I asked Scott if he was all these people, and he chortled. “No!” he said. “Oh, dear.” But he does see “winning the crowd” as his job description. “I have to,” he said. “There’s nothing worse than doing something where you’re thinking, I really got that right—and it fails.”

After “Blade Runner,” Scott’s ability to win the crowd was in doubt. He had kept up his commercial business, directing a series of chic Chanel No. 5 ads inspired by René Magritte. (Chanel’s chairman, Alain Wertheimer, had come to him, pleading, “Chanel No. 5 is my flagship perfume. It’s only seen as a present for Grandma!”) The “1984” Apple ad, which aired during Super Bowl XVIII, became an advertising classic and established the company’s image as a nonconformist juggernaut. But Scott’s next film, “Legend,” a grotesque fairy-tale fantasy starring Tom Cruise as a sprightly woodland boy, bombed. In 1987, he tried his hand at gritty realism, with the noir thriller “Someone to Watch Over Me.” It also failed. Tony, meanwhile, directed the back-to-back mega-hits “Top Gun” and “Beverly Hills Cop II.” “He was competitive with me, naturally, because I’m the older brother,” Ridley said.

His unlikely comeback was “Thelma & Louise,” in 1991. Scott picked up the script, by Callie Khouri, with the intention of producing it. After four directors turned him down, he was in a meeting with Michelle Pfeiffer, who was unavailable to star but told him, “Why don’t you come to your senses and direct it?” Again, Scott was thinking visually. As an outsider in America, he wanted to capture the grandeur of the Southwest: “I felt, I’m doing an odyssey of two women on the last journey, and so the last journey had better be beautiful.” The old Route 66 had become industrialized, so he shot in Bakersfield, California. “What he did was put it in an incredibly heroic setting, where John Wayne’s films had actually been shot, which I think was really special,” Susan Sarandon, who played Louise, later told W. Arriving during the throes of third-wave feminism, the movie was a lightning rod—and a hit. (As a bonus, it gave the world Brad Pitt.)

Then Scott drove his career over a cliff. His follow-up film was the plodding “1492: Conquest of Paradise,” starring Gérard Depardieu, of all people, as Christopher Columbus. Even in 1992, post-colonial sentiment was such that Scott’s treatment seemed weirdly hagiographic. But he clearly saw himself in the explorer. In one scene, Columbus argues with Queen Isabella’s treasurer over the budget for his voyage, like a director haggling with a studio head: “You expect me to take all the risks while you take the profit?”

The rest of the nineties were rough. Scott’s next films, “White Squall” and “G.I. Jane,” disappointed. He was divorced, again. His company had personnel problems. “He was being pulled in multiple directions,” Sammon observed. “He almost dipped below the radar.” In 2000, he rebounded with another once-in-a-decade hit, “Gladiator.” The movie, critically dismissed as a swords-and-sandals rehash, made nearly half a billion dollars and won the Oscar for Best Picture, though Scott lost the directing prize to Steven Soderbergh, for “Traffic.” “You know, I haven’t gotten an Oscar yet,” he told me. “And, if I ever get one, I’ll say, ‘About feckin’ time!’ ”

“Gladiator,” for better or worse, revived the Hollywood historical epic, along with Scott’s career. Instead of face-planting again, he directed two more hits, “Hannibal” and “Black Hawk Down.” He was sixty-two when “Gladiator” was released; since then, in a mad sprint, he’s directed seventeen movies, many of them grand in scale. In 2017, his film “All the Money in the World,” about the kidnapping of J. Paul Getty’s grandson, was six weeks from release when its Getty, Kevin Spacey, was accused of sexual abuse. (Spacey denied the allegations and has since been cleared in two trials.) Scott told Tom Rothman, at Sony, that he wanted to reshoot all of Spacey’s scenes with Christopher Plummer as Getty. Rothman recalled, “I said, ‘Let me tell you absolutely, positively, it cannot be done.’ And absolutely, positively, he did it.” Plummer was nominated for Best Supporting Actor. In 2021, Scott released the medieval drama “The Last Duel” and the campy “House of Gucci” within weeks of each other.

Jake Scott has a theory about what is driving his father’s turbocharged late period: “I think he didn’t get to do it early enough.” Ridley reminded me twice that he didn’t release his first movie until he was forty. “He’s watching Spielberg, he’s watching George Lucas, he’s watching all those guys in their twenties and thirties,” Jake said. “Beginning in midlife means that he didn’t get to do all those films that he wanted to do.” Or maybe, Jake conjectured, it has something to do with what happened to Tony.

One August night in 2012, Scott was in France when his brother called from L.A. Tony had been battling cancer and was recovering from an operation. He’d survived cancer twice before, as a young man, but his earlier chemotherapy had complicated his treatment. He sounded downbeat, so Scott tried to energize him about work: “I said, ‘Have you made your mind up about this film yet? Get going! Let’s get you into a movie.’ ” What he didn’t know was that Tony was standing on the Vincent Thomas Bridge over Los Angeles Harbor. After hanging up the phone, he jumped. He was sixty-eight.

Scott shut down his offices for days. He dedicated his next film, “The Counselor,” to Tony. Then he made another. And another. “Ridley once told me that he has been dogged by deep depression his whole life,” Sammon said. “He calls it ‘the black dog,’ which is what Churchill called it.” (Scott’s fashion and music-video division is called Black Dog Films.) “He says, ‘If I stop, I find myself sinking.’ ”

Napoleon was just forty-five at the Battle of Waterloo, but David Scarpa, the screenwriter, sees him as a man battling against time. “This sense of infinite possibility that he had when he was younger is gone,” he said. Napoleon died six years later, banished and broken.

In 2014, Scott told Variety that he found his brother’s suicide “inexplicable.” At his offices in L.A., I asked if he still found it so. He didn’t. Tony, he explained, was a serious mountain climber. “He’d done El Capitan twice. He would go to the Dolomites. And the operation meant he couldn’t climb again. I think climbing was his enthusiasm. It was his mojo.” He pointed to a photo on the wall, showing a youngish Tony sitting on a craggy mountaintop, a cliff yawning behind him.

Then Scott drifted into a memory: When Tony was sixteen and Scott was twenty-two, Tony took him climbing in the Yorkshire Dales. “I said, ‘Why?’ He said, ‘Let’s see what you’re made of.’ ” The Dales were wet and windy and grim. Scott recalled, “I think, Why am I here? And he’s looking around, going, ‘Isn’t it fantastic?’ ” Tony tied a rope and scaled up an eighty-foot granite rockface, then called down to his brother, “All right. You come up.” Scott started climbing, as Tony clutched the rope from above. “I’m saying, ‘This is a bad idea.’ He’s going, ‘Oh, no, I’ve got you!’ In the fog, I said, ‘My arms are going!’ He said, ‘That’s because you’re holding on too strong.’ ”

Scott felt himself losing his grip on the rockface. “Tony said, ‘Don’t peel off!’ I said, ‘I can’t help it!’ ” Scott let go and spun on the rope, “like a dead spider hanging on the wall,” he recalled. As a movie played in his mind of his younger self dangling in midair, all his battles ahead of him, Scott gave a wicked, staccato laugh. “This sixteen-year-old is going, ‘I’ve got you. I’ve got you.’ And then he lowered me down, with his hands burning.” ?