Heeeeere’s Napoleon

While another collaboration between Stanley Kubrick and Steven Spielberg would seem to require a time machine, a Ouija board or some sort of interdimensional extraterrestrial monolith, The New York Times is reporting plans are nonetheless underway for these two celebrated filmmakers to work together again. Speaking to Canal+ Television in France, Mr. Spielberg said that he intended to turn an unproduced screenplay by Mr. Kubrick about the life of Napoleon into a television miniseries. "I’ve been developing Stanley Kubrick’s screenplay for a miniseries, not for a motion picture, about the life of Napoleon," Spielberg said in the interview. "Kubrick wrote the script in 1961, long time ago, and the Kubrick family — because we made ‘A.I.’ together — the Kubrick family and I, and the next project we’re working on is a miniseries, is going to be 'Napoleon.'"

Kubrick, who died in 1999, spent years researching Napoleon, reviewing more than 18,000 documents and books while assembling a card file that cataloged every significant moment in the French leader’s life. As well as the meticulous research for his planned film, Oskar Werner and Audrey Hepburn are said to have been offered the leading roles. It was announced in 1968 that he would direct 'Napoleon' for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer; then in 1970 it was reported that he had put that project on the back burner in favor of A Clockwork Orange. A year later Kubrick is said to have abandoned his long-gestating screenplay about the French revolutionary hero turned conqueror of Europe after Hollywood studios refused to fund it. "It's impossible to tell you what I'm going to do except to say that I expect to make the best movie ever made," he wrote to studio executives in 1971.

Three years later Kubrick (who had not yet made Barry Lyndon at the time) told Sight & Sound magazine that "there has never been a great historical film" and that he still intended to make 'Napoleon'. But the project was never realized.

There is further evidence to suggest Kubrick actually toyed with the idea of doing 'Napoleon' as a miniseries because there was much more material than could fit comfortably in a standard feature-length film. In an interview with Michel Ciment, Kubrick explained: "His entire life is the story, and it works perfectly well in the order it happened. It would also be nice to do it as a twenty hour TV series, but there is, as yet, not enough money available in TV to properly budget such a venture."


Spielberg has previously adapted an unrealised Kubrick project in the form of the science fiction drama AI, starring Haley Joel Osment and Jude Law. The two filmmakers worked closely together on the 2001 project, which Spielberg was producing for Kubrick, and which he directed two years after Kubrick's death. The Schindler's List director also has form on the small screen with the critically acclaimed HBO TV miniseries Band of Brothers and is planning a third wartime series with Tom Hanks for the US channel after the recently well-recieved Pacific. It is not clear how far down the line Spielberg is with his version of the Napoleon story but one could argue that the Kubrick influence hovers over Spielberg films like Minority Report, and its world of oppressively ubiquitous technology. Both directors also appreciated space aliens as well as Tom Cruise.