Ridley scott brave new world movie#

“So she had the grace of a courtesan and a courtier, and he was Corsican – not exactly a ruffian but he had no social grace at all. Where was she going to live? Where was she going to sleep? And remember, she is actually described politely as a courtesan and, for a woman in those times, courtesan was about survival.ĭirector Ridley Scott and Joaquin Phoenix on the set of Napoleon. “It’s wrong to say it was one-sided I think initially she was less impressed by him other than the fact he was a good support system. Why they both pursued the union, and its enduring appeal as a love story for the ages, is the subject of some debate, Scott says. Woven around the tale of broken armies, blood-spattered battlefields and military carnage of an almost unprecedented scale is a great love story, between Bonaparte and Josephine de Beauharnais (played by Vanessa Kirby), who would become his wife and, later, empress. Bonaparte personally faced two chapters in exile: to the Corsican island of Elba in 1814, and finally to the Atlantic Ocean island of Saint Helena, some 1800 km from the west coast of Africa, in 1815. ” Credit:īut then, for a decade, he ruled as emperor and, despite his imperial depictions in the art of the time, was ultimately consumed by his own hubris: during the Napoleonic Wars, which shook France until 1815, millions died. Ridley Scott on Joaquin Phoenix: “Joaquin was always in my mind. He led successful campaigns during the Revolutionary Wars and led the French Republic as first consul from 1799 to 1804. It can be argued that much of his success was the result of his brilliance, but also his bastardry. The platforms are embracing the importance of cinema.”ĭivorcing the reality of Napoleon Bonaparte’s life from the historical account is not always easy.

“Then Chris Nolan’s film Oppenheimer does a billion dollars. “Bloomberg had said that the business plan of streaming only could not compete with screening, and thank God for Top Gun and Avatar, which came out and both did a billion dollars in the first month,” Scott says.

Ridley scott brave new world movie#

The gift with purchase: they represented a very broad spread of movie audience demographics. It helped build a case for Napoleon that four major post-pandemic films – Top Gun: Maverick ($US1.5 billion, or $2.3 billion, in global ticket sales), Avatar: The Way of Water ($US2.3 billion), Barbie ($US1.45 billion) and Oppenheimer ($US951 million) – generated enormous box-office heat by delaying streaming as long as possible. (Well, maybe a half – the film will be released to streaming after its theatrical window.) Unsurprisingly, the man who put Russell Crowe in hardened black leather with silver plating is not somebody to be reckoned easily with.

“Realising the intent was only to go a little bit of screening and then go to streaming, I had to step in and start to object,” Scott says. Ridley Scott’s Napoleon stars Joaquin Phoenix as Napoleon and Vanessa Kirby as Josephine de Beauharnais. But the brave new world of streaming and the director of Alien, Gladiator and House of Gucci were on a collision course. Napoleon, which chronicles the rise and fall of the French military commander and, later, emperor Napoleon Bonaparte, has been finished for almost a year but has been patiently waiting for its moment on the big screen. And COVID struck like an iceberg, so a lot of cinemas were closed anyway. “But doing a film of this scale, I think the platforms, whoever they are – and we know who they are – had designed their business plan on getting rid of cinema. The 85-year-old director’s greatest fear? That cinemas would remain closed forever. When filming began on Ridley Scott’s biographical war epic Napoleon early in 2022, the world was taking its first hesitant steps after the pandemic had shuttered movie houses around the world.