Ridley Scott Is Not Sure He’ll Ever Top Cameron Diaz F*cking a Ferrari

Ridley Scott has the giggles. The revelation that I’m a New Yorker has prompted the legendary director to launch into a winding tale of the time he was on a traveling scholarship after graduating from London’s Royal College of Art.

“They said, ‘Where do you want to go?’ And, being a 22-year-old in London, I said, ‘I want to go to New York,’” he recalls.

When he arrived in the Big Apple, Scott was told that the most reasonably priced place to stay while on a grant was the YMCA. This was 1960, after all.

“So, I stayed at the YMCA on 9^th Ave. and 34^th St. I’m… not going to say anything else about that,” he offers, chuckling.

The 85-year-old filmmaker behind classics like Alien, Blade Runner, and Gladiator appears to be in a chipper mood. It’s early in the press tour for Napoleon, his towering epic about the military and sexual conquests of Napoleon Bonaparte, and well before a series of grating questions about the film’s historical accuracy caused the cranky Brit to fire off some truly hilarious rejoinders (examples include: “The French don’t even like themselves” and “Excuse me, mate, were you there? No? Well, shut the fuck up then.”)

Given Scott’s reverence for the late Stanley Kubrick, his filmmaking idol, there’s something poetic about this picture. Napoleon, as you may know, was Kubrick’s biggest unrealized project — one he’d extensively researched, scripted, and scouted. He envisioned it starring Jack Nicholson as Napoleon and Audrey Hepburn as his wife Joséphine, and somehow convinced the Romanian People’s Army to commit 40,000 troops for the battle scenes, but was forced to abandon it due to its cost and the low box office of Sergei Bondarchuk’s 1970 film Waterloo.  

But Scott is nothing if not efficient, and his Napoleon is here. It stars Joaquin Phoenix as the French emperor and Vanessa Kirby as Joséphine, a courtesan who’s about as prolific in the bedroom as Napoleon is on the battlefield. Theirs is a kinky romance bordering on BDSM, with the sexually incompetent Napoleon wrapped tightly around her finger. And this is a Ridley Scott film, so you know there are epic battles galore, including one where the diminutive Frenchman fires cannonballs at the pyramids.

In a conversation with Rolling Stone, Scott talked Napoleon, sex scenes, and why there will be a killer rhinoceros in Gladiator 2, which he’s currently filming.  

What made you want to tackle Napoleon Bonaparte?
No one gets more remarkable in history than Napoleon. Think about it: Was it Alexander the Great? Was it easier to be dominant in ancient times? I don’t know. Napoleon literally made his Empire of Europe. And I think he was staring at the United States later on in his career because his brother, Colonel Bonaparte, parked in New York.

How did Napoleon being Kubrick’s white whale inform your own approach?
It did because Stanley would be one of the greatest influences on my career. He always put himself on a succinct center of the steel table that ran through his films. The central storyline was always very strong. I think, when he was doing Barry Lyndon, he was thinking about Napoleon. And it’s almost set in Napoleonic times. When Kubrick passed away, I managed to get to [his] script with the view of considering Napoleon as a subject. I read the script and found it to be birthed to death. I think Stanley would do the whole nine yards and then take two years to whittle the script down to what he wanted it to be. A bit like Scorsese, actually. I don’t really know Martin, but I’ve always admired how he takes his time to bring it down to where he wants it to be. That takes courage when you’re working with high-budget movies. I only started thinking about doing this film three or four years ago, and I thought: Battlefields get boring, sex scenes in film get boring, and the sexual characterization of the relationship between two people is the most interesting thing that almost always drives the narrative. It’s so interesting that he was such a powerful man but was so vulnerable with a woman in his life, Joséphine.

Well, Napoleon happens to have all those things.
Joséphine was regarded as a high-class courtesan — a high-class “free woman” or even a prostitute — and these courtesans were typically kept by French aristocrats. That became the target of: What was it about her that engaged him? And what was it about him that engaged her? She began to see that he was a rare bird due to his drive, ambition, and above all his courage to carry out what he said he was going to do. She came to admire him before feeling affection. She respected him. He was generous in the way he defended her rights as his ex-wife, paying her debts and looking after her late into her life. One of the best parts of the movie, for me, is that he has a child with the Princess of Austria and then takes the child, unattended except with a nanny, and allows Joséphine to hold the child as if it might have been hers.

There’s this almost BDSM element to their relationship in the film.
Yeah. And he deeply, deeply regretted losing her. Even in her exile, he would visit her. And I don’t think there was any hanky-panky. I think he was concerned about her health.

I’m curious about your increased fascination as a filmmaker with sexual power dynamics in recent years, as in The Counselor, The Last Duel, House of Gucci, and now Napoleon.
Women have been powerful in my life, which starts with my mother — who said she was five-feet-tall but was actually four-foot-eleven. That’s not to take anything away from my dad, who would be described as a sweet man. My mother was almost the man of the house because she dominated, and dominated three boys: me, Tony Scott who made Top Gun, and one of which was another brother who became a sea captain at 28, did the South China Sea up to Shanghai, and got shredded up by MiG Jets. So, she did pretty good by being dominating, but what she drilled into us was being neat. We’re all neatniks and all clean shoes still. She also taught us consistency above all things, and to never give up. She would never give up. She was a tough guy. She died at 98 and I was convinced she would live to 102.

Do you feel having a “dominant” mother led to your affinity for strong women protagonists, such as Ripley, Thelma & Louise, G.I. Jane, and Patrizia Reggiani?
My 50-year-old company [RSA Films], in that time I’ve probably had five or six CEOs, and four of them were women. Because the best man got the job. I find them to be in many respects stronger than men. I was taken down a route with Sigourney [Weaver]. G.I. Jane is under-looked-at. I looked at it recently and thought, “This is a really pro-female movie.” Thelma & Louise is an obvious choice. I went down that script and said it should be more, dare I say it, comedic. If you made it as a serious docudrama, you’re gonna switch off every man in the United States, and I wanted people to see the movie. I said to Callie [Khouri, the screenwriter], “Does this happen to you?” And she said, “Every day!” I had so much respect for my mother I carry that form of respect to the opposite sex.

Do you think that, as far as sex scenes go, you’ll ever top Cameron Diaz having sex with a Ferrari in The Counselor?
Probably not. I passed it by Cameron first and said, “So… what do you think?” And she said, “So what?” And I said, “OK!” [Laughs] And I said, “I’m not gonna describe it, just read it.” Cormac McCarthy, in my world, is probably the best dialogue writer ever. The Counselor is one of my favorites of my movies, but it’s a very dark subtext, and you can feel it coming from minute one. It’s so dark because it’s based on a certain amount of truth. I was so disappointed, and I don’t know who to blame because I think the film is really fuckin’ good. It’s so fun and cynical. People take it so seriously! People are getting it now. It’s always annoying because my films tend to get got later. The famous one is Blade Runner, which was dead for twenty years and then got discovered again by accident at the Santa Monica Film Festival.

America I’ve always looked at as the epitome of democracy. And dude, at the moment, you still are — just. You’re really the only one in the world left at that level. It cannot slide any further sideways. It must not.

What’s the best advice you’ve ever received?
I was miserable in school. I was an army brat who went to ten schools. In America you call them SATs, but in England you’re marked on eight to nine subjects, and I got one subject — art, because I was good at drawing — and the rest were disasters. My aunt said, “I want you to go to art school.” And I did. And that was it. I went to art school, and it was like the sun rose, and I spent the next seven years training to be a painter, designer, and photographer.

What’s the status of Gladiator 2?
I just looked at the cutting copy of it. I’ve already got it cut together. I overlap, and I move fast. I was shooting it for nine weeks and heard about the strike and had to stop. It’s an hour and forty-five minutes after nine weeks, and I’ve just looked at the fine cut. There will be visual effects. I’ve got a rhinoceros charging around in an arena trying to kill people. That all starts getting polished together.

What made you want to revisit the world of Gladiator?
I love historic films. In many ways, my best experiences have been The Duellists, Kingdom of Heaven, and Gladiator — because Gladiator was so successful, and you want to enjoy some success. I’ve almost always got a period thing cooking on the side somewhere because history is so fascinating. With history, we don’t learn any lessons, do we? We keep repeating the bad news. Jesus Christ.

We do a lot of that in America.
Yes. But America I’ve always looked at as the epitome of democracy. And dude, at the moment, you still are — just. You’re really the only one in the world left at that level. It cannot slide any further sideways. It must not.

What sold you on Paul Mescal as your warrior-lead in Gladiator 2?
I have to have a bedtime story, so every night I watch something. I’m a big news freak, so I do the news first. I get the news from CNN because it’s my favorite news program. I think they stick more or less to the truth. People say they don’t, but yes they fucking do. And then I found Normal People, and I thought, “This is interesting.” Both the girl and him were very real. And already I was thinking, “Down the road in a year, he might be the lead to take over where Russell Crowe left off.” I asked Paul Mescal and he said, “Yes, absolutely.” Commodus is the brother of Lucilla. Lucilla has the child, Lucius, but it’s from the union of her and Maximus — which she has kept a secret. It’s really the story of, “Whatever happened to Lucius?” There were a lot of inaccuracies in Gladiator, but I think it turned out pretty damned good. It certainly wasn’t a history lesson, and we cheated a lot along the way, but we based a lot of it on the last days of Marcus Aurelius, whose son was indeed Commodus, and whose daughter was Lucilla.

Several of your films have explored artificial intelligence. Does AI worry you?
I always thought the world would end up being run by two corporations, and I think we’re headed in that direction. Tyrell Corp in Blade Runner probably owned 45-50% of the world, and one of his playthings was creating replication through DNA. Tyrell thinks he’s god and in the first Blade Runner has made a Nexus female. And the Nexus female will have a limited lifespan because AI will get dangerous. We have to lock down AI. And I don’t know how you’re gonna lock it down. They have these discussions in the government, “How are we gonna lock down AI?” Are you fucking kidding? You’re never gonna lock it down. Once it’s out, it’s out. If I’m designing AI, I’m going to design a computer whose first job is to design another computer that’s cleverer than the first one. And when they get together, then you’re in trouble, because then it can take over the whole electrical-monetary system in the world and switch it off. That’s your first disaster. It’s a technical hydrogen bomb. Think about what that would mean?

I wanted to ask you about what effect you think AI will have on Hollywood as it was a big sticking point in the writers’ strike, in particular. One fear is that studios will plug a book into AI, have it crap out an “adaptation,” and then pay actual screenwriters day rates to punch it up.
Yeah. They really have to not allow this, and I don’t know how you can control it. Another AI expert said, “We are way over-panicking. Of course, I have a computer that can defeat a chess master in an hour because we can feed him every conceivable move from data, and it’ll process 1,900 conceivable moves on what the person will do next in seconds, and the guy is in trouble.” There’s something non-creative about data. You’re gonna get a painting created by a computer, but I like to believe — and I’m saying this without confidence — it won’t work with anything particularly special that requires emotion or soul. With that said, I’m still worried about it.

Could you tell me a little bit about your aborted Dune adaptation? It’s interesting that Denis Villeneuve directed both Dune and Blade Runner 2049.
I was gonna do Dune with Dino De Laurentiis. I was doing Legend and I brought in a guy named Rudy Wurlitzer, who wrote Two-Lane Blacktop and Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. Wurlitzer was of the Wurlitzer family, and we sat down together and we adapted Dune. He wrote a really good screenplay, had all the sets to go, and Dino said, “With what this is going to cost, we’re going to have to make it in Mexico City.” Now, I went to Mexico City then, and I didn’t love the idea of spending a year in Mexico City. The floors in the studio were earth! So, I backed out. Dino never got it made, so it went on rest. It was a good script by a good writer.

I had the pleasure of interviewing your late brother Tony. How have you managed to deal with his loss, and what do you miss most about him?
Drinking vodka martinis. I can only do one now. Back then, I could do three. I can’t do that now. When I was 20 and in art school, there was this brand-new Bolex camera in the cupboard. I said to the head of the department, “Summer holiday is coming up. Can I borrow the camera? I don’t know why, but I’d like to make a movie.” And he said, “What? You?” And I said, “Why not?” And he said, “Well, if you’re gonna borrow it, you need a script.” So, over the weekend I wrote a script. And I took the camera. I was obsessed at the time with the book Ulysses because I was struck by the visual nature of Joyce’s writing. So, I then did my own version where a boy decides to play hooky for the day thinking it will be freedom, but he discovers that it’s the opposite of freedom and it’s an open prison. He has to hide all day and it’s the counter version of what he thinks he was going to get.

That’s such a mature idea for a student.
I had the camera for a month. Tony was the type who would sleep till 1 p.m., so I went over to him and I said, “Get up! I’ve got a camera and we’re going to make a movie.” My brother was the actor and the equipment-carrier, and we made a little film called Boy and Bicycle. It was 65 pounds, runs half an hour, and it’s still in the library at the BFI. And you know what? It fucking worked! I was obsessed at this point with Japanese cinema, like Kurosawa, and it always had these beautiful black-and-white images. I guess my gift is my eye, so the film looks beautiful, and it has a voiceover/stream-of-consciousness from Tony, and there it is. When we were putting it together, he was miserable. I’d ruined his summer holiday. But what we didn’t realize was that we were forming a partnership for life. I miss him terribly.

We just had Barbie and Oppenheimer perform incredibly well in the cinema. What do you think the future of theatrical cinema looks like? Will it mostly be so-called event films that are IMAX-sized?
I deeply, deeply hope not. My daughter just finished her second movie, which she wrote for Eric Bana, and is about cultism in Berlin. A child of 16, with his bloody cellphone, never leaves his house and soon goes into a hole where he thinks he’s failed at life. So, this cult keeps an eye out for these kids and woos them in. That was her film. I said, “What did I do for you to write this? Is this my fault?!”

From Rolling Stone US.