Ridley Scott Praises Lady Gaga In a New Interview

Legendary director Ridley Scott has been interviewed by Deadline regarding his upcoming movie House of Gucci. During the interview, Ridley discussed the making of the movie and praised the main star: Lady Gaga.

You can read an excerpt of the interview below.

DEADLINE: You just worked with Adam Driver in The Last Duel, and given his height and physical resemblance, you can see why he makes a terrific Maurizio. But this movie hinges on Patrizia’s social climbing and ambition and the consequences of her being cut out of that Gucci clan. How did you settle on Lady Gaga? She got an Oscar nomination for A Star Is Born, but that was in a musical venue she knows so well. This is different…

SCOTT: Yeah, she can certainly fucking sing. Wow. If I’d been doing this 40 years ago, it would’ve been Elizabeth Taylor. Patrizia looked like Liz Taylor, and she was small, and her husband was 6-foot-4. Adam Driver’s 6-foot-fucking-4. It’s almost like Adam is the straight man and Patrizia gets all the laughs, but you need the straight man for the laughs to work, and her evolution is a shock, when she steps across the line, certainly as you get into the end of the first act, and you start to sense that this may be going somewhere I didn’t expect. Now, I believe when she set eyes on Maurizio, she knew he was a Gucci. Define love. Does love come with the trappings of a crown? She was 23 or 24, and she wasn’t a gold digger yet, but she was getting there. I had a funny feeling that if your father’s in transportation in the late ‘60s, early ‘70s, do you think he’s connected in Italy? I don’t want to say it, but it’s feasible. On the perimeter of connected? How could he not be? So, she moved in kind of flashy circles where aristocrats love to fuck around at that level, don’t they? Have you noticed that?

DEADLINE: Yes.

SCOTT: They love to fuck around with the bad boys, don’t they? And so, I think she was always on the lookout for a special boyfriend, but I think what was surprising was, Maurizio was so polite. She had never been treated with such respect, and so, at the bar when he meets her, he [introduces himself] and says ‘Maurizio, Maurizio Gucci.’

That is when they meet, he is behind I said, don’t say Gucci. Let her discover in the newspaper who he was. Let her be impressed by the fact he’s so polite and so nice, and say I’ll make you the drink, but charming, and can he dance? No. I mean, he’s also very honest. There’s nothing worse than a guy who can’t dance, pretending he can. Nothing worse. There’s no way I will go near a dance floor, and my wife is Costa Rican. What can I tell you? I look like a fucking idiot, right? So, it’s best not to dance. So, that’s how it started, and then their relationship evolved.

I think Adam is maybe one of the finest actors we have today. Because he moves from being a bad boy in The Last Duel where my investment in the orgies in that film was done for a reason. It showed a social order that at these houses of great wealth and privilege, post-dinner wouldn’t be a cigar and cigarettes and some brandy. It might be, let’s adjourn to the bedroom and anybody who comes in the bedroom had better partake in what’s going to happen, an orgy. That was quite common. So, that’s the investment in that, and therefore because Adam is playing a guy who was used to this state of play, who assumes that any woman will faint and fuck him and do what he has to do and open her legs and that’s it. And where he got it wrong was…he even says it in a sentence. He says, in awe, to Ben Affleck playing Pierre, he said well, were there objections? He said ‘well, she’s a woman. Of course she pretended to object. Of course she objected. She is a woman.’ That’s the way he put it. You go, what? One wonders how much we’ve learned historically from where we are today.

DEADLINE: What most surprised you about Lady Gaga and the work she put into this character?

SCOTT: Oh. I mean, I work like a fucking demon, but she and I were really very good for each other because she keeps up. She’s on everything. It became more and more enjoyable because, singers can be a bit fragile. This is a big movie, and some singers have not made that transition. They make it in music, they do it quite well. I’m not going to name singers, but when a singer goes onto film, they can evaporate. Somehow, they haven’t got the presence. Not her. She’s right there, and she knows the camera. She’s used to that, from being a performer on stage. Have you ever seen one of her shows?

DEADLINE: Not in person.

SCOTT: Well, you’d have to go to Las Vegas, but it’s like that. And then there is the jazz show she does with Tony Bennett, who loves her like a dad. But this other show is from an entirely different universe, and the Las Vegas crowd flocks to see her. So, she’s a multitalented, multifaceted producer, really, apart from being a performer. My hat came off to her, because I could see she knows exactly what she’s doing. And I know exactly what I’m doing. It was a very good marriage. She loved the fact we moved like lightning. We did the film in 42 days, and came in $5 million under budget.

Read the whole interview on Deadline.com