Ridley Scott seriously isn’t having it when it comes to criticism of his new film Napoleon.
The director, who previously told a TikToker to “get a life” when they pointed out the film’s historical inaccuracies, took aim at French critics of the Joaquin Phoenix-led epic.
Patrice Gueniffey – a Napoleon biographer – said in Le Point magazine that he found the film to be a “very anti-French and very pro-British” historical rewriting, the BBC noted.
Scott, in response to the criticism, told the BBC: “The French don’t even like themselves.”
Other French publications were also critical of the film including Le Figaro, which compared the depiction of Napoleon Bonaparte and Joséphine Bonaparte in the film to Barbie and Ken. French GQ, meanwhile, referred to the movie as feeling “deeply clumsy, unnatural and unintentionally funny”.
The director, who noted that he showed the film to an audience in Paris who “loved it”, wasn’t digging the claims of historical inaccuracies in the film, either.
“Were you there? Oh you weren’t there. Then how do you know?” he told the BBC.
Scott, in an interview with the Times, also suggested that historians don’t know the full scoop on the past.
“Like all history, it’s been reported. Napoleon dies, then, 10 years later, someone writes a book. Then someone takes that book and writes another book and so, 400 years later there’s a lot of imagination [in history books],” he said.
“When I have issues with historians, I ask: ‘Excuse me, mate were you there? No? Well, shut the fuck up then.’”
Ridley Scott’s Napoleon is set to hit cinemas later this week: