I read the script and found it to be birthed to death. When Kubrick passed away, I managed to get to script with the view of considering Napoleon as a subject. I think, when he was doing Barry Lyndon, he was thinking about Napoleon. The central storyline was always very strong. He always put himself on a succinct center of the steel table that ran through his films. It did because Stanley would be one of the greatest influences on my career. How did Napoleon being Kubrick’s white whale inform your own approach? Ridley Scott directing Joaquin Phoenix on the set of ‘Napoleon.’ Apple TV+ And this is a Ridley Scott film, so you know there are epic battles galore, including one where the diminutive Frenchman fires cannonballs at the pyramids. Theirs is a kinky romance bordering on BDSM, with the sexually incompetent Napoleon wrapped tightly around her finger. It stars Joaquin Phoenix as the French emperor and Vanessa Kirby as Joséphine, a courtesan who’s about as prolific in the bedroom as Napoleon is on the battlefield. He envisioned it starring Jack Nicholson as Napoleon and Audrey Hepburn as his wife Joséphine, and somehow convinced the Romanian People’s Army to commit 40,000 troops for the battle scenes, but was forced to abandon it due to its cost and the low box office of Sergei Bondarchuk’s 1970 film Waterloo.īut Scott is nothing if not efficient, and his Napoleon is here. Napoleon, as you may know, was Kubrick’s biggest unrealized project - one he’d extensively researched, scripted, and scouted. Given Scott’s reverence for the late Stanley Kubrick, his filmmaking idol, there’s something poetic about this picture. It’s early in the press tour for Napoleon, his towering epic about the military and sexual conquests of Napoleon Bonaparte, and well before a series of grating questions about the film’s historical accuracy caused the cranky Brit to fire off some truly hilarious rejoinders (examples include: “The French don’t even like themselves” and “Excuse me, mate, were you there? No? Well, shut the fuck up then.”) The 85-year-old filmmaker behind classics like Alien, Blade Runner, and Gladiator appears to be in a chipper mood. I’m… not going to say anything else about that,” he offers, chuckling. When he arrived in the Big Apple, Scott was told that the most reasonably priced place to stay while on a grant was the YMCA. “They said, ‘Where do you want to go?’ And, being a 22-year-old in London, I said, ‘I want to go to New York,’” he recalls. The revelation that I’m a New Yorker has prompted the legendary director to launch into a winding tale of the time he was on a traveling scholarship after graduating from London’s Royal College of Art.
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