Lady Gaga and Ridley Scott on ‘House of Gucci’: When Beauty Turns Ugly

SCOTT No, totally. There’s nothing like success to make you feel good in the morning, right? At the same time, if you get some kind of clip or hit, don’t let it get to you. If you like what you did, move on.

GAGA I can’t agree more. When you are making art to please people or seek praise, this is not sustainable. You’re essentially passionate about getting people to love you as opposed to being passionate about the work. I know I lost my way as an artist for a while when I started to care about what would make people like me. Then I rebelled, because why should I follow a North Star that keeps moving?

My whole career, I’ve had ups, I’ve had downs. When you were talking about “Blade Runner,” I was thinking about my record “Artpop” and how they put out critiques before it even came out. Because of freedom of speech, people can write whatever they want, even if it’s lies, but years later, it’s one of my most critically acclaimed albums.

We have no idea what this movie’s going to do after it opens, but it doesn’t matter because we know we made something great. When you get to be lucky like me and be in one of his movies, you know that no matter what, this is going to last a lifetime.

You look at Ridley with a lot of affection.

GAGA I love Ridley so much. I felt he was watching over me. He saw me falling into this character more and more all the time, and he used to say, “You good, dude? You OK?” I would reply with whatever the truth was and he would always say to me, “Whatever this is, I hope you leave it here.”

So how did you feel when you left Patrizia and all of that behind?

GAGA To be honest, I was really ready to let go. She’s a tremendously complicated individual and when you’re living in survival mode all the time — and she was always in survival mode — it creates such a sentiment of trauma constantly. When I got on that plane back from Italy, I threw out my cigarettes. I threw out the booze, I landed in L.A. and cleaned my life up because I couldn’t live that way anymore. It was killing me because it was killing her.

And how does it feel to be yourself again?

GAGA It’s really emotional. I joke with Ridley all the time, but I really experienced some type of attachment panic when I left set, I missed him so much. I felt the way Patrizia felt, a life without Gucci was not a life worth living. The greatest time in her life was being a Gucci, and I can say to you, being done with this film, that the greatest time in my life was being a Gucci. That’s how art and life line up. Ridley’s life is a masterpiece, and you’re lucky if you get to be a part of it.