Ridley
Scott’s “Napoleon” Complex
Does the director of “Alien,” “Blade Runner,” and
“Gladiator” see himself in the hero of his epic new film?
By Michael
Schulman
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/11/13/ridley-scott-director-profile
November 6,
2023
Ridley
Scott photographed by Christopher Anderson.
He was
already making mistakes. Underestimating his enemies’ capabilities and
overestimating his own, he assumed that the woods behind the British would
block their retreat, but Wellington had strategically used the forest to hide
more soldiers. An overnight downpour had left the fields soggy, and Napoleon,
instead of striking at nine, as he had planned, held off until midday, giving
the Prussians crucial time to reach Wellington as backup. Napoleon was tired.
He was ill. He was strangely apathetic, declining to survey parts of the
battlefield himself. Michael Broers, a Napoleon scholar at Oxford, told me,
“The real question isn’t so much Why did he lose? but How on earth did he ever
think he could win?”
In 2020,
Broers was grading a student’s essay when he got a call from an assistant in
Ridley Scott’s office, explaining that the director was planning an epic film
about Napoleon, starring Joaquin Phoenix. Summoned to Scott’s headquarters, in
London—crammed with movie props, it reminded Broers of Aladdin’s cave—the
professor advised Scott on everything from the motivations of Empress Josephine
to whether Napoleon was left-handed. (He wasn’t.) Scott was particularly
interested in battles, from both a practical and a psychological perspective.
“He saw at eye level,” Broers recalled. “His Waterloo was like a diorama.” At
one point, Broers drew him a map, and the director studied it like a hardened
general preparing for battle—which, in a way, he was. “He’s not un-Napoleonic
himself,” Broers said. “When he’s there, he’s in charge, and you have complete
confidence in him. He dishes it out, and he can take it.”
Scott, who
has filmed and fought more than his share of battles, will turn eighty-six this
month, a week after the release of “Napoleon,” his twenty-eighth film. His
movies have tackled other Great Men of History (Moses, Columbus), as well as
aliens, androids, con men, gangsters, goblins, soldiers, serial killers, and
the Gucci family. He creates visceral worlds, whether the rain-streaked,
mechanized dystopia of “Blade Runner” or the dusty Roman arenas of “Gladiator,”
and several of his screen images—a slime-covered creature bursting out of an
astronaut’s chest in “Alien,” Thelma and Louise zooming off a cliff—are lodged
firmly in the popular imagination. But he’s tough to pin down. “Is Ridley a
fine artist? Is he an art-cinema director? Is he a commercial hack? Is he all
of the above?,” Paul Sammon, a writer who has published three books about
Scott, said. “That’s what I really enjoy about Ridley—he is unclassifiable.”
The
director feels the same way. “My choices tend to be random,” he told me in
September. He was in the West Hollywood offices of the Ridley Scott Creative
Group, a sprawling enterprise that produces features, music videos, and
commercials, with outposts in Amsterdam and Hong Kong. We sat in an airy
conference room, the walls of which were covered with photographs of Scott on
his various sets. Like Logan Roy, the patriarch in “Succession,” he wears his
authority like an old sweater, his northern English burr unsoftened by
Hollywood. He’s a growler, a grumbler, a barker, a chortler. His narrow eyes
peer over a long, stern nose, and his resting scowl is framed by an untidy
white beard, which he occasionally strokes, more in irritation than in
contemplation.
Scott
regards his œuvre with pugnacious pride, especially his less loved films, such
as the 2013 crime thriller “The Counselor,” which he maintains was the victim
of bad marketing. (“They fucked it up.”) When a movie fails, I asked, does he
question his instincts? “No,” he grunted. “I blast the shit out of a tennis
ball.” Beside him was Pauline Kael’s four-page evisceration of “Blade Runner,”
which ran in this magazine in 1982 and contains, among other gibes, the line
“Scott seems to be trapped in his own alleyways, without a map.” Scott had the
review framed for his office wall years ago and had asked an assistant to lay
it on the table for me; I got the sense that he had agreed to a New Yorker
Profile in order to have the last laugh.
Scott was
on an enforced hiatus. In July, he’d been more than halfway through shooting
“Gladiator 2,” on the island of Malta, when the actors’ strike halted
production. But, unlike Napoleon during his exile on Elba, he wasn’t taking
salt baths and stewing. He was busy preparing an extended cut of “Napoleon” for
Apple, which produced and will stream the film. He’d been editing what he had
of “Gladiator 2,” slated for next fall, and “reccing”—reconnoitering—locations
for a Western. As he approaches ninety, Scott is not slowing down but speeding
up. Tom Rothman, the head of Sony’s film division, which will distribute
“Napoleon” theatrically, told me, “Ridley Scott is the single best argument for
a second term for Joe Biden.” Paul Biddiss, a burly British ex-paratrooper who
was Scott’s military adviser for “Napoleon,” recalled shooting the siege of
Toulon, in Malta: “He goes, ‘Can you touch your toes? Come on!’ We’re in the
middle of Fort Ricasoli, we’re both touching toes to see who’s flexible, and he
was, like, ‘You’ve got to take up yoga.’ ”
While many
directors are embracing a gentler, more collaborative mode of authority, Scott
characterizes his style as a benevolent dictatorship. “Working with Ridley,
it’s very much military in some ways,” Arthur Max, his longtime production
designer, told me. David Scarpa, the screenwriter of “Napoleon,” said, “The
striking thing about Ridley, more than anything else, is this enormous will.
You send him pages while he’s shooting, he shoots twelve hours a day, he then
goes out to dinner with the actors, then he works on editing what he’s shot
that day. After that, he reads your pages, and the next day you get the e-mail
from Europe, and he’s storyboarded them. That would kill ninety per cent of the
directors in Hollywood.”
One of
Scott’s meticulous, hand-drawn storyboards, called Ridleygrams, for the Battle
of Waterloo scene.Art work courtesy Ridley Scott
Researching
the script, Scarpa began noticing similarities between director and subject.
“Seeing Napoleon and Ridley side by side, I think that there are people who
simply don’t have that internal sense of limitation that normal people have,”
he said. “I remember reading about how one time Napoleon was finishing up a
battle, and he was simultaneously designing the currency.”
Joaquin
Phoenix, like other actors who have worked with Scott, was unable to talk to me
for this story because of the actors’ strike. But, earlier this year, he told
Empire magazine, “If you want to really understand Napoleon, then you should
probably do your own studying and reading. Because if you see this film, it’s
this experience told through Ridley’s eyes.” Ten days before filming, Phoenix
went to Scott and said, “I’m agonizing over this. I don’t know how to do it.”
The two spent several twelve-hour days psychoanalyzing the Emperor, scene by
scene. “We found that he’s a split personality,” Scott said. “He is deeply
vulnerable, and while doing his job he’s able to hide that under a marvellous
front. His forceful personality was part of his theatre.”
Napoleon
has enticed filmmakers practically since movies were invented. The French
director Abel Gance débuted his five-and-a-half-hour silent epic, “Napoléon,”
in 1927; with its use of cameras attached to guillotines and sleds, it was a
breakthrough in special effects. (“I couldn’t get through it, honestly,” Scott
said.) In 1970, Sergei Bondarchuk released “Waterloo,” starring Rod Steiger as
a sweaty, screaming Napoleon. It was filmed on Ukrainian farmland, with
seventeen thousand extras borrowed from the Soviet Army. At the time, Stanley
Kubrick, hot off “2001: A Space Odyssey,” was laboring over his own Napoleon
project, for M-G-M, envisioning Jack Nicholson in the title role. “He
fascinates me,” Kubrick said, of the Emperor. He devoured biographies, obsessing
over minutiae. One designer quit after an argument over whether rhododendrons
had been brought from India by Napoleon’s time. When Kubrick’s plans fell
apart, he funnelled his period research into “Barry Lyndon,” which in turn
inspired Scott’s first film, “The Duellists,” in 1977, about a pair of rival
officers during the Napoleonic Wars. Years after Kubrick’s death, Scott was
sent his unused Napoleon script. Scott found it underwhelming, in part because
it spanned “birth to death,” he said. (Steven Spielberg is currently developing
the Kubrick project as an HBO series.)
Scott
became interested in Napoleon about fifteen years ago, when he happened upon a
book by Sten Forshufvud, a Swedish dental surgeon, who, in 1961, tested
Napoleon’s hair for arsenic and theorized that he had been poisoned. (Broers,
the Oxford historian, is doubtful. “Forshufvud forgot something—everyone was a
bit ‘arsenic poisoned’ in those days,” he said. “Wallpaper and many other
things were made with levels of it that would be banned today.”) Scott started
thinking about Napoleon’s final exile, on St. Helena. He was intrigued by his
friendship with a young girl who liked to play with the Emperor’s sword and
hat. “He would sit there and watch her hacking away at a tree,” Scott said.
“She had no idea who he was, other than a prisoner of war.”
Unlike
Kubrick, Scott wasn’t big on biographies. He gave up after two or three books
and ordered Scarpa, his screenwriter, to bone up. “One of the questions I found
myself asking is Where am I supposed to come down on this guy?” Scarpa said.
“In history, we tend to sort characters into heroes or villains. You’re either
Martin Luther King or you’re Adolf Hitler.” He was curious about Napoleon’s
marriage to Josephine, who carried on a flagrant affair with a Hussar in her
husband’s Army. “What stuck was Napoleon’s seeming ineptitude with women,”
Scarpa explained. “His attachment to Josephine over the course of his entire
life, but also the bizarre disconnect in a guy who is able to kill eighty
thousand people on a battlefield in Eastern Europe, almost as a sporting event,
and yet, to him, it simply wouldn’t be sporting to deal with his rival for his
wife’s affections.”
The angle
appealed to Scott. “Who was this person, and why was he vulnerable?” he asked.
“And it was this woman called Josephine.” He cast Jodie Comer, who had starred
in his 2021 film “The Last Duel,” but two months before filming she had to drop
out and was replaced by Vanessa Kirby.
Scott has
described the “environment” as a character in all his films, and critics have
accused him of prioritizing spectacle over substance. “I tend to be visual
above all things, before the written word,” he said. He is fond of the adage “A
picture is worth a thousand words,” which he attributes to Hitchcock. (In fact,
it dates back at least to a speech in 1911 by the newspaper editor Arthur
Brisbane.) His hand-drawn storyboards, known as Ridleygrams, are his method of
thinking and communicating. His older son, Jake, recalled going on a family
vacation in France when he and his brother were children: “He had us illustrate
the holiday, and he wrote the text. That was a form of storyboarding.”
Luke,
Scott’s younger son, has worked as a second-unit director on several of his
father’s films, beginning with “Exodus: Gods and Kings,” from 2014, starring
Christian Bale as an unlikely Moses. For a sequence with the ten plagues, Luke
was tasked with filming vultures landing on a statue. When it was done, he
recalled, “I think, All good, pretty good shots of vultures. And then I get a
phone call: ‘What the fuck was that?’ He says, ‘The top of the statue has to be
covered in bones, detritus, all of that!’ ” Luke called the vultures back and
reshot the scene with the jetsam of pestilence. “I was misreading the
storyboard,” he said.
Scott’s
closest collaborators are trained to anticipate his aesthetic preferences.
Arthur Max, the production designer, named a few: “Smoke. Thick, crusty, shiny,
black, thick paint. Heavy aging. Filth. Dirt. Textures of all kinds. Shiny
glass mirrors. Chrome. Metallic, silky fabrics. Corrosion. Small, fine,
delicate mechanisms.” Janty Yates, his costume designer, avoids fluorescent
fabrics for his films. “He prefers rich jewel colors,” she told me. “He loves
gold trim, but old gold. He loves shadow. He really doesn’t like green—and then
suddenly he’ll like green. He’s quite a hummingbird.” On “The Martian,” he
surprised her by requesting a “pop of orange.”
In his L.A.
office, Scott had an assistant bring in a bound copy of his “Napoleon”
storyboards, which looked like a comic-strip biography. He flipped through: the
Battle of Austerlitz, in which Napoleon lures the Russians onto a frozen pond;
a cut scene of Napoleon and Josephine discussing politics in a bathtub; the
Fire of Moscow, in 1812. (“It burned like a son of a bitch.”) “This is now the
day of Waterloo,” Scott said, pointing at a page. Originally, he had planned to
show Napoleon on the toilet, noticing blood; he’d read that the Emperor
suffered from hemorrhoids, which were common to equestrians. (It’s possible
that he actually had stomach cancer.) “As I got close to the release, I
thought, I haven’t got the courage,” he said, and he cut the toilet scene. He
turned to a drawing of Wellington in gray, asking a scout when the Prussians
would arrive. A scribbled note read, “Does NB have similar intel?”
To play the
role of Waterloo, Scott’s team scouted dozens of fields in England—“tromping
around in Wellington boots in muddy fields, avoiding cowpats,” Max
recalled—before settling on a farm in Berkshire. The production set up a “war
room” in Brentford, a London suburb, with three-dimensional models of the
terrain. Biddiss, the ex-paratrooper, ran five hundred extras through “boot
camp” at the Cavalry Barracks in Hounslow, which were built in Napoleon’s era.
He assessed the extras to make sure they were “physically and mentally robust”
and put the best three hundred up front. (C.G.I. multiplied them into the
thousands.) Biddiss had studied old military manuals and showed the extras how
the French and the English loaded their muskets in different ways. Scott is
less of a stickler. When the trailer came out, the TV historian Dan Snow posted
a TikTok breakdown of its inaccuracies. (At the Battle of the Pyramids,
“Napoleon didn’t shoot at the pyramids”; Marie-Antoinette “famously had very
cropped hair for the execution, and, hey, Napoleon wasn’t there.”) Scott’s
response: “Get a life.”
Waterloo
was shot in the course of five days, with eleven cameras rolling. “It was quite
blustery,” Max recalled. “I knew Ridley would like it, because he is very
visceral about the elements. If he got an earthquake, he’d find a way to use
it.” Biddiss told me, “Uniformity is very important with Ridley—right down to
the guys, making sure their hats are straight. There wasn’t a bayonet that was
out of synch.” The most complicated maneuver was forming human squares, with
bayonets pointed outward—an infantry formation that the British used to scare
off the Frenchmen’s horses. “I had some sleepless nights, because I wanted to
make sure that those guys did this square perfectly,” Biddiss said. On the day,
“they pulled it off brilliantly. I could hear Ridley on the radio—‘Buy those
boys a pint!’ ”
Scott calls
himself a war baby, though he was born in 1937, two years before England
entered the Second World War. The Scotts lived in South Shields, on the
northeast coast. “When the air-raid warnings sounded off, my father was in
London already as an officer,” Scott recalled. “My mother would hustle us under
the stairs, and we’d sit drinking cocoa, singing ‘Old MacDonald Had a Farm’
while bombs came down around us.”
His father,
Francis Percy Scott, had been a clerk in a shipping office, but the war was
good to him. Despite his Geordie accent, he rose up the ranks to brigadier
general overseeing civil engineering; according to Ridley, he received letters
from Winston Churchill, thanking him for his input on D Day. After the war,
Francis was asked to help rebuild Germany’s infrastructure. He moved his wife
and sons—Ridley, his older brother, Frank, and his younger brother, Tony—to a
sumptuous house in Hamburg. In 1952, Francis was offered a prestigious role
leading the Port Authority for the Elbe and the Rhine. (Scott said, “That’s
like being offered the St. Lawrence and the Hudson!”) But Ridley’s mother,
Elizabeth, wanted to be near her relatives in England. Ridley remembers
speaking up, saying, “Take the job!” and getting a thwack. They returned to
England and lived in modest state housing. He said, “Already I was learning how
life changes so quickly, you know?”
Despite
Scott’s machismo, he is known for populating his films with strong women:
Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen Ripley, in “Alien,” one of Hollywood’s first female
action heroes; Thelma and Louise; G.I. Jane; Lady Gaga’s vengeful Patrizia
Reggiani, in “House of Gucci”; even the sledgehammer-wielding rebel in his
“1984” commercial for Apple. Sigourney Weaver credits Scott with the longevity
of Ripley and “Alien.” Earlier this year, she told Total Film, “They made
Ripley a woman, without making her this helpless creature.” In AnOther
magazine, she recalled, “I’d been put in a baby-blue space costume, and Ridley
took one look at me and said, ‘You look like fucking Jackie O. in space!’ ” He
put her in an old nasa flight suit instead. “Ripley is not a sexy space babe,”
Weaver said. “I never worried how I looked, I worried about getting down the
corridors fast enough to escape the explosions!”
Scott is
not one to expound on gender roles. When asked about his predilection, he
responds vaguely, as he did in 1998, speaking to Sammon: “I’m drawn to strong,
intelligent women in real life. Why shouldn’t the films reflect that?” When I
raised the subject with his son Jake, he replied, “I can tell you where that
comes from—my grandmother.”
“I
shouldn’t say this,” Scott told me, “but my mother was the man of the house. My
mother insisted she was five feet—she was four foot eleven. And she was
ferocious. My dad was a real gentleman. He was a sweetheart, a nice man, who
took more than he should have from my mum.” Elizabeth, he recalled, “would take
a belt or a stick to us.” She never worked outside the home, although, in the
seventies, she offered to be a receptionist at Scott’s commercial-production
company. (“I didn’t want to say it, but she’d scare away more clients than
she’d bring in.”) Elizabeth lost her brother and four sisters to cancer, then
lived until ninety-six. “She was formidable,” Scott said. “Her famous words to
me before she died were ‘This is ridiculous.’ ”
I asked
Jake which of his father’s characters most resembled Elizabeth. He laughed and
said, “Mother, in ‘Alien.’ ” Mother, or mu/th/ur 6000, is the spaceship’s
computer system, Scott’s answer to Kubrick’s hal 9000, from “2001.” At the end
of “Alien,” she counts down to self-destruction in a firm, matronly voice. (The
voice actress, Helen Horton, was in her fifties.) Jake said, “Even ‘Napoleon’
begins with a defiant Marie-Antoinette at the guillotine, which is a sort of
punk image.” Then he thought of another film, “A Good Year,” which features the
actress Archie Panjabi as a hard-charging executive assistant. “That’s another
Grandma,” he said. “Do you know what? There’s Grandmas in his films. They’re
here, there, and everywhere.”
Does Scott
see his mother in his heroines? “No, no,” he told me. “But I learned to give as
good as I take. She’d say, ‘Don’t you talk to me like that.’ And I’d say,
‘Don’t you talk to me like that.’ ” In “Napoleon,” Josephine is the only person
who seems unimpressed by her husband’s conquests. In a particularly strong
scene, he confronts her about her philandering, demanding that she say,
“Without you, I am nothing.” Later, as they sit by a fire, she makes him say
the same to her, reducing the Emperor of France to a whimperer. “By forgiving
her, it in a way is both generous and a weakness,” Scott said. Later, his son
Luke talked about how Elizabeth ruled over Ridley and his brother Tony. “The
only person in the world who could tell them to shut up and get in line was
her,” he said.
Scott was a
terrible student, but by the age of nine he’d discovered two passions: smoking
and painting. At seventeen, having flunked all his exams except art, he decided
to enlist in the National Service; his older brother, Frank, had joined the
British Merchant Navy. “You’ve got nothing to learn from the Army,” Ridley’s
father advised him. “You should go to art school.” He enrolled in a local
program, in West Hartlepool, an industrial seaside town. He’d walk the beaches
by the steelworks, watching “towers belching filth and junk,” he said. “It’s a
wonder I’ve still got a pair of lungs.” Years later, he drew on those polluted
skies while envisioning the dystopian Los Angeles of “Blade Runner.”
He went on
to the Royal College of Art, in London. His classmates included David Hockney,
whom he remembers getting bored in a life-drawing class and sketching a
skeleton in the corner instead. The school had no filmmaking program, so Scott
joined the theatre-design department, where, in 1962, someone lent him a Bolex
16-mm. camera. He returned to West Hartlepool to make a short film, “Boy and
Bicycle,” starring his teen-age brother, Tony, who would follow him into art
school. Scott was fascinated by Joyce’s “Ulysses,” with its “organically visual
descriptions” of, say, a butcher laying a “moist tender gland” onto “rubber
prickles.” In “Boy and Bicycle,” a freckled lad skips school and bikes through
town, as we hear his inner monologue on time, the stench of the smokestacks,
and death. Scott said, “The idea was, boy plays hooky for the day, thinks it’s
freedom. It’s not—it’s actually prison.”
His final
student show got him an offer of a design job at the BBC, which he deferred to
travel the United States on Greyhound buses. In New York, he met fashion
designers and worked for the documentarians Richard Leacock and D. A.
Pennebaker. He was full of drive but unclear which direction it should take.
Back in London, he designed sets for such BBC series as “The Dick Emery Show.”
He recalled, “From designing, I’d been groomed to be a senior department head,
and I surprised them by saying, ‘I don’t want that.’ Then they surprised me by
saying, ‘Would you want to do a director’s course at the BBC?’ ” For the class,
he made a “potted version” of Kubrick’s war drama “Paths of Glory.” The next
Monday, he was offered his first directing job, on a police procedural called
“Z-Cars.”
One day in
the mid-sixties, a colleague asked him to cover for her at a test shoot for a
Benson & Hedges cigarette ad in Chelsea. Freelance commercial directing was
better paying and less bureaucratic than the BBC, and Scott was soon shuttling
in his white Mini between the BBC’s White City Place and a studio in Chelsea.
Within a year, he’d shot hundreds of commercials, starting with a Gerber
baby-food ad, during which “the baby spattered porridge all over me,” as he
recalled with a grimace. Britain’s ad business was experiencing a creative
revolution, with dull, market-research-driven spots giving way to mini movies
that captured the buzz of Swinging London. “British advertising had been
waiting for a figure like Scott for some time,” Sam Delaney writes in “Get
Smashed,” his chronicle of the era. “A generation of writers and art directors
had elevated the standard of creative ideas but were unable to find directors
who could properly execute their scripts.”
Commercials
trained Scott in economical storytelling, conjuring atmosphere, delivering on
time and on budget, and making lots of money doing so. He was known for
infusing banal scripts with a sheen of artistry; he shot a soap-powder ad in
the style of “Citizen Kane” and a toothpaste spot inspired by “Doctor Zhivago.”
As competitors moved in on his turf, he realized that he could profit off his
rivals and, in 1968, he founded Ridley Scott Associates, which signed
up-and-coming commercial directors. When his brother Tony got out of school,
dreaming of making documentaries, Ridley urged Tony’s wife to dissuade him: “I
said, ‘Dear, if he does documentaries, he’s going to be riding the bicycle in
forty years’ time. Come with me, because I know he really wants a Ferrari.’ So
Tony came with me, and, sure enough, he got a Ferrari.” With the company
flourishing, the brothers earned a reputation for avarice. One industry in-joke
went, “What do you get if you drop a penny between the Scott brothers? A metre
of copper wire!”
In 1973,
Ridley made a commercial for Hovis Bread, featuring a boy pushing a bicycle,
its basket stuffed with loaves of fresh bread, through the cobblestoned streets
of an English village, set to Dvořák’s “New World” Symphony. It was “Boy and
Bicycle,” with existential dread swapped out for nostalgic warmth. (Tagline:
“As good for you today as it’s always been.”) In 2006, it was voted Britain’s
favorite advert of all time. Both brothers were part of a wave of rock-star
British ad directors, many of whom would become feature filmmakers, including
Alan Parker (“Midnight Express”) and Adrian Lyne (“Fatal Attraction”). But
Ridley, approaching forty, was impatient to get his movie career going. He
developed a project with the Bee Gees, but they didn’t want to sing on film,
and the project collapsed. When Parker landed his first movie, “Bugsy Malone,”
produced by the former adman David Puttnam, Scott was so envious that he
couldn’t sleep.
After
“Bugsy Malone” played at Cannes, in 1976, Paramount asked Puttnam if he knew
anyone else like Parker. He did—Ridley Scott, who had two potential
screenplays. The first, about the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, would cost $2.2
million. The second, “The Duellists,” a dark comedy based on a Joseph Conrad
story about the madness of competition, would cost $1.4 million. “I’ll take
that one,” the Paramount executive said. After making his first film, Scott
recalled, “I thought, Blimey, that was easy.” At Cannes in 1977, “The
Duellists” was nominated for the Palme d’Or and won the prize for the best
début film.
By then,
Scott had divorced his first wife, Felicity Heywood, a painter he’d met in art
school and the mother of his sons. In 1979, he married the advertising
executive Sandy Watson, with whom he had a daughter, Jordan. (He’s now married
to the actress Giannina Facio, who played the wife of Russell Crowe’s
character, Maximus, in “Gladiator.”) All three children have become filmmakers,
and all are partners in the family business. I mentioned the “Succession” vibes
at the company to Jake. He laughed and replied, “It’s been said.” A few years
ago, he was at a restaurant in London when Brian Cox, who played Logan Roy,
walked in. “My friend was, like, ‘Oh, your dad’s here!’ ”
The three
children were raised by Watson, and when they were young Scott was subsumed
with work, spending evenings laboring over his Ridleygrams. In the seventies,
the family lived in a mock-Tudor town house on Wimbledon Common, which Ridley
designed with the exactitude he devoted to his sets. Jake recalled a
conservatory with a checkered floor and a kitchen with no right angles. Both
boys appeared in their father’s and uncle’s commercials; Luke remembered
stuffing his mouth with Cadbury chocolate. In “The Duellists,” they play
aristocratic boys in breeches and pageboy haircuts, and Jake asks a character
played by Keith Carradine if he’s ever talked to Napoleon.
The boys
saw less of their father as he made trips to Hollywood to drum up films. He
developed an idea about Tristan and Isolde, but that fizzled in May, 1977, when
Puttnam brought him to see “Star Wars” at Mann’s Chinese Theatre. “It was
beyond a crazy football crowd,” Scott recalled. He hadn’t been much interested
in science fiction but was seized with a need to top George Lucas. “I couldn’t
sleep for a week. I said to David, ‘Listen, I don’t know why I’m doing Tristan
and Isolde.’ He said, ‘Think of something else.’ ”
So he did
“Alien.” Scott was engrossed with how it would look. He wanted the spaceship to
feel claustrophobic, arguing a producer into lowering the ceilings. He was
frustrated that the audience wouldn’t be able to smell the creature, which he
imagined had a horrible stench. For the chest-bursting scene, he said at the
time, “We wanted to do something so outrageous that no one would know it was
coming.” Kubrick, whom he idolized but had never met, later called him to ask
how the hell he had pulled it off. At a preview screening in Dallas, women ran
to the bathroom to vomit, and an usher fainted in the aisle. Scott was
thrilled.
“Alien”
turned Scott into a bankable studio director, but he was entering perhaps his
darkest phase. In 1980, his brother Frank died, at forty-five, of melanoma. “I
was going through a nervous breakdown and didn’t know,” Scott told me. “I’ve
always been very rational, and death is irrational. It became a nightmare to go
to bed, because I’d walk the floor for nine hours.” He was attached to direct
“Dune,” but shooting was at least two years off, and he was restless. Instead,
he returned to an idea he’d rejected, an adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s sci-fi
novel “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” As he sketched out the world that
became “Blade Runner,” what emerged was doom: a future of endless rain,
perpetual night, environmental ruin, and technology that blurred the line
between human and machine to a vanishing point.
The “Blade
Runner” shoot was notoriously fraught. The first day, for a scene set in a
corporate ziggurat, Scott looked through the lens and saw that the building’s
columns had been installed upside down. Paul Sammon, who was embedded on set
and chronicled the film’s making in his book “Future Noir,” recalled, “Within
the first few weeks, I felt this radical shift in his personality. I saw him go
from being fairly personable to being a screamer.” Scott was unaccustomed to
American union rules, which prevented him from operating his own camera. He sat
in a video-playback booth, which isolated him from his unhappy star, Harrison
Ford; the two men could never agree whether Ford’s character, Deckard, was a
man or a “replicant.”
Midway
through, the Guardian ran an interview in which Scott said that he preferred
British crews, because he could give them orders and they’d say, “Yes,
guv’nor!” The crew printed up T-shirts that read “yes guv’nor my ass!” Scott
and his British compatriots tried to quell the insurrection by wearing T-shirts
reading “xenophobia sucks.” The budget ran two million dollars over. The final
days were a frenzy, with the last scene—Rutger Hauer’s moody android death—shot
against the last sunrise to dawn before Scott’s cameras would be taken from
him. In postproduction, Scott was fired—twice—but worked his way back. When
preview audiences expressed confusion, Scott, against his better judgment,
added a voice-over and a happy ending in which Deckard and his android paramour
flee Los Angeles; Kubrick gave him helicopter footage left over from “The
Shining.”
“Blade
Runner” came out in June, 1982, two weeks after “E.T.,” which synched better
with the sunny Reagan era than Scott’s bleak dystopia did. Kael wasn’t its only
detractor; another critic wrote, “I suspect my blender and toaster oven would
just love it.” After making six million dollars on its opening weekend, the
film all but disappeared. Although it grew into a cult classic and became a
touchstone for such filmmakers as Christopher Nolan and Denis Villeneuve (who
directed the 2017 sequel), Scott still speaks of “Blade Runner” with an ache.
Asked what it taught him, he sounded like a defiant general routed by an
undeserving enemy: “I learned that the only opinion that matters, when all is
said and done—even with failure in your face, and you’re lying on the mat,
crushed—is, What did you think of it?”
Just as
Napoleon had Versailles, Scott maintains his own seat of power in the French
countryside: Mas des Infermières, a winery in Provence, situated in a hilly
patch of the Luberon region dotted with cypress and olive trees. Scott bought
the property, with eleven hectares of vines, in 1992, after he made “Thelma
& Louise.” He was eager to tell me that it once belonged to General Baron
Robert, a health officer in Napoleon’s Army.
The day
before I met him there, on a cloudless morning in October, his son Luke told me
about the house: “It’s the sacred space, the mental palace. Everything within
is the construct of this person who thinks visually. You’ll go, ‘Holy shit,
this place is beautiful!’ But it’s not accidental that it’s that beautiful,
because it’s him pitting himself against nature itself. He is Canute sitting on
the shores of England, shouting at the ocean, ‘I command you to get back!’ It’s
like all of his movies virtually encapsulated, with the waft of the curtains
and the drift of the pollen and the mist.”
I found
Scott not in the house but in a building that he constructed on the property in
2019, with a wine cellar, a tasting kitchen, and a gift shop. The outside is
faux-rustic, capped with terra-cotta roof tiles. The inside is sleekly modern,
with concrete floors, a steel staircase spiralling down to the cellar, and
movie memorabilia everywhere. Next to a table with wineglasses and spittoons
were four spacesuits, from “The Martian,” “Prometheus,” and “Alien: Covenant.”
The mise-en-scène: Cézanne meets Planet Hollywood.
Scott
sipped an espresso at a café table, beside the bicycle that Adam Driver rode in
“House of Gucci.” He wore a dark T-shirt, trousers, and a plastic watch the
color of a traffic cone (a pop of orange). “If I come here, I find that I can
sit and think and draw,” he said. He showed me a print of one of his oil
paintings, of a mesa in Spain that he had spotted shooting “Exodus.” He put on
a tan fedora and led me through the back door, to an expanse of fields. “This
place is bloody heaven!” he said. “My vineyard goes way across. See those
cypress trees? I go beyond that.” He hadn’t paid much attention to his
vintner’s work until his reds began winning prizes in Paris. “So far, I’m just
losing money like crazy, but it doesn’t matter. It’s a pleasure.”
In 2006,
Scott made the Euro-kitsch screwball comedy “A Good Year,” in which Russell
Crowe plays a London financier who inherits his uncle’s vineyard in Provence
and learns to appreciate the good things in life. It was filmed eight minutes
away. “Russell was damaged goods—he’d thrown the phone in the Mercer Hotel,”
Scott recalled, referring to a tabloid incident from Crowe’s post-“Gladiator”
bad-boy period. “In the morning, I see him in handcuffs. I went, Fuck! ‘The
phone stopped ringing,’ he said. ‘No one’s calling!’ And I said, ‘O.K., I got a
film.’ That’s how it began. I got him back on his feet. He’ll never admit
that.” (Indeed, a representative for Crowe disputed this account.)
Back
inside, past the spacesuits, Scott showed me a hall full of huge
stainless-steel wine tanks, each with a blackboard indicating the variety. A
circular window above a pair of barn doors was inspired by a monastery in
Narbonne where he’d filmed part of “The Last Duel.” “It’s a church,” Scott
whispered, taking in the quiet and the pleasant, vinous aroma. “The standards
in France are rigid. You can’t force aging. You can’t add sugar. I find
Californian wine way too sweet—you get drunk off one glass.” Scott illustrates
all of his wines’ labels. In the gift shop, he tapped on a bottle of red,
showing two dogs howling at the moon. “I thought all the wine should be about
health, fun, sex, dogs,” he said.
A tasting
group was coming in, so he led me down the staircase, warning, “I’ve got dodgy
knees—too much tennis.” (Arthur Max told me that Scott had injured his knee
operating a camera on “G.I. Jane” but “blames it on tennis, which is more
glamorous.”) In the cellar were rows of barrels aging the best of the reds,
plus more movie artifacts: a sword from “Kingdom of Heaven,” his 2005 Crusades
epic; a miniature of the Colosseum, from “Gladiator”; a chain-mail suit worn by
Oscar Isaac in “Robin Hood”; a plaster alien head. “This shit is museum
quality,” Scott said, stopping in front of two Napoleon uniforms. He picked up
a gilded scimitar, with the inscription “recte faciendo neminem timeas.” “I was
never good at Latin,” Scott said. (It means “In acting justly fear no one.”)
He asked an
assistant for another espresso. He’d been busy. After finishing the extended
cut of “Napoleon,” he started storyboarding the Western; he showed me pages of
Ridleygrams, featuring a snowy fight scene. With sag-aftra and the studios back
in negotiations, he was preparing to pick up “Gladiator 2,” which stars Paul
Mescal, the moment the strike was resolved. “I could shoot on Monday,” he said.
(The talks fell apart a week later.) In the meantime, he’d been polishing the
ninety minutes he had, including a scene in which the hero fights a pack of
baboons; he’d been haunted, he said, by a video of baboons attacking tourists
in Johannesburg: “Baboons are carnivores. Can you hang from that roof for two
hours by your left leg? No! A baboon can.”
I asked why
he wanted to make a “Gladiator” sequel, and he gave a practical answer: the
first one made a lot of money. But, as he described the new film, his thoughts
turned toward immortality. In the first “Gladiator,” there’s a recurring shot
of Maximus’ hand grazing the tops of wheat stalks in a field, which we come to
realize is the afterlife. Scott had captured the image spontaneously, when he
saw Crowe’s body double walking through a wheat field in Umbria, smoking a
cigarette. “Do I believe in immortality?” Scott asked, unprompted. “I’m not
sure.”
I thought
back to something that Luke had told me the day before. “In each movie, there
is always a character who I think is Ridley,” he’d said. “They tend to be quite
peripheral, almost observers. It’s the one with a darker humor, the one who is,
perhaps, more divisive. The one who has the agenda.” He thought of Guy Pearce’s
character in “Prometheus,” an eccentric billionaire who longs for immortality,
or of Tyrell, the corporate wizard from “Blade Runner.” In “Gladiator,” it’s
the trainer played by Oliver Reed who advises Maximus, “Win the crowd and
you’ll win your freedom.” “In ‘Napoleon,’ ” Luke said, “it’s Napoleon.”
I asked
Scott if he was all these people, and he chortled. “No!” he said. “Oh, dear.”
But he does see “winning the crowd” as his job description. “I have to,” he
said. “There’s nothing worse than doing something where you’re thinking, I
really got that right—and it fails.”
After
“Blade Runner,” Scott’s ability to win the crowd was in doubt. He had kept up
his commercial business, directing a series of chic Chanel No. 5 ads inspired
by René Magritte. (Chanel’s chairman, Alain Wertheimer, had come to him,
pleading, “Chanel No. 5 is my flagship perfume. It’s only seen as a present for
Grandma!”) The “1984” Apple ad, which aired during Super Bowl XVIII, became an
advertising classic and established the company’s image as a nonconformist
juggernaut. But Scott’s next film, “Legend,” a grotesque fairy-tale fantasy
starring Tom Cruise as a sprightly woodland boy, bombed. In 1987, he tried his
hand at gritty realism, with the noir thriller “Someone to Watch Over Me.” It
also failed. Tony, meanwhile, directed the back-to-back mega-hits “Top Gun” and
“Beverly Hills Cop II.” “He was competitive with me, naturally, because I’m the
older brother,” Ridley said.
His
unlikely comeback was “Thelma & Louise,” in 1991. Scott picked up the
script, by Callie Khouri, with the intention of producing it. After four
directors turned him down, he was in a meeting with Michelle Pfeiffer, who was
unavailable to star but told him, “Why don’t you come to your senses and direct
it?” Again, Scott was thinking visually. As an outsider in America, he wanted
to capture the grandeur of the Southwest: “I felt, I’m doing an odyssey of two
women on the last journey, and so the last journey had better be beautiful.”
The old Route 66 had become industrialized, so he shot in Bakersfield,
California. “What he did was put it in an incredibly heroic setting, where John
Wayne’s films had actually been shot, which I think was really special,” Susan
Sarandon, who played Louise, later told W. Arriving during the throes of
third-wave feminism, the movie was a lightning rod—and a hit. (As a bonus, it
gave the world Brad Pitt.)
Then Scott
drove his career over a cliff. His follow-up film was the plodding “1492:
Conquest of Paradise,” starring Gérard Depardieu, of all people, as Christopher
Columbus. Even in 1992, post-colonial sentiment was such that Scott’s treatment
seemed weirdly hagiographic. But he clearly saw himself in the explorer. In one
scene, Columbus argues with Queen Isabella’s treasurer over the budget for his
voyage, like a director haggling with a studio head: “You expect me to take all
the risks while you take the profit?”
The rest of
the nineties were rough. Scott’s next films, “White Squall” and “G.I. Jane,”
disappointed. He was divorced, again. His company had personnel problems. “He
was being pulled in multiple directions,” Sammon observed. “He almost dipped
below the radar.” In 2000, he rebounded with another once-in-a-decade hit,
“Gladiator.” The movie, critically dismissed as a swords-and-sandals rehash,
made nearly half a billion dollars and won the Oscar for Best Picture, though
Scott lost the directing prize to Steven Soderbergh, for “Traffic.” “You know,
I haven’t gotten an Oscar yet,” he told me. “And, if I ever get one, I’ll say,
‘About feckin’ time!’ ”
“Gladiator,”
for better or worse, revived the Hollywood historical epic, along with Scott’s
career. Instead of face-planting again, he directed two more hits, “Hannibal”
and “Black Hawk Down.” He was sixty-two when “Gladiator” was released; since
then, in a mad sprint, he’s directed seventeen movies, many of them grand in
scale. In 2017, his film “All the Money in the World,” about the kidnapping of
J. Paul Getty’s grandson, was six weeks from release when its Getty, Kevin
Spacey, was accused of sexual abuse. (Spacey denied the allegations and has
since been cleared in two trials.) Scott told Tom Rothman, at Sony, that he
wanted to reshoot all of Spacey’s scenes with Christopher Plummer as Getty.
Rothman recalled, “I said, ‘Let me tell you absolutely, positively, it cannot
be done.’ And absolutely, positively, he did it.” Plummer was nominated for
Best Supporting Actor. In 2021, Scott released the medieval drama “The Last
Duel” and the campy “House of Gucci” within weeks of each other.
Jake Scott
has a theory about what is driving his father’s turbocharged late period: “I
think he didn’t get to do it early enough.” Ridley reminded me twice that he
didn’t release his first movie until he was forty. “He’s watching Spielberg,
he’s watching George Lucas, he’s watching all those guys in their twenties and
thirties,” Jake said. “Beginning in midlife means that he didn’t get to do all
those films that he wanted to do.” Or maybe, Jake conjectured, it has something
to do with what happened to Tony.
One August
night in 2012, Scott was in France when his brother called from L.A. Tony had
been battling cancer and was recovering from an operation. He’d survived cancer
twice before, as a young man, but his earlier chemotherapy had complicated his
treatment. He sounded downbeat, so Scott tried to energize him about work: “I
said, ‘Have you made your mind up about this film yet? Get going! Let’s get you
into a movie.’ ” What he didn’t know was that Tony was standing on the Vincent
Thomas Bridge over Los Angeles Harbor. After hanging up the phone, he jumped.
He was sixty-eight.
Scott shut
down his offices for days. He dedicated his next film, “The Counselor,” to
Tony. Then he made another. And another. “Ridley once told me that he has been
dogged by deep depression his whole life,” Sammon said. “He calls it ‘the black
dog,’ which is what Churchill called it.” (Scott’s fashion and music-video
division is called Black Dog Films.) “He says, ‘If I stop, I find myself
sinking.’ ”
Napoleon
was just forty-five at the Battle of Waterloo, but David Scarpa, the
screenwriter, sees him as a man battling against time. “This sense of infinite
possibility that he had when he was younger is gone,” he said. Napoleon died
six years later, banished and broken.
In 2014,
Scott told Variety that he found his brother’s suicide “inexplicable.” At his
offices in L.A., I asked if he still found it so. He didn’t. Tony, he
explained, was a serious mountain climber. “He’d done El Capitan twice. He
would go to the Dolomites. And the operation meant he couldn’t climb again. I
think climbing was his enthusiasm. It was his mojo.” He pointed to a photo on
the wall, showing a youngish Tony sitting on a craggy mountaintop, a cliff
yawning behind him.
Then Scott
drifted into a memory: When Tony was sixteen and Scott was twenty-two, Tony
took him climbing in the Yorkshire Dales. “I said, ‘Why?’ He said, ‘Let’s see
what you’re made of.’ ” The Dales were wet and windy and grim. Scott recalled,
“I think, Why am I here? And he’s looking around, going, ‘Isn’t it fantastic?’
” Tony tied a rope and scaled up an eighty-foot granite rockface, then called
down to his brother, “All right. You come up.” Scott started climbing, as Tony
clutched the rope from above. “I’m saying, ‘This is a bad idea.’ He’s going,
‘Oh, no, I’ve got you!’ In the fog, I said, ‘My arms are going!’ He said,
‘That’s because you’re holding on too strong.’ ”
Scott felt
himself losing his grip on the rockface. “Tony said, ‘Don’t peel off!’ I said,
‘I can’t help it!’ ” Scott let go and spun on the rope, “like a dead spider
hanging on the wall,” he recalled. As a movie played in his mind of his younger
self dangling in midair, all his battles ahead of him, Scott gave a wicked,
staccato laugh. “This sixteen-year-old is going, ‘I’ve got you. I’ve got you.’
And then he lowered me down, with his hands burning.” ♦
Published
in the print edition of the November 13, 2023, issue, with the headline
“Napoleon Complex.”
Review
Napoleon review – Joaquin Phoenix makes a magnificent
emperor in thrilling biopic
Ridley Scott dispenses with the symbolic weight
attached to previous biopics in favour of a spectacle with a great star at its
centre
Peter
Bradshaw
@PeterBradshaw1
Wed 15 Nov
2023 00.01 GMT
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2023/nov/15/napoleon-review-joaquin-phoenix-emperor-ridley-scott
Many
directors have tried following Napoleon where the paths of glory lead, and
maybe it is only defiant defeat that is really glorious. But Ridley Scott – the
Wellington of cinema – has created an outrageously enjoyable cavalry charge of
a movie, a full-tilt biopic of two and a half hours in which Scott doesn’t
allow his troops to get bogged down mid-gallop in the muddy terrain of either
fact or metaphysical significance, the tactical issues that have defeated other
film-makers.
Scott
cheekily imagines Napoleon firing on the pyramids in the Egyptian campaign as
well as witnessing the execution of Marie Antoinette (but not the humiliation
of Louis XVI by the Tuileries mob, which he might actually have seen). Out of
deference moreover, Scott and his screenwriter David Scarpa suppress all
mention of Napoleon’s reintroduction of slavery into the French colonies. But
above all, there’s a deliciously insinuating portrayal of the doomed emperor
from Joaquin Phoenix, whose derisive face suits the framing of a bicorne hat
and jaunty tricolour cockade. Phoenix plays Napoleon as a military genius and
lounge lizard peacock who is incidentally no slouch on horseback. Others might
show Napoleon as a dreamy loner, but for Scott he is one half of a rackety
power couple: passionately, despairingly in love with Vanessa Kirby’s
pragmatically sensual Josephine. Scott makes this warring pair the Burton and
Taylor of imperial France.
Rod Steiger
gave us Napoleon as the world-weary gangboss exchanging barbs with his
consigliere in Sergei Bondarchuk’s Waterloo in 1970; Herbert Lom found him a
dwindling absurdity in King Vidor’s War and Peace from 1956, unable to believe
no one is there to submit to him in the Russian capital; for Albert Dieudonné
in Abel Gance’s silent masterpiece of 1927 he was ascetic and gaunt like Joan
of Arc or Rasputin. But for Phoenix he is the arch satirist and grinning
mastermind, the outsider, the brilliant observer and exploiter of other
people’s weaknesses, the proto-capitalist entrepreneur, grabbing power,
boosting confidence, bolstering the printed paper money. Later people might be
nicknamed the Napoleon of Crime, but Phoenix’s Napoleon is already that.
Scott stages a thrilling action set piece for Napoleon’s first great achievement as a young artilleryman: the audacious attack on the British at Toulon in 1793, which cemented his reputation as a strategic master and a hater of the English. Scott bookends the whole thing imagining a defeated Napoleon’s interview with Wellington aboard the HMS Bellerophon, insouciantly congratulating him on the quality of breakfast served to the Royal Navy.
It is
course Britain’s sea power that gives Napoleon the nearest thing possible to an
inferiority complex; Phoenix gets a big laugh when he petulantly whines at the
British ambassador: “You think you’re so great because you have boats!” For a
second, Napoleon becomes Phoenix’s creepy young Commodus, from Scott’s
Gladiator. There’s also a fair bit of Commodus in Napoleon’s auto-coronation
scene as the new emperor who realises that the crown does not quite fit atop
his Roman-style laurels. And with the help of his patron and friend Barras
(Tahar Rahim), the young Napoleon rides the opposing stormfronts and
triangulates the violent impulses of revolution and royalism and becomes
himself the distillation of pure power, ruthlessly suppressing the mob with his
“whiff of grapeshot”, which Scott shows us graphically.
As symbol
and icon, Napoleon has always been seductive; since Tolstoy, the abandonment of
Moscow and Napoleon’s subsequent retreat have been symbolic of Mother Russia’s
miraculous deliverance, analogous to the resurrection itself. Hitler was
fascinated by him; but the postwar cult of Napoleon lives on for those who want
to annul the horrors of the 20th century and revive what they take to be the
romantic adventure of warfare. For Kubrick in his famously abandoned film
project, Napoleon might perhaps have been expected to bear the weight of all
kinds of significance. But this isn’t Ridley Scott’s intent; he doesn’t detain
the audience with metaphysical meaning and certainly doesn’t withhold the
old-fashioned pleasures of spectacle and excitement. Phoenix is the key to it
all: a performance as robust as the glass of burgundy he knocks back: preening,
brooding, seething and triumphing.
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