For a while, it looked as if Ridley Scott was going to get through the Gladiator II press cycle without saying anything remotely contentious. That was a worry since, as we know, saying contentious things is the entire point of a Ridley Scott press cycle. The gold standard, of course, was Napoleon; a film about a historical French figure that he promoted by slagging off French people (they “don’t even like themselves”) and historians (“Excuse me, mate, were you there? No? Well, shut the fuck up then”). However, the most he managed for Gladiator II was a half-hearted potshot at Russell Crowe’s “bitching”. Slim pickings indeed.
But now that awards season is cranking up again, Scott gets a second bite at the cherry. And so last month, during a discussion with Christopher Nolan, he decided to throw Malta into a minor political crisis. The country’s film commissioner Johann Grech shared a clip of the chat on social media, in which Scott made this tourist-friendly pronouncement: “Malta is a treasure trove of architecture. The architecture goes from medieval right through to Renaissance and when it’s good it’s spectacular.”
