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At 85, Ridley Scott is five years older than Martin Scorsese and 16 years older than James Cameron, but in a recent New Yorker profile, the Napoleon director splits the difference between the two. Here and there, Scott acknowledges his own mortality, the way Scorsese repeatedly did during his Killers of the Flower Moon tour. But much of the time Scott seems, in James Cameronesque fashion, way too busy for that—working on three movies at once, running a winery, and generally being the towering head of his own cottage industry. His own children (he has three, all filmmakers, all “partners in the family business”) compare him to Logan Roy from Succession more than once.
The piece is full of both bluster and occasional introspection from the great master, who’ll be releasing his twenty-eighth film with Napoleon. While he seems hotter and busier than ever in the middle of his eighth decade, it’s easy to forget that Scott didn’t direct his first feature until he was 40 (The Duellists, from 1977)--something his son says drives his tirelessness to this day.
“I think he didn’t get to do it early enough,” Jake Scott told the magazine. “He’s watching Spielberg, he’s watching George Lucas, he’s watching all those guys in their twenties and thirties. Beginning in midlife means that he didn’t get to do all those films that he wanted to do.”
It’s also easy to forget that, even as recently as the 1990s, Scott—despite the auteur aura he’d accrued as the man behind Blade Runner and Alien—was on the verge of being forgotten, after a string of bombs like White Squall and G.I. Jane. That was before Gladiator came around in 2000, making almost $500 million, winning Best Picture, and generally reinvigorating his career. He lost the Best Director Oscar to Steven Soderbergh for Traffic though, and doesn’t seemed to have forgotten it.
“I haven’t gotten an Oscar yet,” Scott told the magazine. “And, if I ever get one, I’ll say, ‘About feckin’ time!’”
This is the kind of bluster that profile writers prize. The biggest gold nugget Scott hands writer Michael Schulman in this one is probably Scott’s response to a TV historian who broke down the inaccuracies of the Napoleon trailer in a viral TikTok, pointing out that Napoleon never shot at the pyramids during the Battle of the Pyramids, that Marie-Antoinette did not have long hair at her execution, “and, hey, Napoleon wasn’t there.” Scott’s much-blogged retort? “Get a life.”
Of course, that sound bite paints Scott as a swashbuckling, facts-be-damned filmmaker, when it’s just as true that Scott brought on an Oxford Napoleon scholar (Michael Broers) to consult on the film, and worked through every nuance of some of Napoleon’s battles in excruciating detail. (Maybe not as excruciating as Stanley Kubrick got with the details on his never-filmed Napoleon movie, whose production designer quit, we learn from Schulman's piece, "after an argument over whether rhododendrons had been brought from India by Napoleon’s time.”)
It’s this mix of outward swashbuckling and inner turmoil—or maybe just rigor—that seems to define Scott. In one of the profile’s quieter moments, Scott recalled the time his brother, Tony—whose own career seemed to catch fire in the late 80s with Top Gun and Beverly Hills Cop just as Ridley’s was slowing down—called Ridley in France in 2012.
“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 reasons now that his younger brother, a passionate mountain climber who’d climbed Yosemite’s El Capitan in Yosemite (the mountain from Free Solo) not once but twice, was distraught that a recent cancer operation meant he’d never climb again.
Ridley Scott himself has made seven movies since then, not counting documentaries, shorts, and television shows. And he can still touch his toes. Napoleon opens in two weeks. Gladiator 2, starring Paul Mescal, is set for release next fall.