“Technology companies think they are gods. It’s great but it’s also lethal. If you have kids, don’t leave it to them,” says Ridley Scott, holding the iPhone of one of the journalists invited to the round table with the director and actor. Joaquin Phoenix’s. The director continues: “Let them climb the tree, fall down, break their arms, but this shouldn’t happen.” Foreign, knife edge anyone Thelma and Louise Without caring about your last tape, NapoleonIt was fully funded by Apple TV+, the manufacturer of this device.
“Platforms streaming They made a mistake in the business plan Even Bloomberg told them they were making a big mistake. His idea was to close the cinemas and have people pay a certain amount per month to see all the movies they wanted, but this was not a good solution. How many movies do you release per month? Fifteen? The problem is, they made more money with just one of these having a theatrical release,” explains Scott, who paralyzed the film’s release. Napoleon for ten months until Apple TV+ refused to release it directly on home platforms. “During this time I have already shot half Gladiator 2But since I said we couldn’t release the movie directly, I chose to wait ten months. streaming, was supposed to be released in theaters. Finally We put distribution into competition, Sony wonand now we’re premiering it in fourteen thousand theaters and four hundred IMAXs. “The folks at Apple realized this was the right thing to do, and we’re all very happy.”
Ridley Scott, 85, is back from it all. An attitude that comes from a long and solid career and is not exactly the result of luck or improvisation. When you shot your first movie duelistsHe was already over forty years old and had done a significant part of the work. shot more than three thousand commercials. One of them, 1984This model, which was produced specifically for the Apple brand in the year in which it was named, is kept in the MoMa archives in New York.
Cinema is not a sport where you win or lose. The creative theme, that is, writing, painting, making music, is different and only self-criticism is important. The rest is opinion.”
“I shot the first Steve Jobs commercial and it shook me, so I’m pretty proud of that,” says Scott, who recognizes his value as a filmmaker and the real importance of criticism. “I’ve had ‘director blackout’ for years [el derecho por contrato a decidir el montaje]. This means; even though I don’t take into account the studio and the people who financed the films, up to this point: Because I’m very determined, I tend to spend less than expected in the budgetThe final version of the movie belongs to me. Then you must understand that cinema is not a sport where you win or lose. The creative theme, that is, writing, painting, making music, is different and only self-criticism is important. The rest is opinion. I’m already very critical of my work, so when bad reviews come I tell them ‘never mind’ and move on. “At this point in my career, all I’m thinking about is what kind of trouble am I going to get into next and how am I going to make it fun?”
Hardness vs. entertainment
Approaching characters from many different perspectives, from documentary to comedy, from melodrama to war genre, Napoleon has become one of the greatest themes in the history of cinema. The last of these approaches was Ridley Scott’s approach. The work was not well received by historians, who accused the British director of a lack of historical rigor for example, the inclusion of a scene in which French artillery bombards the Egyptian pyramids with cannons, or the use of “France, Navy, Josephine” as the emperor’s last words, although there have been experts who have thought this was the case for decades. version is the result of propaganda rather than historical facts.
“More than two thousand books have been written about Napoleon. That’s one book a week since his death. I think the only character that’s been written about so much is Jesus. If you take in all that information, you should be aware of this: There must be a lot of speculation out there, so I focused more on the letters that give us a better understanding of Napoleon’s relationship with Josephine. Letters that are a bit childish, especially when it comes to sexuality, and in which the soldier portrays himself as a very vulnerable person to her,” explains Ridley Scott, who does not deny this, and at the time all this material was on the Big Screen, Tried to strike a balance between historical accuracy and entertainmentThis is something where the freedom players have when confronting their characters is very important.
“I shoot with four cameras. This gives the actors a certain freedom and allows them to improvise. Although there is always a script, improvisation often brings out good things, and that’s how Joaquin likes to work. For example, Vanessa Kirby [Josefina en la película] “I had no idea that in the breakfast scene he was going to lift her out of her chair and put her under the table,” recalls Ridley Scott, who maintained a specially complicit relationship with Phoenix, whom he had previously directed. Gladiatormore than twenty years ago.
“I was an inexperienced kid, and he let me discover what I wanted to do with my character, sometimes instinctively and sometimes through research,” recalls Joaquin Phoenix. “What I didn’t know at the time was that this way of working wasn’t that common,” he said. I didn’t realize it wasn’t normal to be able to do whatever you wantedBecause I didn’t even know it took two hours to light a scene. If you suddenly decided to shoot the scene in a different part of the set, you had to set everything up again. In that sense, Scott has been very important to my development as an actor, and although he has given me a lot of freedom, it is also true that if something is not working, he will tell you and go back to the original idea. “To create the character, the actor tried to give him a new approach that moved away from historical biography,” explains the actor.
“The truth is that I knew very little about Napoleon. I dropped out of high school very early and wasn’t very interested in history at the time. because I didn’t know how it would benefit me. Then obviously I’ve done a lot of films and I’d like to go a little deeper. In this case, I focused on personal accounts of his relationship with Josefina, which, I must admit, I do not yet understand very well. I don’t know what they see in each otherbeyond having qualities that others do not have. “Like, he was very good socially, he had a network, and he was very strange on that level,” says Phoenix, aware of the challenge of showing a life as complex as Napoleon’s and more in a two-and-a-half-hour film.
During this time, Scott and Phoenix have time to concisely review the French leader’s numerous combat achievements and some of the turning points in his life. From the successful siege of the castle of Toulon to his death on the Island of Saint Helena, not forgetting his coronation as emperor, Magnificently captured campaigns of Austerlitz, the invasion of Russia or the defeat at Waterloo. All this is intense and The little Corsican’s stormy affair with JosefinaIncluding divorce due to the impossibility of designing a successor to continue the emperor’s line.
I am never satisfied with the work I do. “If it were up to me, I would remake every movie I’ve ever made.”
“I would have liked to have made a three-hour movie about just this part of the coup because there was so much more to add in there,” laments Phoenix, who is as critical as Scott when it comes to evaluating his own film. work. “I am never satisfied with the work I do. If it were up to me, I would remake every movie I’ve ever shot. I always think that I want to do more, express more… What I am proud of is the effort we put into the film, the daily efforts of the actors, the collaboration of the directors. Technicians…”, comments the actor, who recognizes the magic that a character like Napoleon can create in an actor, but also criticizes an extremely ambitious and authoritarian character.
“The desire to have more than universal rights, to want material things, is something we can see not only in political leaders, but in many people. I don’t know what the source is that causes this to emerge in people, but I think you need a consciousness that will take you a little beyond this materiality. In his case, Napoleon was a son of the Revolution, his principles were to take care of the people above the aristocracy, he eventually turned the tables on all this and He no longer benefited the aristocracy but only those in his family. As in Spain, he removed the king and replaced him with his brother. In any case, these are profiles that can be found in different parts of society, including in this room.”