Ridley Scott is firing back at the Gucci family after Patricia Gucci mocked House of Gucci’s casting of Al Pacino.
While Gucci family heirs recently detailed most of everything they disliked about the director’s latest film in a statement shared this past week, Scott spoke withTotal Film magazine and responded to one very specific early comment from Patricia, who had mocked Pacino’s appearance before the movie was even released.
She claimed the legendary actor’s take on Aldo Gucci was “shameful, because he doesn’t resemble him at all,” calling him “fat, short, with sideburns, really ugly.” Scott clearly wasn’t happy with what she had to say.
“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,” Scott said. “And yet, frankly, 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.”
Scott explained that he “tried to be as respectful as possible by being as factual as possible, and as factual as we can possibly imagine.”
“Time and space sometimes has to jump because of the nature of the length of the film,” he said.
In the recent statement, initially shared by Italian news agency ANSA, the heirs of Aldo Gucci—the chairman of the fashion house from 1953 to 1986—claimed that the film featured a “a tone and an attitude to the protagonists of the well-known events that never belonged to them.” While the family has yet to take any legal action, that won’t stop the movie from doing numbers at the box office, thanks in large part to a star-stacked cast consisting of Lady Gaga, Adam Driver, Jared Leto, and more.
“Gucci is a family that lives honoring the work of its ancestors, whose memory does not deserve to be disturbed to stage a spectacle that is untrue and which does not do justice to its protagonists,” the statement read, adding that “the members of the Gucci family reserve the right to take action to protect the name, image and dignity of themselves and their loved ones.”
