“Ridley Scott’s Napoleon Complex: Does the Director of Alien, Blade Runner, and Gladiator See Himself in the Hero of His Epic New Film?”, 2023-11-06 (; backlinks):
On the morning of the Battle of Waterloo, Napoleon Bonaparte was full of catastrophic confidence. His 73,000 troops were camped on a ridge near a tavern called La Belle Alliance. His nemesis, the Duke of Wellington, occupied a slope across the fields, with a mere 67,000 troops. Over breakfast, Napoleon predicted, “If my orders are well executed, we will sleep in Brussels this evening.” When his chief of staff offered a word of caution, Napoleon snapped, “Wellington is a bad general and the English are bad troops. The whole affair will not be more serious than swallowing one’s breakfast.”…Napoleon, instead of striking at 9, 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?”
… “He’s [Ridley Scott, age 85] 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 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 f—ked it up.”) When a movie fails, I asked, does he question his instincts? “No”, he grunted. “I blast the s—t 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 90, 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.” [This comparison suggests a heroic level of willful blindness on Rothman’s part.] 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 12 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 90% of the directors in Hollywood.” 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.”
…The two spent several 12-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.”
…Despite Scott’s machismo, he is known for populating his films with strong women…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 5 feet—she was 4 foot 11. 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 4 sisters to cancer, then lived until 96. “She was formidable”, Scott said. “Her famous words to me before she died were ‘This is ridiculous.’”
… 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.
…One day in the mid-1960s, 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 40 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!”…When Alan Parker landed his first movie, Bugsy Malone, produced by the former adman David Puttnam, Scott was so envious that he couldn’t sleep…After making his first film, Scott recalled, “I thought, Blimey, that was easy.”
…He developed an idea about Tristan and Isolde, but that fizzled in May 1977, when Puttnam brought him to see Star Wars: A New Hope 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.’”
…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.)
…Alien turned Scott into a bankable studio director, but he was entering perhaps his darkest phase. In 1980, his brother Frank died, at 45, 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 9 hours.”…In postproduction, Scott was fired—twice—but worked his way back.
…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 11 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 s—t, 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.”…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.”
…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 90 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 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.”
…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 62 when Gladiator was released; since then, in a mad sprint, he’s directed 17 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 6 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 40. “He’s watching Spielberg, he’s watching George Lucas, he’s watching all those guys in their 20s and 30s”, 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 Scott.
…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 68. [Tony Scott had been prescribed antidepressants & sleeping pills before his suicide.]
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.” [originally, Samuel Johnson] (Scott’s fashion and music-video division is called Black Dog Films.) “He says, ‘If I stop, I find myself sinking.’”