| 60 Second Screenplay |
LOVE AND WAR
NAPOLEON Ridley Scott reunites with Gladiator’s Joaquin Phoenix foran audacious take on a military icon.
It’s impossible to tell you what I’m going to do, except to say I expect to make the best movie ever made.’ So wrote Stanley Kubrick of his proposed biopic of Napoleon Bonaparte, a legend whose rise from obscurity to become the most feared man in Europe he called ‘an epic poem of action.’ Kubrick’s film never got shot, the failure of 1970’s Waterloo giving his financiers cold feet to match those Boney’s soldiers suffered on their ill-fated march on Moscow. Five decades on, the Corsican-born commander who became Emperor of France gets the big-screen treatment he deserves in Ridley Scott’s ambitious chronicle of his tumultuous life and career.
‘Kubrick is one of Ridley’s favourite directors, so he wanted to pick up where he left off,’ says producer Kevin Walsh, who has worked alongside the Alien helmer since 2017’s All the Money in the World. ‘But he didn’t want to make Kubrick’s film. He wanted to make his own.’ Key to Scott’s vision was Napoleon’s volatile union with wife Joséphine (played by Vanessa Kirby), a consuming passion her numerous infidelities did little to lessen. ‘Ridley wanted to tell the story of a powerful man who took the world by storm yet was brought to his knees by the woman he loved,’ Walsh tells Teasers. ‘He liked the dynamic of this huge appetite for war and conquering being aligned with an emotional and romantic weakness.’
Spanning ‘the full swathe’ of Napoleon’s history, from his promotion to brigadier general at the age of 24 to his defeat at Waterloo and beyond, Scott’s film combines spectacular triumphs like the victory he engineered at Austerlitz in 1805, with quieter moments of intimacy. ‘We snuck a great character movie into a war film,’ states Walsh proudly. ‘It’s a good, interesting spread of personal scenes and incredible battles.’ It was a mix that asked much of star Joaquin Phoenix, reunited with Scott for the first time since 2000’s Gladiator. ‘He is the hardest-working, most diligent actor I’ve ever worked with,’ Walsh beams. ‘It’s a relief to have someone like him as your partner because a lot of the making sure you’re not doing something farcical or bullshit is eradicated by his prep and process.’
‘Joaquin Phoenix is the hardestworking, most diligent actor I’ve ever worked with’
KEVIN WALSH
Ridiculed for his supposedly short stature, ‘the tiny tyrant’ was in fact of average height. ‘It’s a myth,’ nods Walsh. ‘But because of his domineering behaviour, the cartoonists of the time gave him his Napoleon “complex”.’ Given the sway such slander continues to hold over the popular imagination, it’s hardly surprising Kubrick felt ‘a good or accurate movie’ had never been made about him. Walsh, though, never doubted Scott would be the director ‘to take up the torch and get it done’.
NAPOLEON OPENS IN CINEMAS ON 22 NOVEMBER.