Ridley Scott has been typically dismissive of critics taking issue with his forthcoming movie Napoleon, particularly French ones.
While his big-screen epic, starring Joaquin Phoenix as the embattled French emperor with Vanessa Kirby as his wife Josephine, has earned the veteran director plaudits in the UK, French critics have been less gushing, with Le Figaro saying the film could have been called “Barbie and Ken under the Empire,” French GQ calling the film “deeply clumsy, unnatural and unintentionally clumsy” and Le Point magazine quoting biographer Patrice Gueniffey calling the film “very anti-French and pro-British.”
Asked by the BBC to respond, Scott replied with customary swagger:
“The French don’t even like themselves. The audience that I showed it to in Paris, they loved it.”
The film’s world premiere took place in the French capital this week.
Scott added he would say to historians questioning the accuracy of his storytelling:
“Were you there? Oh you weren’t there. Then how do you know?”
Eh I have found French organizations tend to take themselves too seriously and go out of their way to affect an air of superiority about… pretty much everything. In other words: fuck em.
Imagine making a movie about George Washington, but you cast a French guy and everyone in the movie has a French accent.
That’s not even a weird thought, though. French speakers are allowed to make movies about George Washington and probably have made at least one.
Sure, but when Americans tell the French filmmaker, “You got this wrong. Washington never lived in Boston,” the response shouldn’t be “how do you know? Were you there?”
Sure, but that’s different from just the language spoken in the movie.