Kubrick and Napoleon--Jack Nicholson? ugh

[Richard Romeo]

>From today's Guardian:

 

Stanley Kubrick's Napoleon 
In 1968, Kubrick embarked on one of his most ambitious and personal
projects thus far: an epic biography of Napoleon Bonaparte, with Jack
Nicholson playing the emperor. Napoleon was a lifelong obsession and
Kubrick intended to cover the entire sweep of his life, with full-scale
reconstructions of his battles, requiring some 50,000 extras (Kubrick
often noted the similarities between filmmaking and mounting a battle
campaign). 

The director worked for two years on the film, immersing himself with a
team of researchers in a minute analysis of the Napoleonic era,
developing a day-by-day account of court life and a catalogue of 15,000
images of the period. With characteristic ingenuity he found special
lenses to film exteriors in the evening and low-cost paper fabric for
the soldiers' uniforms. He even got the Romanian army to agree to
provide tens of thousands of men for the battle scenes. 

In 1969, however, MGM studios balked at the cost of Kubrick's epic,
despite the unprecedented success of his film 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Kubrick went to Warner Brothers, where he made A Clockwork Orange, but
he never gave up hope for Napoleon. If he had achieved his vision, A
Clockwork Orange might never have been made. That film's success sealed
his relationship with Warner Brothers and led to his masterpieces Barry
Lyndon and The Shining. 





 

 

Richard Romeo

Reference Coordinator 
The Atlantic Philanthropies 
125 Park Avenue, 21st Floor 
New York, NY 10017 
212-916-7305 
r.romeo at atlanticphilanthropies.org 

 

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