Ridley Scott’s greatest foul-mouthed outbursts at being asked the wrong question
Ridley Scott is one of Hollywood’s best proponents of the “DGAF” attitude. At this point, the man has plied his trade in show business for nearly 50 years, making a handful of the greatest movies ever committed to celluloid. He’s had some bumps along the road, sure, but he’s still mounting large-scale historical epics as he approaches his ninth decade, and that truly boggles the mind.
Is it any wonder, then, that Scott’s press tours have become the stuff of legend? He’s been around the block so often that he knows he can say whatever he wants, and it won’t affect his career negatively. It’s led to an atmosphere of true unpredictability that surrounds every Scott interview, as people genuinely have no idea what’s about to come out of his mouth, let alone how many F-bombs it will contain.
In recent years, Scott has released three huge films in quick succession—The Last Duel, House of Gucci, and Napoleon—and the response to all three has been mixed. Maybe that mixed reaction has raised his hackles to a previously unheard-of level, or perhaps he just likes yelling at journalists who annoy him. Either way, it’s led to some epic and sometimes nonsensical outbursts.
Here is a ranking of Ridley Scott’s greatest foul-mouthed outbursts at being asked the wrong question.
Ridley Scott’s greatest foul-mouthed outbursts:
Telling a journalist “Go fuck yourself” after a compliment
While the movie itself was awesome, it became obvious during the press tour for The Last Duel that Scott wasn’t a happy camper. The movie went down in flames at the box office, there was controversy around the film’s gender politics, and Scott felt too many audiences missed the obvious point behind why he told the story from three different perspectives.
By the time a Russian journalist told him that the film “looks more realistic than Kingdom of Heaven or Robin Hood,” Scott had reached the end of his rope. Despite the journalist’s quote sounding vaguely like a compliment, Scott retorted, “Sir, fuck you. Fuck you. Thank you very much. Fuck you. Go fuck yourself, sir. Go on.”
Being blindsided by not one, not two, but three “Fuck you’s”, plus a “Go fuck yourself” for good measure, by an octogenarian Hollywood legend must have taken the interviewer off guard. To his credit, though, he laughed it off, assuming it was merely Scott’s attempt at ribald humour. Whether it was or not? That’s still up for debate.
That time he told historians to “Shut the fuck up”
If there’s one thing in this life that Scott hates, it’s historians telling him that his films are “historically inaccurate.” To Scott, his job is to tell his stories in the most exciting, involving ways possible, and if that involves bending the truth of history or wildly diverging from it, then that’s what he’ll do. Your mileage may vary on whether that’s the correct thing to do when making films about real-life figures, but one thing is for sure—Scott is no history teacher.
The zenith of this dismissive approach to historians came when Scott was promoting Napoleon in 2023. After fielding several complaints, Scott went ballistic on the entire topic by calling into question the very nature of how anyone knows anything that happened in history. If all your knowledge comes from reading dusty old books, think about this: did the people writing the books really get it right?
He ranted, “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.” Then he added the pièce de résistance: “When I have issues with historians, I ask, ‘Excuse me, mate, were you there?’ No? Well, shut the fuck up, then.”
Blaming “millennians” for poor box office sales
At 83 years old, Scott appeared on Marc Maron’s WTF podcast for a lengthy chat about his life and career. When Maron asked why he thought The Last Duel died at the box office, Scott went off on a rant for the ages. He began, “I think what it boils down to…the audiences who were brought up on these fucking cellphones.” We can only imagine Maron’s eyebrows raising at this, knowing full well that he touched a nerve with the director and angry magic was about to ensue.
“The millennian do not ever want to be taught anything unless you’re told it on the cellphone,” claimed Scott. “This is a broad stroke, but I think we’re dealing with it right now with Facebook. This is a misdirection that has happened where it’s given the wrong kind of confidence to this latest generation, I think.”
Naturally, Scott was raked over the coals from every corner of the internet for his out-of-touch thinking and semi-charming misuse of the word “millennian.” Here’s the thing, though: was Scott more right than he was wrong? While there were undoubtedly more factors involved in The Last Duel flopping, is he wrong in thinking that young audiences raised on a diet of Netflix, social media, and short TikTok videos probably weren’t too enthused by the prospect of a two-and-a-half-hour historical drama about the attitude toward rape in Medieval France?
Fighting back against the Gucci family
If someone were to say, “In House of Gucci, Al Pacino looked nothing like the real Aldo Gucci,” it would be difficult to argue with them. After all, the legendary Godfather star didn’t resemble the fashion house’s chairman, who reigned from 1953 to 1986 in any way. However, if you’re Scott, and you receive a letter from the Gucci family complaining about this and calling Pacino “short, fat, and ugly,” you’ll only have one response, and it won’t be pretty.
In an interview with Total Film, Scott raged, “The people that were writing from the family to us at the onset were alarmingly insulting, saying that Al Pacino did not physically represent Aldo Gucci in any shape or form.” To Scott, this was just sour grapes from a wealthy family who wanted to be portrayed in a certain way on film.
“Frankly,” Scott grumbled, “how could they be better represented than by Al Pacino? Excuse me! You probably have the best actors in the world; you should be so fucking lucky!”
Scoffing at the idea of making “wizard films” and superhero movies
In recent years, the elder statesmen of Hollywood have gotten plenty of mileage out of lambasting the modern prevalence of large-scale blockbusters and, most of all, the endless glut of superhero movies. Scott is no different, and in November 2023, he told Deadline – unprompted – that he would “crush” superhero films because they’re “fucking boring as shit.” He added, “Their scripts are not any fucking good,” and then went off on a weird tangent about how he considers Gladiator, Alien, and Blade Runner to be superhero movies with legitimately great scripts.
Amusingly, Scott also revealed in 2022 that someone at Disney once made the grievous error of offering him a “wizard film” to direct. He scoffed, “They wanted me to do a wizard film, and I don’t do wizard films. It wasn’t a good idea.”
Now, considering that Warner Brothers is the home of Harry Potter, we can safely assume it wasn’t a Potter picture that Scott turned his nose up at. Still, the idea of some young executive pitching a movie about witches and magic wands to a stone-faced Ridley Scott amuses us greatly.
