Napoleon Director Ridley Scott Responds To 'Anti-French' Criticism

It's been said that the French just sort of ... don't like their country's leaders – canonically, the last president they even tolerated was Charles de Gaulle, and they named an airport after that guy. But that doesn't seem to be the case this time around as "Napoleon" has been torn apart by French critics. Director Ridley Scott, naturally, has a response to the negative feedback.

"The French don't even like themselves," the director told the BBC. "The audience that I showed it to in Paris, they loved it."

Scott didn't mince any words when asked about his response to French critiques of the biopic, which stars Joaquin Phoenix in the title role. To cite some examples, Le Figaro joked that the movie should have been titled "Barbie and Ken under the Empire." Napoleon biographer Patrice Gueniffey told Le Point that the film has a clear pro-British and anti-French slant. The French branch of GQ said that they couldn't handle watching "French" soldiers fighting for their country with American accents, saying the experience was "deeply clumsy, unnatural and unintentionally funny." 

Throughout the press tour for "Napoleon," Ridley Scott has been characteristically blunt when it comes to the film's critics, particularly those concerned about its historical accuracy. In that same chat with the BBC, Scott was asked what he thought of historians' concerns and simply said, "You really want me to answer that? ... it will have a bleep in it."

After expressing a similar sentiment in a New Yorker interview, summing it all up by saying "get a life," Scott opened up a little more while speaking to Total Film. "I've done a lot of historical films," he mused. "I find I'm reading a report of someone else's report 100 years after the event. So I wonder, 'How much do they romance and elaborate? How accurate is it?' It always amuses me when a critic says to me, 'This didn't happen in Jerusalem.' I say, 'Were you there? That's the f***ing answer.'"

It appears that Scott played pretty fast and loose with history. There are scenes where Napoleon fires cannons at the Egyptian pyramids, which decisively and definitively did not happen, and Vanessa Kirby, who plays Napoleon's wife, Josephine, is much younger than Joaquin Phoenix despite how the leader was six years his spouse's junior in real life. Apparently, though, the director doesn't particularly care, and he made exactly the movie he wanted to make.