, though.” Well deserved, Sir Ridley — the man whose entire career seems based on that immortal cry of Maximus Decimus Meridius in Gladiator: “Are you not entertained?”
Napoleon is in cinemas from Nov 22, before streaming on Apple TV+
Joaquin Phoenix in Napoleon
In 1977 a brash young British ad man called Ridley Scott, who’d made a bit of a name for himself with the nostalgic “boy on a bike” Hovis commercial, went to Los Angeles. His mission was to flog his first film, an arthouse Napoleonic number called The Duellists, and plot his planned follow-up, a take on the medieval romance Tristan and Isolde.
Within days Scott’s hopes were dust. The studio had ordered only seven copies of The Duellists. To cheer himself up the director went to see a new film that was creating a buzz. It was called Star Wars — and it changed his life. He was sitting near the front of the cinema, he recalls. “I’d never experienced such audience participation. It was like a rock concert. I thought: ‘Why the hell am I doing Tristan and Isolde?’ I was depressed for a month. Then, out of the blue, someone sent me a script called Alien.” Scott never looked back. Star Wars showed him what he really wanted to do: make big films that people would watch, and boy did he stick to his guns. After Alien came Blade Runner, Thelma & Louise, Gladiator, The Martian — popcorn cinema with brain as well as brawn.
At 85 Scott is still on a roll, and now comes his latest really big one, Napoleon. “Frankly, he was one motherf***er — wow,” Scott gushes of the soldier, visionary and emperor who modernised France and terrified its neighbours. Joaquin Phoenix plays Bonaparte in a biopic that zips through his greatest hits and misses — Austerlitz, Moscow, Waterloo — while Boney mopes after his cheating wife, Josephine (Vanessa Kirby, who played the young Princess Margaret in The Crown). The movie feels even bigger than Napoleon’s ego.
Scott with Joaquin Phoenix on the set of Napoleon
Years ago Stanley Kubrick wanted to make a film about the icon. Steven Spielberg planned one too, as did Baz Luhrmann. But their versions hit the buffers, for various reasons including finances and death. Nobody could stop Scott, though. When I mention those directors who only tried where he succeeded, Scott says: “Stanley called me the week Alien opened. He said: ‘It’s Stanley Kubrick.’ I said: ‘F*** off!’ He said: ‘No, it’s Stanley Kubrick.’ He said: ‘I just watched Alien — how did you bring that creature out the guy’s chest?’”
He is on rollicking, slightly unhinged form at his home in Provence. He had been shooting a sequel to another of his blockbusters, Gladiator, before it got postponed by the actor’s strike. He has kept himself busy editing: Napoleon in the cinema is two and a half hours long, but when it hits the streaming site Apple, Scott is adding an hour. “Can cinema audiences really take more than three hours?” he asks, ever the crowd-pleaser. “But longer is perfect for streaming. You can press pause, get a beer, resume.”
Which scenes won’t make the cinema cut? “I am obsessed with the fact Napoleon had piles,” says Scott, who believes that the failed invasion of Russia in 1812 could have been different if the man in charge had not had haemorrhoids. Judge for yourself in the streaming edit. “It’s like having a migraine up your butt! I’ve never had them, but it’s a horseman’s dilemma.”
There is plenty more for historians to nitpick. At one point, in a spectacular scene, Napoleon’s cannons fire at the Pyramids. “I don’t know if he did that, but it was a fast way of saying he took Egypt,” Scott says.
“Like all history, it’s been reported,” he adds. “Napoleon dies then, ten years later, someone writes a book. Then someone takes that book and writes another, and so, 400 years later, there’s a lot of imagination [in history books]. When I have issues with historians, I ask: ‘Excuse me, mate, were you there? No? Well, shut the f*** up then.’” In July, the historian Dan Snow, commenting on the trailer, said the film “ain’t a documentary”. Scott countered Snow by saying: “Get a life.”
Scott was born into a military family in South Shields, Co Durham, in 1937. The family moved about a lot before he went down south, to the Royal College of Art to study photography. There he made a short film, Boy and Bicycle, starring his “very talented young brother”, Tony, who went on to be a director too, making Top Gun and Enemy of the State before taking his own life in 2012. No family wowed Hollywood quite like those British brothers.
The older Scott puts a lot of his success down to his early career in advertising, which he fell into because it was better paid than the BBC. “I took off in that job,” he says, learning how to communicate fast, telling stories in 30 or 60 seconds and never forgetting the need to be efficient. “My own definitive plan is that there is no plan,” he explains. “Since Gladiator I’ve made 19 movies — I’m busy.”
French connection: Joaquin Phoenix and Vanessa Kirby in Napoleon
Martin Scorsese has a fear of his time running out. Does Scott share that concern? “Well, since he started Killers of the Flower Moon I’ve made four films.” So he is not weighed down by mortality? “No, I don’t think about it. I get up in the morning and say: ‘Ah great! Another day of stress.’”
What Scott is weighed down by, though, is one review that a renowned critic gave Blade Runner, nearly 42 years ago. “My career has been paved with perceived disasters,” he rages. “The biggest? I got crucified by Pauline Kael [in The New Yorker] for Blade Runner. I was stunned. It got personal. I was furious because I knew I had done something special.” The story of Deckard (Harrison Ford), replicants and rain is an unsurpassed sci-fi noir. “It is a sophisticated view of the possible future,” he adds. “It says: ‘AI has feelings.’”
How will artificial intelligence change his industry? “We haven’t felt it yet,” Scott says. “But my concern is it getting into the hands of people with absolutely no conscience. You know who they are — so rich it doesn’t matter — and already we are experiencing global crises and these wankers are not taking it on board.” I assume he means Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg, but before I can ask he rushes off again on another tangent. “Do you have kids?” Yes. “I’m very concerned about the future. The stupidity of how we have seen global warming coming at us like a tidal wave. How stupid can you get?”
He blows a raspberry. “The world is bowling along with this blind notion that somehow it will be OK, but it won’t.” Scott grew up during the Second World War, so is no stranger to existential dread. “I’m a war baby, so I was under the stairs or in the shelter every night while we got bombed by this lunatic from Germany. He was mad, cray-zee.”
David Chase, the writer of The Sopranos, once compared the threat of climate change to Cold War fears about nuclear Armageddon, I say. “The atomic bomb is nothing compared to what is about to happen,” Scott says. “Mother Nature can shake us off like a flea — she wouldn’t even know we’re here. They’re advertising holiday resorts in places where it’s 112 degrees [Fahrenheit]. Are you kidding? We’re going to be living by night and sleeping by day.”
All of which sounds like a decent plot for a film, although the director has his plate full. Once the strike ends it is back to Gladiator 2, with Paul Mescal in the lead. Then Scott will make a western. Then a film about banks. “I always work three or four ahead.”
Does he think modern audiences, raised on simplistic superheroes, can cope with the antiheroes Scott has made a career from, even up to his recent forays into the Getty and Gucci families? Is there a lack of nuance in modern cinema? “In big movies yes,” he says. “But in TV something is changing. I have to have a bedtime story so I always watch something before bed, and little by little television is offering something challenging, not the usual suspects saving the world. I’m not someone who loves superheroes.”
This is the crux of Scott: a man who makes blockbusters with mass appeal but respects his audience’s intelligence. He goes on to argue that his own characters are heroic — superheroic even — but without the need to “fly off the screen” wearing a cape. Ford’s character, he says, is a hero in Blade Runner, fighting to find the truth about who he is. Sigourney Weaver is too, as Ripley versus the alien. And so was Russell Crowe, in Gladiator, against that bad guy the Roman Empire. His point, delivered in his own blunt way: “You can do a superhero film well or as a piece of crap.”
What an underrated director Scott is. He has never won an Oscar. Does that bother him? “Well, it’s a bit late for me,” he says, without sounding sad at all. “I care more about being well enough to cope with what I’m doing, so my health is far more important than a f***ing gong.”
He smiles. “I did get a knighthood, though.” Well deserved, Sir Ridley — the man whose entire career seems based on that immortal cry of Maximus Decimus Meridius in Gladiator: “Are you not entertained?”
Napoleon is in cinemas from Nov 22, before streaming on Apple TV+
