If you were Sir Ridley Scott, and you’d made Alien, and Thelma & Louise, and Gladiator, and Blade Runner, and The Martian, and you were getting ready to do the promo rounds for your hotly anticipated biopic of Napoleon, you might look on the rituals of the promo circuit in 2023 and wonder what you were supposed to do.

You’re not going to do Hot Ones. You’re not going on a Chicken Shop Date. You’re not dropping into Off Menu. You’re 85 years old and you’ve got Gladiator 2 to finish, plus probably another few movies after that. Nope. No thank you. Get Vanessa Kirby to talk to Grimmy and Annie Mac. I’ve got enough on as it is.

He could phone in a few careworn anecdotes about Rutger Hauer and maybe say he liked Barbie to give it a little pizzazz and have done with it. But no. The interviews Scott has done for Napoleon hold some of the greatest, most unnecessarily splenetic hand grenade quotes any director has decided to chuck into the discourse.

Some French reviewers complain that it’s a little too pro-British; Scott tells the BBC: “The French don't even like themselves. The audience that I showed it to in Paris, they loved it.” The historian Dan Snow mentions in passing that Napoleon “ain’t a documentary”; Scott tells the Times he should “get a life.”

london, england november 16 ridley scott attends the napoleon uk premiere at odeon luxe leicester square on november 16, 2023 in london, england photo by gareth cattermolegetty images
Gareth Cattermole//Getty Images

People pointing out that Napoleon didn’t fire cannons at the pyramids at Giza, and that Josephine was actually older than Napoleon while Kirby is 13 years younger than Joaquin Phoenix, were given shorter shrift still: “When I have issues with historians, I ask: 'Excuse me, mate, were you there? No? Well, shut the fuck up then'.”

All of which I really, really, really respect. You know that saying, ‘Beware of an old man in a hurry’? You should be even more aware of a cinema grandee being fact-checked. He does not give a shit. You will not stop Ridley Scott.

It feels like it’s catching too. A couple of weeks ago Adam Driver – who starred in Scott’s The Last Duel – was challenged by a journalist who thought the crashes in Ferrari were “pretty harsh, drastic and, I must say, cheesy for me”. Driver responded: “Fuck you, I don’t know. Next question.”

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Telling journalists ‘fuck you’ is, by and large, not something anyone wants to encourage, and if any celeb I was interviewing told me to fuck off I’d obviously be a wreck for months. But the cantankerous, swivel-on-it attitude Scott has toward nitpicking and the Well Actually brigade is a) very funny and b) a reminder that he’s making art here.

The whole mini-industry of fact-checks, explainers and historical primers which now orbit any historical epic or period drama are fun, but they’re so ingrained in the cycle of movie promo that it feels normal that civilians get to completely miss the point of a piece of art in order to dunk on its tweaks to the facts. It’s pretty audacious, isn’t it: hundreds of professionals spend years of their lives hammering away at a movie, only to find that fewer people ever saw their film than saw a 10-minute demolition of the tactics of the big cavalry charge at the end on YouTube.

Scott’s Napoleon and Gladiator 2 come after Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer made $950 million at the box office, and the two filmmakers have taken very different approaches to historical truth in their movies. Nolan made the truth of the science, and the dedication to filming a nuclear explosion using practical methods, a selling point of Oppenheimer: this was rootsy, chalkboard filmmaking on a gigantic scale, inspired by the way that Oppenheimer and his team had to rigorously break reality down into its constituent parts. Scott is a lot more interested in the myth and sweep of history, and if he needed to find a way to make it clear Napoleon took Egypt really quickly, he had him fire cannons at the pyramids. It’s artistic license! Sue him!

Clearly, it isn’t enough for a movie to just be historically accurate – Peter Weir’s noble but failed attempt to start a Master & Commander franchise in 2003, and Robert Eggers’ box office dud The Northman, for which the production built a replica Viking longship with period-correct everything down to the nails holding the hull together, attest to that. But the effort involved is part of the marketing and marks them out as Serious Films which Serious Film Fans ought to respect.

So Scott and Driver’s dismissals of any pernickety historians are particularly thrilling given how much things have changed in the last 10 years. They’re a reminder that despite everything having changed in movies since the streaming revolution and demands for actors to do daft stuff for social media to show they’re vaguely normal human beings, there’s still more than enough unalloyed ego floating around to keep the whole thing feeling special.

It’s often said that there aren’t many movie stars left, and I’m not sure how true that is. I think it’s more the case that mystique is far scarcer now than it used to be. That’s because of social media, obviously, but it’s also because they’ve got to slog around that promo circuit more vigorously just to get anyone into the IMAX for your two-and-a-half-hour biopic. It’s harder to hold onto that stardust when you’ve got to play party games on camera.

It’s hard to make movies, and it’s even harder to make movies anyone cares about enough to pay money to see, and harder still to make movies which people go to see and also enjoy watching. For Scott to give us a round of interviews that simultaneously insult, entertain and get attention for what looks like a late-period masterpiece? Now that’s box office.